Cultivating AntiRacist Curricular Ecologies: Imagining Inclusive Educational Futurities as an Endlessly Evolving Endeavor

• In Event: Speculative Methodologies and Anti-Racist Curricular Practice: Building Curricular Futures Beyond Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Objectives
We have many partial ontologies of racism—as economic, discursive, a form of social death, psychological bias, etc., but we lack a theory that explains how these many disparate processes consistently line up to produce what we know as systemic racism. This paper starts with the assumption that a comprehensive ontology of racism will not be forthcoming, because racism is ontologically protean; its nature changes in response to our efforts to resist and eliminate it. This view has given rise to a new generation of scholarship focused on developing creative immanent responses to racism—ways to act from within and against the surround of white supremacy. Most notably such responses are being envisioned in the literatures on practices of refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014), fugitivity theory (Hartman, 2008), Afropessimism (Wilderson, 2021), and Afrofuturisms (Barber, 2018).

The paper’s purpose is to apply these new ways of thinking about racism to the study of the hidden curriculum.

Data
Preliminary findings of an NSF funded (IUSE, $1.3M) project that documents the experiences of undergraduates of color considering becoming science teachers will be presented. Findings are based on the analysis of interviews with students; it privileges their voices as a source of critical insights.

Theory
The project does not look for discreet causes of student attrition. Instead, it seeks to understand student persistence as a consequence of students’ creative responses to an educational ecosystem that includes various forms of hidden curricula, social dynamics, and material pressures (Franklin, 2016; Lake, 2021; McGee, 2016),

At an ontological level, this study draws on Wynterian counterhumanism and posthumanist philosophies of science that maintain social and material phenomena like racism adapt, change, and perhaps are agential (Barad, 2007, 2011; Tsing, 2015; Wynter, 2015). A protean realism enables an acknowledgment that the causes of persistent racial inequalities in STEM education are constantly evolving, thus supporting the ecological conception of STEM education in/equality.

Methodology
These theories imply that our inquiries cannot uncover the true nature of antiblack racism. Instead research is an intervention; it produces present and future relational possibilities (Hartman, 2021; Campt, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2018). This project generates possibility through the production of stories about student experience based on student interviews and observations. It employs a synthesis of CRT counterstory methodology (Bell, 2018; Delgado, 1989) and posthumanist cartographic analysis to develop stories intended to transform possibilities for future experience. (Braidotti, 2019).

Results
In keeping with this methodology, the paper presents two stories about the experiences of Black students in STEM teacher education pathways. The stories do not to provide scalable and replicable plans for supporting students, but instead to sensitize listeners to the complex navigation of relational possibilities STEM students of color engage in on a daily basis.

Significance
The individual stories offer insights into ways STEM education students of color assemble resources that supports their persistence and thriving. Additionally, they provide a model for how storying-telling methodologies can be a futurity generating approach to research on STEM curriculum and the hidden curriculum of anti-Black racism.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon