Black Liberatory STEM Education Beyond the Liberal Imagination

• In Event: (A)Historicity in Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational Studies in Education: Toward Educational Renewal and Reparative Futures

Abstract

One of the primary strategies for discussing Black education is to frame what is needed to remedy educational injustices that affect Black people in terms of liberation. However, a survey of much of the current scholarship addressing a liberatory Black education—and liberatory education for other groups that have been colonized and/or marginalized—reveals that “liberation” is an unstable idea within STEM education research and education research writ large. Such instability hinders change because the goal is unclear.

The lack of conceptual clarity related to liberation is not unfamiliar to education. A primary tactic of liberal reform is to mobilize revolutionary language and to dilute meaning to the point where the liberal agenda proceeds unchallenged with the apparent endorsement of revolutionary rhetoric. In STEM education, specifically, liberation, decolonization, freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) and the like are common parlance used to position STEM education as a rallying point for marginalized people to achieve these freedom goals. However, the benefits of STEM outlined in such research remain limited to the trappings of capitalism (Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019).

This political maneuvering becomes possible by separating the words from the moral imperatives encased within (Sriprakash, 2023). One effect is that liberal reform places the present and future in opposition to each other and recreates ideas like liberation in a way that makes a liberatory interest for the present distinct from a liberatory interest for the future, while relegating the past to contextual description. This creates what I call the perpetual present-future problem in education research. Both the present and future hold moral imperatives for educationists to create a more just situation. However, the actions and changes that may make schooling better for a child today (e.g., teacher professional development about gender and sexuality, anti-racist teacher training) are often contradictory to the more radical changes needed to establish the type of education that repairs harm and promotes the liberation of future child who is generations removed from this moment. The “winner” in this conflict is always the present because that child is sitting in front of us and the education research enterprise is more interested in what works than what is good. This myopic focus on the present encourages the slow, incremental, and nonspecific change that Bell (1989) decried in his critique of liberalism.

In this paper, I analyze extant literature addressing (Black) liberation in STEM education. I examine the historicity of science as a path to liberation both within and outside of the neoliberal imagination and discuss current research literature in conversation. Finally, I consider ways of thinking about science and liberation that can promote just futures.

Author

• Erika C. Bullock, University of Wisconsin - Madison