STEM and the Social Good

Forwarding Political and Ethical Perspectives in the Learning Sciences

Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Maxine McKinney de Royston, Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Maxine McKinney de Royston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000198287
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This compilation of empirical studies interrogates the global high-speed train of STEM education, particularly as a promise of social, economic, and political enfranchisement for marginalized communities.

In this book, scholars of race, education, and learning offer a range of analyses from which to consider the "who", "what", and "toward ends" of STEM education. Together with scholarly commentaries, the studies frame STEM learning as a personal and political enterprise worthy of closer examination in the lives of children, the work of adults, and the making of nations. Thus, the studies vary in scope and scale, but coalesce in surfacing the ideologies and values underlying the rapid ingestion of STEM in schools and communities as a "social good for all". Readers will journey through a Latinx student's reflections on social justice mathematics, African American primary school students studying water and justice, Indigenous families engaged in storytelling with robotics, college STEM mentors' work with youth, an online portal created for youth in Singapore to envision a STEM-infused future; and finally, frameworks for teaching and research that engage marginalized children's histories, cultural practices and sensemaking. The socio-political grounding and visioning of these works makes this a must-read for researchers, teachers, teacher educators and policy makers in STEM.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Cognition and Instruction.

MySkillsFuture for Students, STEM Learning, and the Design of Neoliberal Citizenship in Singapore

Roberto Santiago de Roock

and Mark Baildon

ABSTRACT There is a great need for interrogating the politics of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning at a global level and for STEM literacies that include robust sociopolitical analysis. This article analyzes neoliberal underpinnings of STEM discourse on an online portal created for pedagogic use with primary and secondary students in Singapore. We find that the portal leverages student interests, self-discovery, and diverse identities to recruit them into (neoliberal) figured worlds of learning, work, and citizenship that narrowly imagine a disciplined society and workforce appealing to global capital. Excluded and rendered invisible are skills to address pressing global issues (e.g., inequality, poverty, or sustainability) or to understand the world, others, or power relations, except strategically as instrumental skills that support industries and economic growth. We conclude by offering a hopeful vision that builds on the diversity, hybridity, and cultural crossroads of Singapore, asserting that alternate speculative futures are possible, including for decolonized or desettled STEM perspectives.

As socioscientific issues like global climate change and nuclear technologies pose increasing threats to human existence, there has never been greater need for interrogating the politics of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning at a global level and for STEM literacies that include robust sociopolitical analysis. Work within the learning sciences has increasingly examined issues of culture, identity, race, and power in STEM education (e.g., The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017; Vakil, de Royston, Nasir, & Kirshner, 2016), but largely without examination of connections to macro-level political, ideological, and economic forces (Vakil et al., 2016). These ongoing discussions could benefit from an analysis of STEM education’s connections to contemporary neoliberalism, the extension of competitive market logics into all areas of life (Ball, 2005; Harvey, 1989), that in turn enroll citizens into discourses that reinforce and reify oppressive power structures.

In this analysis, we explore the MySkillsFuture for Students (MSFS) online portal, which is designed for pedagogic use with Singapore students as part of an extensive lifelong learning initiative, SkillsFuture. We examine the portal not simply as a digital text or director of traffic, but as a digital object where online procedures around STEM education recruit students into particular figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Figured worlds, part of Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of identity, are imagined worlds and futures that provide grounds for learning and other meaning-making and identity practices. We find that MSFS recruits students into neoliberal figured worlds of learning, work, and citizenship that narrowly imagine a disciplined society and workforce appealing to global capital. Within these figured worlds, individuals are mandated to be ultimately responsible for their own success and failure as students and workers in an open labor market (Means, 2018), a notion we label entrepreneurial citizenship. We conclude by offering a hopeful vision that builds on the diversity, hybridity, and cultural crossroads of Singapore and assert that alternate speculative futures are possible, including for, with, and through decolonized or desettled STEM perspectives (Bang, Warren, Rosebery, & Medin, 2012; Zavala, 2016).

