Pedagogy as Reckoning: Ethics and Futures in the Teaching of Disciplinary Knowledge

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Unforgetting as Pedagogy: Reclaiming Histories and Reimagining Futures in Education

Abstract

This paper explores pedagogy and curriculum as a form of reckoning with what knowledge carries forward, what it excludes, and how we might relate to it differently. Using developmental psychology classrooms in an urban community college as a site of inquiry, this paper asks how teaching might unforget the discipline’s histories of harm and support more ethical, future-oriented relationships to knowledge and practice.

Developmental psychology is often taught as a neutral science of how humans grow and change across our lifespan. Yet many of its core theories are tied to eugenics, colonialism, unethical experiments, and narrow ideas of “normal” development (Burman, 2016; Medina & Uytiepo, 2024; Yakushko, 2019). Instead of distancing ourselves from these histories, I ask: What becomes possible when we unforget them in the classroom? What responsibilities do we take on when we teach this material, and what kinds of futures are shaped by how we carry it forward?
Drawing from decolonial thought (Andreotti, 2024; Wynter, 2003), transformative teaching-learning (Stetsenko, 2017), and post-qualitative methods, including a critical ethnography of my pedagogy/assignments and student interviews, I theorize how curriculum and pedagogy can become spaces to reckon with the histories and assumptions embedded in psychological and scientific knowledge.

In our developmental psychology classroom, this reckoning centered on confronting dominant narratives and unsettling disciplinary norms. Together, we examined how developmental frameworks often justify the pathologization of Black and Latino boys in schools (e.g., ODD diagnoses), pregnancy surveillance and mother-blame, racialized and sexist myths in medicine and science, and the segregation of students in special education. We explored not only how developmental psychology has contributed to these practices but also how such practices affect people’s well-being.

We worked to unlearn persistent myths that frame race, gender, and ability as biological facts, and considered how these ideas continue to shape the systems students are preparing to enter—such as education, health care, and mental health. Importantly, students were invited not only to critique these histories and systems, but also to consider how they might carry this knowledge forward. Through prompts and projects designed to foster ethical reflection and critical engagement, the curriculum created space for students to explore emerging orientations toward practice. For example, students were asked to advocate against a fictional 2078 dystopian policy where technology monitors pregnancies and reports information like heart rate, diet, and miscarriages to the government, using what they learned about prenatal development, fetal-maternal bidirectionality, eugenics, and policing pregnancy. These conversations and assignments became central to challenging developmental theories, their real-world effects, and entanglement with harm in medicine and society. They also positioned students to imagine justice-oriented, historically grounded approaches to knowledge, practice, and professional ethics.

This paper theorizes curriculum and pedagogy as sites of reckoning with disciplinary history. It contributes to educational theory by showing how historically engaged teaching can support students in cultivating ethical, future-oriented relationships to their fields and reimagine the classroom as a space for confronting and carrying forward unforgotten histories.

Author

• Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice