Compensatory Curiosity: Making Up People and Marking Differences

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Six
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Curiosity and Exploration in STEM: Integrating Technology, History, and Mathematical Knowledge to Disrupt Curricular Hierarchies (Table 4)

Abstract

This paper is a social epistemology of how curiosity’s developmentalism is assumed as natural within education reforms, particularly STEM, and as therefore a necessary personal quality to cultivate to be “scientific.” It examines how curiosity has become a remedy for addressing disparities in participation and achievement in education by inculcating curiosity in those insufficiently “curious” in science and STEM fields. Through analysis of compensatory education research and reforms in the 50s and 60s and science education and STEM education reforms in the present, the paper argues that appeals to curiosity’s “naturalness” in efforts to increase achievement and broaden participation impedes reflexivity on the values and judgments that inform curiosity’s developmental norms and the differences and exclusions that follow from them.

Author

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author