Conceptual framework

Neoliberalism and STEM education

Largely outside of the learning sciences, the ideologies behind STEM education have been widely critiqued as closely aligned with neoliberal discourses and mechanisms of governance (e.g., Apple, 2017; Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015; Noble, 2018). Recent emphasis on STEM education in many societies, including Singapore, is aligned with nationalist and neoliberal ideologies to promote constant innovation and the deployment of new technologies to enhance human capital development that enables nations to compete globally (DeCoito, Steele, & Goodnough, 2016; Philip, Bang & Jackson, 2018). These developments have been similarly theorized as informationalized capitalism (Noble, 2018) and technocapitalism (Suarez-Villa, 2009), “a new form of capitalism that is heavily grounded on corporate power and its exploitation of technological creativity” (p. 3). Disruption and change (as part of capitalism’s inherent crises) are fetishized and figured as primarily technological projects (Barry, 2001; Suchman, 2011). These projects are then leveraged to call for new technologies and educational innovation to increase worker productivity (Ekbia & Nardi, 2017; Harvey, 1989), which disproportionately benefit the already wealthy.

Enactment of neoliberal ideology is evidenced in the ongoing restructuring of public education around the globe. Examples include the defunding and privatization of schools; teacher deprofessionalization; and reduction of curricular scope to focus on the skills, knowledge, and values that benefit capitalist competition (especially in STEM fields). It can also be seen in accountability measures like standards-based education and standardized tests, and the emphasis on learning for workplace readiness (Ball, 2005; Saltman, 2015). Educational attainment and skills development for labor become “a form of currency for economic ends [where] those that fail to properly learn to work only have themselves to blame” (Means, 2018, p. 328). The fundamental assumption that economic competition and the needs of industry should be the basis of education is unchallenged in much of STEM education as a global and national political project (Vakil, 2018). This assumption is underpinned by current education systems mainly organized to advance technological and scientific areas of study and forms of technical and administrative knowledge that ensure capital accumulation, profitability, and economic growth (Apple, 2017). The primacy of neoliberal capitalism dehumanizes STEM students by focusing on their utility to the needs of capital, reducing students to human resources to be targeted as national investments in order to reap profits (Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015). This primacy leads to increased spending to train workers for industry by using public funding, further benefiting industry by reducing labor costs (Bencze, Reiss, Sharma, & Weinstein, 2018; Gunckel & Tolbert, 2018).

Moreover, STEM education promoters often use “salvationary rhetoric” that promises to create jobs, enhance international competition, and save the nation from economic disaster (Bencze et al., 2018, p. 72). Although current and future realities presented by STEM education discourses carry a sense of certainty and inevitability, they are highly speculative. The emphasis on STEM education and careers (to achieve substantial financial rewards) may result in eventual career disappointment for learners, because there are fewer professional STEM jobs than trained applicants (Martin, 2008). High levels of STEM education are unnecessary for most jobs in the current market and may not prepare the rest of the population for success in life (Apple, 2017; Roth & Barton, 2004). As a result, STEM degree-pursuers potentially bear the high cost of education without certainty of returns (Chesky & Goldstein, 2018).

STEM education initiatives frequently ignore significant sociocultural issues, conflate social mobility and equity (Nasir & Vakil, 2017), and reaffirm the meritocratic myth (Chesky & Goldstein, 2018) in ways that serve to reproduce or increase unjust effects and social inequity (Bencze & Alsop, 2014; Chen & Buell, 2018; Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015). The lack of grounding in sociocultural contexts has also resulted in an emphasis on decontextualized forms of knowledge that devalue students’ everyday lives and communities (Roth, 2009). Such an emphasis creates discontinuities between formal schooling and other aspects of life (Roth & Barton, 2004). Posited as apolitical and value-free (Bencze & Alsop, 2014), STEM education policies and practices prioritize engineered solutions that ignore the sociopolitical causes of social problems and fail to consider who benefits from these solutions and who does not (Gunckel & Tolbert, 2018).

In sum, STEM initiatives rely upon neoliberal, technocratic, instrumentalist, and utilitarian discourses to promote technological change as unequivocally positive while ignoring the sociopolitical foundations of social issues, such as issues of inequality and injustice (e.g., Gunckel & Tolbert, 2018; Rodriguez, 2015). Generally, STEM education operates as a means to achieve national economic and military strength in the geopolitical sphere, rather than support more authentically democratic and justice-oriented goals that would benefit marginalized and racialized groups (Philip et al., 2018).

Neoliberalism and systems of oppression

Neoliberalism should be understood as a project of colonialism, as it was explicitly (and successfully) envisioned as a way to maintain the colonial world order in the era of decolonization (Slobodian, 2018). Neoliberalism has thus perpetuated the colonial logic of domination through hierarchized binaries that justified the domination of humans by gender, race, social class, and educational status (Warren, 1990). Colonial-era practices leveraged what we now call STEM as mechanisms for both judging and exploiting colonized communities, such as in Singapore, even while providing STEM education to the local non-European elites (Blackburn, 2017). STEM similarly formed a central part of the education-economy nexus in postcolonial developmental states, in particular Singapore and other Asian Tigers, governed by elite and Western-aligned authoritarian ruling classes that gained political legitimacy through economic growth and development (Castells, 1988).

Gendered, racialized, and other colonial frameworks of oppression remain inherent in global STEM discourses and educational initiatives, including not only postcolonial societies like Singapore (Ong, 2016), but in colonizer nations like the United States (Chesky & Goldstein, 2018; Nasir & Vakil, 2017). Although equality discourses and diverse representations of STEM education claim to benefit particular disadvantaged social groups, they mask and exacerbate persistent equity and social justice issues. For example, minoritized groups are encouraged to take huge financial risks to pursue STEM education even though workers may only need short- or moderate-term on-the-job-training instead of college education for most STEM jobs (Gutstein, 2008).

Similarly, access to STEM learning spaces and decisions about engaging in these learning settings are bound up in notions of race, gender, identity, and belonging (Chesky & Goldstein, 2018; Nasir & Vakil, 2017). In the US context, feminist and critical race theory research in STEM education has linked discourses of meritocracy in STEM to racial capitalism and the neoliberal racial project (e.g., Chen & Buell, 2018; Noble, 2018) that point to efforts to inspire more women and minoritized groups into STEM careers (e.g., Google-supported BlackGirlsCode). These efforts tend to misrepresent STEM’s diversity issues, obscuring the appallingly discriminatory hiring practices of STEM-dominated industries, like those found in Silicon Valley, by suggesting the issue lies in the lack of skills or inspiration within minoritized groups (Noble, 2018). Neoliberalism thus builds on colonial frameworks in narrowing the nature, purpose, and praxis of STEM education globally, with profound implications for limiting the imagined possibilities of STEM identities in local educational contexts.

STEM identities and figured worlds

The learning sciences has tended not to look beyond the classroom level at the ideological, racialized, and gendered messaging that shapes student identity formation, participation in learning, and sense of belonging and agency in classrooms (Nasir & Vakil, 2017). We address this gap by looking at the intersection of macro-level neoliberal processes, STEM education, and student identities through the concept of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998).

Figured worlds are “socially and culturally constructed realms of interpretation in which particular characters and ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Another Step Forward: Engaging the Political in Learning
• 1 MySkillsFuture for Students, STEM Learning, and the Design of Neoliberal Citizenship in Singapore
• 2 Story work in STEM-Art: Making, Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence
• 3 Learning in Community for STEM Undergraduates: Connecting a Learning Sciences and a Learning Humanities Approach in Higher Education
• 4 Integrating Power to Advance the Study of Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement in Mathematics and Science
• 5 Troubling Troubled Waters in Elementary Science Education: Politics, Ethics & Black Children's Conceptions of Water [Justice] in the Era of Flint
• 6 Looking at My (Real) World through Mathematics: Memories and Imaginaries of Math and Science Learning
• 7 The Restorying of STEM Learning through the Lens of Multiples
• 8 Read Me Last: Constructing a Scholarly Catchment Through a Black Feminist Reading
• Index