Raciolinguistic Hierarchies of Feeling: How Affective Interventions Authorized Resegregating U.S. Science Education Post-Mendez and Brown (Poster 2)

• In Event: Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education

Abstract

Objectives
Despite the 1946 Mendez and 1954 Brown rulings outlawing segregation, many U.S. students still receive separate, unequally positioned forms of science education (Jones & Burrell, 2022; Umansky, 2016). While crucial work contests deficit discourses disparaging the cognitive or linguistic proficiencies of minoritized students (Harper & Kayumova, 2023), less scrutiny has fallen on affect’s role in authorizing distinct school science tiers. This study investigates the politics of the science of affect (Alsop, 2016), asking: How did research ascribe affective distinctions onto racially and linguistically marked science learners in the decades between desegregation rulings and the field’s first equity report?

Perspectives
Scholars caution that affective distinctions—e.g., ‘unmotivated groups,’ ‘weak STEM identities’—justify the emotional policing of minoritized youth (Avraamidou, 2020; Kayumova & Tippins, 2022). Recent work theorizes the complicity of research in producing these affective hierarchies (Zembylas, 2016). For a century, research techniques have produced racializing effects (Ziols, 2020) by evaluating students against idealized norms of interest in science (Bang & Valero, 2015) or healthy mathematical attitudes (Diaz, 2017). I expand prior work by examining how entangled affective and raciolinguistic hierarchies (Flores & Rosa, 2023) began dividing students into separate, unequal tiers.

Modes of Inquiry
This raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores, 2021) employed archival analysis to trace how U.S. science education mapped affective differences onto racial and linguistic categories (1946–1989). Extending prior historiographies, I analyzed science education journals and curricular reform archives using: (1) iterative keyword searches, (2) citational backmapping, and (3) tabular coding grounded in raciolinguistic perspectives.

Data Sources
Sources included K-12 research and curricula for students classified as ‘culturally deprived’ (Beatty, 2012): a term posited as interchangeable with ‘black,’ ‘Spanish-speaking,’ ‘Puerto Rican,’ ‘Mexican American,’ and ‘American Indian’ (Skeel, 1966). Special science curricula explicitly promoted the ‘attitudinal adjustment’ of groups marked as racially and/or linguistically differing from Anglo-(speaking) Americans.

Conclusions
The analysis outlines how desegregation-era science education reforms produced raciolinguistic hierarchies of affect in three ways. First, affective constructs: (a) idealized personality traits of elite scientists (Roe, 1962), while (b) pathologizing values ascribed to ‘Indian,’ ‘Spanish-speaking,’ and ‘ghetto’ communities (Zintz, 1962). Second, affective metrics attributed the failure/success of non/Anglo students to their individual acquisition of those norms (Ausubel et al., 1973). Third, affective objectives reformulated Americanization imperatives as universalized goals to help all achieve human dignity and other affective prerequisites for success (Morrison, 1958/1971). For instance, reforms strove to help groups socio-emotionally adapt to modern society by giving up attachments to cultural heritages or collective organizing in favor of Anglo lifestyles and individualistic competition (Huff & Languis, 1973; Wangler, 1969). Altogether, affective distinctions redirected Civil Rights demands—reauthorizing separate instructional tiers as if necessary to elevate groups’ dignity through culturally and linguistically approximating a depoliticized scientific self.

Significance
This paper further unsettles the onto-epistemic hierarchies (Warren et al., 2020) upheld by ‘disciplinary molds’ of proper modes of feeling and emoting (Jaber et al., 2023). In striving toward a more just, dignity-affirming science education, historical reflexivity helps us recognize the sociopolitical embeddedness of techniques classifying student affect and their potentially resegregating effects.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison