Critical Engagement with Technologies, and its Corporate Producers, in STEM Education

• In Event: Interrogating Education, Technology & Capitalism in Chicago and Beyond

Proposal

For decades Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) education has been consistently positioned as an important part of economic and national security efforts in countries around the world. In the 21st century, this emphasis has been modeled into a metaphoric infrastructure known as the STEM pipeline (Aikenhead, 2006). Pipeline politics and the workforce needs of technological companies have come to dominate STEM education in an era defined by rising nationalisms and also transnational socio-technical crises like climate change, pandemic, and the unpredictable proliferation of artificial intelligence (Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017; Moura et al 2023). The first part of this presentation critiques the STEM pipeline for treating education as an engine for refining human resources. Examples from Chicago illustrate how pipeline politics reinforce the social structures of an unsustainable society structured by racial capitalism (Author & Colleague, 2019). The second part of this presentation shares how abolishing the STEM pipeline opens new possibilities for critical pedagogies in and across various STEM disciplines (Vakil, 2018; Kokka, 2019), with examples from high school chemistry contexts.

Insights into the problems and possibilities for STEM education in this presentation emerge from a Chicago-based science teacher collective that has engaged in teacher solidarity co-design as a form of participatory design research since 2017 (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Philip et al, 2022). Through an analysis of our process for developing chemistry curriculum that addresses local issues of environmental racism, this presentation demonstrates how the chemical industry is implicated in shaping the disciplinary boundaries of chemistry in schools. This inscription of STEM curriculum within corporate interests is consistent with the pipeline metaphor, which treats education as an extractive process and represents a textbook example of false generosity (Colleagues & Author 2, 2022; Author & Colleague, 2022).

In contrast, STEM education can open critical possibilities for grappling with tensions between technology and justice. For example, by teaching about the scientific principles undergirding the instruments that can measure environmental contamination, STEM education can link disciplinary tools with grassroots campaigns against corporate polluters. This approach works against the ways in which sophisticated technologies are treated as “black-boxes” whose outputs are uncritically trusted in matters of public concern (Waight et al, 2022). Scientific evidence of contamination gathered by students using these instruments can be a tool in organized efforts to confront environmental racism. At the same time, affluent white communities are not burdened with collecting such evidence. Therefore, engaging civic science in these ways risks reifying what some have called “regimes of evidence” (Liboiron et al, 2022). These tensions became apparent in a local effort where youth and community members were successful in pressuring a railroad corporation to remediate their contaminated infrastructures in one South Side neighborhood. The lessons learned from these projects demonstrate that critical engagement with technology is a necessary part of education in our current epoch and that learning to critique the corporations that produce technologies are an indispensable part of that sort of education.

Authors

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois Chicago

• Alejandra Frausto Aceves, Northwestern University

• Shelby Hatch, Northwestern University

• Mindy Chappell, Portland State University