Feminist Materialist Curriculum Development and the Conceptualization of Trust in Science Education

• In Event: Posthumanism, Feminism, Critical Theory

Abstract

Recent global events, including environmental crises and the COVID-19 pandemic, underscore the need for both appropriate public trust in science and critical engagement with science to address underlying inequities. Traditional conceptions of trust in science built on dominant onto-epistemologies provide an inadequate framework for (re-)connecting students with science and building trust and criticality concurrently. As an alternative, we draw upon Barad’s agential realism to redefine trust as intra-active and emergent. To demonstrate how this re-conceptualization of trust might inform efforts to re-imagine science education, we analyze teaching practices within an undergraduate science curriculum inspired by feminist materialism and identify how these practices support the emergence of more flexible and resilient trust among students, instructors, experts, and the material world.

Authors

• Anna Skorupa, New York University

• Shaghig Chaparian, New York University

• Leah Master, New York University

• Catherine E. Milne, New York University