STEM education as diffractive curriculum: Science, multiple worldings and affirmative politics

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Collaboration, Kinship, and Healing: Subversive Compliance in Curriculum Studies (Table 9)

Abstract

Objectives: Diffracted through the lenses of critical and “more than human” geographies (Whatmore, 2006) and feminist new materialisms, in this paper I articulate a Baradian “re-membering” (2015, p. 406) of a math/science collaborative STEM project loosely called “the Haiti project” designed and engaged in a “super-diverse” neighborhood (Aptekar, 2019) situated in the northeastern United States. Expanding Alford’s conceptualization of “unofficial trauma”
(Alford, 2016, p. 33) and extending Till’s notion of “the wounded city” (Till, 2012) to include non-linear renderings of diasporic peoples, places and times, this paper will “re-member” (p. 406) a project in which participants’ studied plate tectonics, architecture and engineering, and entangled this new learning with diverse stories and experiences tethered to the 2010 catastrophic and far-reaching earthquake in Haiti. By exploring human/more-than-human
connectivities, this contribution works to offer insights into not only how public school students and global communities “become with one another” (Kruger, 2016, p. 87) but also the potential for envisioning “becoming” differently via science education.

Perspectives: This chapter is an experimental engagement with critical, posthumanist curriculum theorizing as a thinking apparatus for re-imagining trauma and healing informed “curriculum-in-the-making” (Schultz & Baricovitch, 2010). Theorizing in this way calls for both
situated knowledges that allow us to recognize “condensations of response-ability” (Barad, 2014, p. 172), but also, importantly, it opens us up to multiple worldings across space, place and time that offer the potential for an affirmative politics of relationality. By expanding Till’s transdisciplinary notion of “the wounded city” (2012), I explore her conceptualization of [school] communities as complex networks of “ontologically heterogeneous partners” that do not pre-exist their entanglement, but rather “become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding” (Haraway, 2016, p. 13).

Methods: Working through the aforementioned perspectives, I engage with a Baradian re-membering (2015, p. 406) of “data” from “the Haiti project” via Stanford University d school’s design thinking process, student work samples, videos, memories, collaborative teacher and student conversations, guest speakers, parent night, shaker table, and sociohistorical residues. Re-membering in this way consists of the patching together of disparate parts that are not “absolutely a-part” but rather cut intra-actively so that things are “cut together/apart (one move), a pattern of differentiated entangling [that] may not be recognized but is indeed re-membered….” (p. 406).

Materials: Formal curriculum artifacts from the project, including lesson plans, student work and assessment tasks, but also memories, longings and recollections.

Results and Significance: Emphasizing the need for multi-faceted theories, I argue for transdisciplinary practices that might contribute to critical, posthumanist re-imaginings of STEM curriculum that attend to the unpredictable leakiness of disciplinary boundaries, nurture the development of a critical consciousness amongst students and educators, enhance school community members’ understandings of collective response-ability, and offer students creative,
affirmative openings for a re-imagined future. Additionally, I articulate this abbreviated Baradian “re-membering” (2015, p. 406) of this middle-school STEM project and its enactment of, and potential for, a critical posthumanist understanding of trauma informed curriculum and pedagogy.

Author

• Mary J. Newbery, Quinnipiac University