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"You Assumed That Everybody Was...": The Epistemic Injustice of Assumed Cis-Heteropatriarchy in STEM Group Work

Fri, April 22, 11:30am to 1:00pm PDT (11:30am to 1:00pm PDT), Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina, Floor: North Building, Lobby Level, Marriott Grand Ballroom 13

Abstract

STEM learning environments can be unwelcoming to students with minoritized identities of sexuality and/or gender (MIoSG). However, past work (BLIND) has typically focused on overall outcomes, not microprocesses that shape climate perceptions. Using grounded theory, this study explores how cisheteropatriarchy shaped MIoSG students’ experiences of groupwork in STEM higher education environments. The throughline of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) related to silencing, exclusion, and injustice further highlights the complications that MIoSG participants identified. The nature of groupwork in STEM classrooms activates student invisibility.

With literature on MIoSG students in STEM still relatively sparse, the available research shows that these students experience exclusion in postsecondary STEM environments (Cech & Pham, 2017). Studies found that LGBTQ students also experience invisibility and discomfort about being out in STEM spaces (BLIND; Mattheis et al., 2019). These experiences of exclusion have long-term consequences. Epistemic injustice tenets of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2017) account for the misunderstanding, ignoring, and re-naming of a student’s MIoSG identity. Our participants’ narratives (Charmaz, 2014) add depth and nuance to the literature on groupwork in (and beyond) STEM.

Our study engaged 56 MIoSG students in semi-structured interviews. Our grounded theory analysis posits the question: How do college students with MIoSG identities describe/experience/navigate postsecondary STEM learning environments? Preliminary findings suggest three themes highlighting how cisheteropatriarchy, gender, and sexuality converge in STEM groupwork experiences among MIoSG students. First, students described STEM classrooms and groupwork as spaces normalizing cisheteropatriarchy, suggesting that instructor attempts to contest this normative framing were insufficient. Taylor shares, “... the teacher, whenever assigning the group, she asked us for our pronouns. It’s not like I tell everyone, ‘Hey I’m non binary.’ Everyone’s like ‘she’s a she.’ Second, participants described the compulsory cisheteropatriarchy of STEM spaces, treating gender and sexuality interchangeably. Femme-presenting people and queer-coded men, regardless of their appearance, experienced compulsory cisheteropatriarchy, rendering them hypervisible to peers and producing feelings of unsafety in group settings. Jason shared, “I’d be put in groups of a majority of straight men; interacting with them throughout the semester made me realize that I am different than most straight males are. It made me feel like I was not included.” Third, participants described counter-examples and spaces of greater inclusion. STEM student Angela noticed, “When I applied, I was taken aback because the gender options exceeded the binary. Never seeing that before, I was more excited to attend my school.” That example highlighted the active inclusion rarely occurring in groupwork.

Given the centrality of learning spaces to interpersonal marginalization and STEM success, this paper focuses more closely on a common pedagogical tool in STEM classrooms: groupwork, and its inadvertent harm. Cisheteropatriarchal harm gets transmitted in microprocesses (Posselt, 2020). Groupwork becomes a site wherein the alterity of MIoSG students gets (re)produced. Our work supports future inquiry on the creation of socially just STEM spaces, while raising the voices of MIoSG STEM students. Changes to instructional practices -- specifically, thinking about them as part of a complex system -- is the most welcome outcome of our study.

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