The Children Will Lead the Way: The Neoliberal Roots of STEM Learning Trends

• In Event: Alternative Pedagogies at the Crux of Interdisciplinarity: Promises and Pitfalls of “Innovating” Education - III

Abstract

This talk explores ideologies underlying a number of contemporary STEM learning trends, including makerspaces and self-paced online courses, using the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project as a case study. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC promised to enable self-directed technical learning for children across the Global South with a custom-designed laptop. While the project fell short in many ways, the same ideas that inspired OLPC have gone on to inspire other movements in informal STEM learning.

Children were meant to engage deeply and meaningfully with OLPC's laptop, inspired by their innate creativity and technical inclinations, and the knowledge that they built would allow them to leapfrog past the adults in their lives and eventually transform their economies. Based on a study of OLPC’s history and a seven-month ethnography in Paraguay, this talk will detail not only the pitfalls of this vision but its broader implications for informal STEM learning movements. For one, OLPC's individualist focus failed to shift or even acknowledge larger structural inequalities, including gender, language, and social class. Moreover, the expectation that children will lead the way appears to give agency to children, but when change fails to materialize, it is not the fault of schools, economic conditions, social structures, national policies, or infrastructure -- it becomes the fault of the children.

While OLPC's star has faded, other informal STEM learning movements make the same neoliberal assumptions of child-led social change -- and would benefit from an engagement with STS to trouble them.

Author

• Morgan G. Ames, CSTMS/School of Information, UC Berkeley