The Intellectual Struggle to Be Human: Reading Wynter for Rethinking/Reimagining Equitable Educational Opportunity in STEM

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session together scholars who are exploring Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the development of the Western colonialist episteme and its productions of categories of race, gender and ethnoclass in the project of desettling, decolonizing and reimagining science education. Drawing on Wynter’s notions of Man, humanness and knowledge, the presenters will engage participants in a dialogue around how these have and continue to shape social institutions and hierarchies, including schools and classrooms and science-learning contexts. Using Wynter’s conceptions as foundational we plan to have a generative discussion that will lead to collaborations and approaches that challenge existing frameworks and approaches to equity in order create a paradigm shift towards more knowledge inclusive and critically-oriented teaching and learning contexts.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Science Teaching and Learning

Chair

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary

Papers

• Against the Genres of Colonialism: Speculative Educations for Liberation - Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma

• Toward a Decolonial Approach to Science Epistemology - LaToya Strong, The City University of New York

• A Wynter Approach to Reconstructing Human Cognition and Human Action in Science Education - Gillian Ursula Bayne, Lehman College - CUNY

• Decolonizing Science Education: Taking Science Back From the Old Dead White Guys - Jean Rockford Aguilar-Valdez, Portland State Univeristy

• Black Feminist Thought, Creativity, and Science - Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary

Discussant

• Maria Selenia Rivera Maulucci, Barnard College