Becoming-STEMM Educator-With a Haunted Kindergarten Classroom Apparatus

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 4:15 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Becoming Teachers: Identity, Narrative, and Pedagogical Journeys

Abstract

This paper diffracts STEMM teacher identity through Barad’s agential realism, proposing becoming-STEMM educator-with as an entangled, material-discursive process. Centering a kindergarten teacher’s enactment of a germ unit during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study attends to how identity materializes through intra-actions among students, materials, affect, and institutional apparatuses. Using a postqualitative, diffractive methodology, identity is not treated as coherent or interior, but as a haunted unfolding, re-membered through agential cuts shaped by spectral forces such as racialized trauma and systemic constraint. Pedagogy emerges as an ethical, affective, and scientific practice co-constituted within the classroom apparatus. This reconfiguration re-turns teacher identity from a bounded subjectivity to a relational ontology, opening possibilities for justice-oriented, materially responsive STEMM education.

Authors

• Katherine Ayers, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

• Robyn Pennella, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

• Hailey Wolfe, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital