“That’s Just the Way It Is”: Troubling Normalcy of Researcher Neutrality in STEM Education Research

• In Event: Disrupting Notions of Normalcy and White Supremacy: Radical Imaginations Across Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
Inequities in the field of STEM education are well-researched and well-documented (Whitcomb & Singh, 2021). Interest in these inequities has grown in the field of early childhood through to secondary and post-secondary education since there have been numerous calls and movements to create more accessible and equitable pathways for all learners. This paper argues that this burgeoning field of STEM education research continues to reinforce the normalcy and hegemony of white supremacy in this field when researchers fail to interrogate their identities and positionalities alongside the research.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Critical Race Theory examines the structures and systems that reproduce oppressions for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, including the systemic racism in the curriculum, assessments, culture, expectations, and instruction in education (Ladson-Billings, 2021). Drawing from tenets of CRT, this paper examines the role of researchers’ identity and positionality in STEM education research.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Critical theories attempt to move the needle on effecting social change and center
the voices and experiences of participants (Bhattacharya, 2017). In this research, a critical case study (Bhattacharya, 2017) was used to interview three racialized students, three times each over the course of a year as part of a doctoral thesis. In addition to the interviews, the author kept a reflexive journal and wrote reflexive memos after each interview.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
This paper draws on data from a doctoral thesis. In this thesis, racialized students interested in STEM education were interviewed as part of a case study. The data includes audio recordings of the interviews, researcher journals, and reflexive memos after each interview.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
A salient theme during data analysis is that a critical reflexive analysis of the author’s privilege, positionality and identity is essential to STEM education research that seeks to disrupt historical ways of conducting STEM education research which reinforced white supremacy. Annamma (2013) states “It is clear that when we enact the ideology of normal, particular populations are subject to oppression and that is not accidental” (p 1287). In disrupting ideas of the normalcy of a neutral researcher, especially when race is considered, the author poses questions and exercise for researchers to consider in their own work.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

Traditional education programs have a deficit model for student learning and are used as a function of neoliberal education policy which reproduces structural, social, political, and economic inequalities and oppressions, including in STEM education (Zeidler, 2016; Wolfmeyer et al., 2017; Kumashiro, 2018). This paper highlights the ways in which STEM education research continues to uphold these structures if researchers conduct research that lacks a critical analysis of their identity and positionality. This can have wider implications for access to education and marginalized students’ enrolment in post-secondary STEM.

Author

• Nadia Qureshi, University of Toronto - OISE