Session Information
27 SES 11 A, Feminist Ways of Being, Knowing and Teaching in the Academy 2: International Perspectives on Feminist-Inspired Pedagogies
Symposium
Contribution
Material feminism offers a unique theoretical framework for science educators because it moves theorizing and analysis from the postmodern that focused solely on language/discourse critique to re-engaging with matter/material (Barad, 2007; Hird, 2009). Science education research is described as masculine and politically conservative (Lemke, 2011), having sporadic engagements with poststructuralist theories (Bazzul, 2012) with a gross overemphasis on cause-effect relationships, interventions and outcomes, input-output explanations—all-in-all an oversimplification of the dynamic complexities that are schools and science classrooms. Too little attention is given to the multiple, intra-acting material-discursive phenomena that co-constitute (and reconstitute) diverse and complex realities and possibilities for (science) teaching and learning. Utilizing Barad’s diffractive methodology, this paper will examine how techno-scientific and material discursive practices allow us to investigate the rich context of education in the making through the intra-action between matter’s agency and science learners and teachers’ bodily practices to explicate in what ways teachers, students, and their subjectivities, desires, and bodies are inscribed in performativities of science practices taking place under the current public school accountability and achievement contexts. Using rich data sources from middle school science classes, students in undergraduate science education courses and our roles as feminist researchers|pedagogues we will explicate how science teachers’ subjectivities, and students’ bodies are constructed, in an endeavour to provide an alternative understanding for how material entities, embodiment, and subjectivity play out in science teaching and learning. And from these understandings, discussion how to use feminist science frameworks to develop transformative science teaching, learning, and research in schools and universities.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bazzul, J. (2012). Neoliberal ideology, global capitalism, and science education: engaging the question of subjectivity. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 7(4), 1001–1020. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-012-9413-3 Hird, M. J. (2009). Feminist engagements with matter. Feminist Studies, 35(2), 329–346. Lemke, J. (2011). The secret identity of science education: Masculine and politically conservative? Cultural Studies of Science Education, 6, 287–292.
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