Sensitizing the Science Teacher to Diversity: Racializing Modes of Affective Regulation

• In Event: The New Sciences of Teaching: Theorizing Their Differences and Exclusions

Abstract

Objectives
Equity-oriented teacher education reforms propose sensitizing White teachers to the feelings of their ‘diverse’ students. Such reforms appear especially innovative in science education, given its long-standing appeals to cognitive rationality. Yet affective interventions predate equity reforms. Mid-century efforts preparing science teachers for desegregation entailed scientized strategies of emotional management aimed at those termed ‘culturally deprived’ (e.g., Giddings, 1966). Reforms racialized these students as extra sensitive (e.g., low self-efficacy in science) and their teachers as requiring greater sympathy and self-efficacy to ‘reach’ them. This paper examines historical continuities of this desired kind of teacher, where becoming ‘culturally sensitive’ has meant subscribing to emotional taxonomies and techniques of affective regulation with racializing effects.

Theoretical Perspectives
The study extends a body of scholarship historicizing power relations in teacher education’s efforts to regulate the emotional or moral conduct of students via that of their teachers (Fendler, 2003; Kuhlmann, 2022; Popkewitz, 2017). Through analysis of the biopolitics of feeling (Schuller, 2018), the paper examines how techniques of affective regulation in science teacher education have iteratively racialized populations along hierarchies of feeling.

Methods and Sources
The study historicizes (Foucault, 1991) techniques making up the emotions of target students and their science teachers as objects of inspection and intervention. It compares how emotional sensitivities became targets of reform at two key moments, asking: What persisted in shifts from compensatory interventions for the ‘culturally deprived’ to responsive strategies for the ‘culturally diverse’?

The study analyzed three major U.S. science education journals (i.e., Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Journal of Science Teacher Education) using keywords to identify articles on the affective needs of the “culturally deprived” (1960–1979) or “culturally diverse” (1990–2009) and those of their teachers (e.g., Fraser-Abder, 2001; Lisonbee, 1965; McGinnis, 1994; Rowe, 1974). For selected articles, I examined sources cited therein to identify scientific techniques grounding their truth claims (Daston, 1994). Analysis explored how tools rendered the emotions of student subgroups and their teachers as distinct but interrelated objects of intervention.

Warrants for Argument
At both moments, perceptual techniques produced a binarized biopolitics of feeling—projecting student subgroups as needing self-control versus their teachers as needing sympathy/empathy. Surveys, scales and questionnaires visualized interlinked problems of teacher/student affect, where intervening on teachers’ fears and lack of confidence appeared necessary to remedy the science anxiety and low self-efficacy ascribed to their students. Attempts to foster inclusion by making science-loving, agentic citizens created new exclusions; perceived affective distinctions demanded separate instructional strategies—whether given as compensatory (1960s–70s) or culturally responsive (1990s–2000s). In helping teachers recognize their responsibility for turning subgroups into responsible citizens, reforms persistently emphasized prejudice reduction for teachers, while paradoxically reinscribing racial distinctions in student affect as explanations for inequities.

Significance
The study contributes to scholarship interrogating how efforts to help teachers scientifically ‘see’ diversity reiterate many of the “same old stories” (Blinded; Brown, 2011, p. 2047). Science education offers a unique vantage onto teacher education methods whose appeals to innovation obscure inherited techniques and their inadvertently racializing effects.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author