“Efficiency Isn’t the Only Important Thing:" Racialized Contours of Justice in an NGSS Case Study

• In Event: “No Justice, No Peace”: A Racial Reckoning for Science Education

Abstract

Objectives: Case Study 2 in Appendix D of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Council, 2013) identifies culturally relevant pedagogy, community involvement, social activism, and multimodal learning as effective teaching strategies for racially marginalized students. This represents one of seven case studies written to support “non-dominant” students' science learning based on renewed equity commitments. However, despite updates, the ideological commitments of the NGSS inhibit responsive science education for communities of color (Morales-Doyle et al., 2019). While alternative considerations for equity from a justice-oriented perspective are offered (Calabrese-Barton et al., 2022; Morales-Doyle, 2017), scholars beyond (Givens, 2021; Grant et al., 2019) and within science education (Morton et al., 2022) are also using Black epistemologies that predate and situate contemporary equity reforms in a historical context. These epistemologies, often delegitimized by racialized discourses, challenge hegemony that stabilizes injustices and inequities (Ladson-Billings, 2000). In this study, I investigate how Case Study 2 conceptualizes justice and the sociopolitical educational possibilities or limitations it presents based on epistemologies of “civil disobedience” during the civil rights movement in 1964-1974.

Theoretical Perspectives: Documentation of the 20th-century civil rights movement presents a consensus narrative that truncates “civil disobedience” to persuasive tactics, an abstraction from political practices that have served Black communities for generations (Pineda, 2021). This generalization constructs a hierarchy of civil disobedience as a citizen-making mechanism that enacts control for market expansion through productive forces that influence an individual’s desires (Foucault, 2009). Conversely, Stoler (2009) informs us that archives carry anxieties that materialize these productive forces, revealing tension that can desettle settled expectations (Bang et al., 2012) currently restricting science education possibilities.

Modes of Inquiry and Sources: Through a historical onto-epistemological approach (Daston, 1994; Hacking, 1992), I engage the archives to trace the contours of justice from the civil rights movement in two ways. First, I read against the archival grain based on documentation of activists’ Black radical tradition practices in the context of 1964-1974 when their efforts yielded the passing of major anti-discriminatory laws for education and other systems. Second, I read along the archival grain to identify what’s written in as a consensus narrative. Sources for this phase include two digitized surveys documenting youth’s beliefs about sociopolitical activism (Gallatin, 1972; Langton & Jennings, 1968). Lastly, a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) of Case Study 2, informed by a historical Black onto-epistemology of justice, is conducted to understand how past conceptions shape the present.

Substantiated Conclusions: My analysis outlines three trends in the NGSS’s expressed conceptions of justice in Case Study 2: (1) justice-oriented critiques of canonized scientific knowledge are devalued through othering techniques (e.g. segregating sociopolitical ideas from the curriculum); (2) permitted justice-oriented opportunities privilege discourse practices of mainstream norms and values (e.g. “high-level” communication); (3) students’ justice-oriented identities are depicted by assimilationist rather than transformative (Morales-Doyle, 2017) descriptors.

Significance: This paper necessitates the inclusion of dynamic epistemologies of justice that transcend racialized disempowering sociopolitical discourses present within the NGSS, thereby extending the call for substantive equity reform (Rodriguez, 2015).

Author

• Curtis O'Dwyer, University of Wisconsin - Madison