Affective Engineering?: Growth Mindset and Spatializations of Mind through STEM Education

• In Event: Making the neo-colonizer: strategies and tactics of subjectification for development

Proposal

The proliferation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has emerged as a seemingly necessary and inevitable springboard for launching local, regional, national, and ‘global’ education policies. A common implicit assumption of such policies is that a robust technoscientific substrate provides an optimal educational base for transforming children into productive workers, adaptive collaborators, problem-solvers, and globally aware citizens. One recent concept believed to be an important bridge from a less desirable present to a more manageable future is that of growth mindset. Briefly, growth mindset is a concept that often assumes a link between neuro-biological, psychological, and cultural assumptions about learning, academic achievement, well-being, and the mind. In some accounts, by targeting those with “fixed mindsets” to develop “growth mindsets,” equity, well-being, and achievement will result - creating observable changes in the brain, behavior, reports of well-being, schooling, culture, and the nation (e.g., Boaler, 2016; U.S. Dept. of Education, 2016).

This paper argues that growth mindset, much like “grit” and other related terms from positive psychology, carries residues of colonial-era practices and new forms of “affective engineering” that may mark human difference in dangerous ways (Kirchgasler, 2018; see also, Anderson, 2014; Thrift, 2008). In part, this paper contributes to related efforts to historicize psychological constructs with respect to how they travel, often unintentionally, in the making and marking of human and/or cultural difference and boundaries of inclusion/exclusion (see, e.g., Danziger, 1997; Popkewitz, 2008). However, this paper also pays specific attention to how growth mindset has become easily absorbed into STEM-related education discourses targeting (and producing) the affect.

The analytic approach draws heavily from history of science scholarship (e.g., Daston & Galison, 2007; Jones, 2008) and non-representational geography (Thrift, 2008) to historicize growth mindset. In particular, growth mindset is considered with respect to how pedagogies have differently spatialized mind, thought, and feeling through translations and boundary-makings of disciplinary subjects via pedagogy and techniques of self (e.g., Baker, 2013; Jenkins, 2010; Jones, 2008; Popkewitz, 2004, 2008; Thrift, 2008).

The preliminary analysis suggests growth mindset can be seen as part of a larger set of spatializations linking notions of effort, achievement, capacity, and well-being to perceived changes in the biological, cultural, and ‘globalized’ mind. Such spatializations rely in part on appeals to the neurosciences, psychology, and the social sciences emerging as colonial-era practices and techniques of the “scientific” self (e.g., Jones, 2008) that differentially produced subjectivities who needed “mental cultivation.” Further, changing beliefs to a “growth” orientation increasingly involves efforts to design desired subjectivities in part by targeting the “fixed” orientations through the “flow” of daily life (Anderson, 2014) via the media, STEM toys, and “intentional” play (e.g., U.S. Dept. of Education, 2016).
In short, this paper shows how growth mindset, much like STEM education, is neither an ahistorical or neutral heuristic for supporting equity. Rather, it mobilizes colonial-era practices along new horizons for marking and making difference through the affective engineering of pedagogical spaces and the flow of daily life.

Author

• Ryan Ziols, University of Wisconsin-Madison