Listening in Disciplinary Conversations

• In Event: Cultivating Equitable Education Through Challenging the Status Quo of Curriculum

Abstract

Using a poststructural approach towards discourse, and re/writing a piece of mathematical history; I frame Edward Lorenz’s early work with dynamic systems as dialogic meaning-making with multiple entities: modeling equations, a computing machine, the programming language used, colleagues who helped him refine his ideas (and refine his metaphor of the “butterfly effect”), and his emotions that told him he was seeing something worth investigating. I briefly develop a posthumanist conceptual perspective that sees learners and experts as engaging in scientific conversations with external materials and theories, each other, and their embodied and affective experiences. Revisibilizing listening within disciplinary relational practices is a necessary step towards (re)making STEM relationships and finding liberatory forms of disciplinary learning.

Author

• Ezra Gouvea, Tufts University