The Emotional Valence of Hyperrationality in STEM: Re-inscriptions and Contestations Across Two Learning Environments (Poster 8)

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

Abstract

Objectives
It is common practice to equate “sound” scientific reasoning and expertise with the perceived absence of discernable emotion. As a performative affective stance, composure becomes a proxy for scientific acumen, maintaining a facade of safety and intellectual objectivity often at the expense of those othered (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). How do we account for the felt dimensions of science learning that may be masked or otherwise less visible? In this poster, we offer tools for interrogating the emotional valence carried in the performance of hyperrationality in STEM education. We do so with concern for how these performances, regardless of intent, may harm learners in everyday interaction.

Theoretical Framework
Building from scholarship on emotional configurations (Vea, 2020), we position hyper-rationality as part of an emotional configuration of coloniality that does ongoing, everyday work in STEM learning contexts. As an embodied and discursive technology, hyperrationality in STEM, when predicated on the ungrievability of the other, masks and legitimizes white fears. As a display of emotion that is portrayed as lacking emotion, hyperrationality allows participants who reproduce dominant colonial logics to emote while denying that right to others. Importantly, learners can and do contest hyperrationality in transformative ways. Figure 1 illustrates these relationships and entanglements:


Data and Method
Our analysis brings together two cases, each representing data collected in STEM classrooms. The first case is based on collaborative research in an undergraduate engineering ethics course, with a specific focus on a classroom discussion about militarized drones. The second case is drawn from ethnographic research conducted with Black children over the course of a unit on water that deeply resonated with students. We expound on the core findings from our prior work and further attune to paradoxes in the performance of hyperrationality through a comparative case study.

Findings
The contrasting cases illuminate key elements of Figure 1. Case one emphasizes the role of hyperrationality in a STEM learning context that was predicated on the ungrievability of West and South Asian others. In this instance, hyperrationality worked to mask and legitimize the irrational white fear of the students (and Western colonial nations). In case two, Black children were aware of hyperrationality through their own lived experiences. In both classroom discourse and a film project, children performed hyperrationality, often in an exaggerated fashion, and for the purpose of critiquing it. Children leveraged the emotions and experiences of the “other” to resist, shift, and transform discourses of hyperrationality. In doing so, they not only contested the ungrievability of the other; they took steps toward humanizing the people grappling with water (in)access.

Significance
Our analysis is a step in articulating the significance of hyperrationality in STEM learning, as a mechanism that may be inadvertently working against decolonial innovations (Dominguez, 2018). We see this work as integral to understanding what it might look like to operate outside of a colonial imagination, by designing STEM environments that are explicit in naming hyperrationality as a potential barrier to expansive, dignity-conferring forms of learning (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014).

Authors

• Natalie R. Davis, University of Michigan

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Berkeley