Pedagogy as a Site of Reinforcing and Disrupting Undergraduate STEM as a White, Cis-Heteropatriarchal Space

• In Event: Reconstructing Postsecondary STEM as an Equitable Educational System for Queer and Trans* Justice

Abstract

This study characterizes pedagogical practices, including curricular design and instruction, that reinforce and disrupt oppression among Black, Latin*, and Asian queer students as STEM majors. We theoretically and methodologically grounded the study in queer of color critique (Brockenbrough, 2015), a tradition of educational research that foregrounds lived experiences among queer students of color as valid sources of knowledge to interrogate white cisheteropatriarchy. The study took place at a large, private, and historically white research university. We collected data from 12 participants, including STEM autobiographies, journaling, and interviews (1 individual, 1 group, and 1 member check). The framework of STEM education as a white, cisheteropatriarchal space (BLIND; BLIND) guided our coding to flag instances of STEM pedagogy that preserved or disrupted queer of color marginalization.

One theme revealed through our analysis was racialized, cisheteronormative instructional discourse. Katherine (Black bisexual femme female) described how computer science faculty staged classroom debates that discursively positioned racism and homophobia as reasonable and negotiable. As the only Black student in her computing ethics class, Katherine was assigned to defend an employee’s online use of the N word, which she experienced as the instructor “putting white discomfort as a higher priority than other people’s discomfort” and preventing the debate from “get[ting] too real.” Alexander (Asian bisexual male) recalled faculty use of the phrase, “open the kimono,” to describe delving deeper into computer science concepts. Finding this discourse “aggressively heteronormative and… very strangely dominant of Asian people,” Alexander expressed how hearing this racialized-sexualized remark “bops [him] out of whatever [he’s] thinking” and thus interrupted his STEM learning. Ideologies of STEM as neutral arguably justify oppressive discourses that Katherine and Alexander encountered, which perpetuates knowledge production through instruction that marginalizes queer students of color.

Devin (Black bisexual man) described a disruption of white, cisheteropatriarchal discourses going unchecked in instruction. A senior engineering design instructor leveraged Devin’s racial awareness to motivate the value of socially-conscious professional practices. In debriefing a class activity that involved describing a painting of a man to a blind person, the instructor asked the class, “Why was he [Devin] the only one that mentioned that he [the man in the painting] was a white guy?” For Devin, the instructor’s question connected his contribution with the course’s learning goal of fostering social consciousness in “mak[ing] devices that actually work for the populations that [engineers] say they’re supposed to work on.” This disruption of what Devin perceived as dehumanizing silence on social issues in the engineering school affirmed his perspective as a queer Black man as “help[ing] teach everyone of all races and sexual orientations” how to be better engineers.

Research on equity-oriented reform in undergraduate STEM is often framed as supporting all students (Johnson et al., 2020; Martin, 2003; Tanner, 2013), leaving unexamined how instruction shapes queer students’ experiences of intersectional oppression. Considering disproportionate rates of STEM attrition among racially minoritized students (Chen, 2013) and queer students (BLIND), our study addresses this research gap to inform identity-affirming STEM pedagogies for queer students of color.

Authors

• Luis Antonio Leyva, Vanderbilt University

• Taylor McNeill, Vanderbilt University