Session Information
33 SES 14 A, Critically Revisiting the Concept of the Hidden Curriculum from the Feminist, Intersectional and Postcolonial Perspectives 33. Gender and Education
Symposium
Contribution
Science education research struggles to problematize the concept of gender and rarely uses intersectionaility as a framework to examine how other social categories such as race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, first language, and/or religion are impact science teaching and learning. Moreover, most science teaching and learning promulgates the hidden curriculum that science is ‘value-free’, logical and rational, and accessible to all learners. For example, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Acheive, 2013) outlines what science American students should learn during primary and secondary schooling. But NGSS replicates the failure of previous standards to attain equity and excellence of students’ participation, understanding and engagement in science, and to acknowledge how humans’ understanding and use of scientific practices and of scientific knowledge emerges from their entanglements with the material. Theories and concepts do not exist in isolation but emerge through the entanglement that produces material-discursive practices. Materialism feminism allow us to recognize the ways in which matter matters not only on the grounds of a theory, but also as a possibility for practice and action and provides a lens to reconsider ontology and epistemology (Barad, 2003) in the context of teaching and learning. Indigenous people, feminists, farmers, and many minoritized groups have understood the importance of the intimate relationship and connection with living and non-living entities in the world. If science education took matter seriously, the NGSS would be reimagined as a tool for human and non-human entities, learners, curriculum, instruments, and activities to come together to create new meaning, understandings, being and becoming. The production of material-discursive practices would incorporate sociopolitical engagement and the assemblage of relations on which actions and engagement are made possible. Haraway (2008) suggested that researchers need to ‘stay with the trouble’ in order to advance feminist theorizing. Engaging with new materialistic ideas helps us to examine power imbalances as a part of material entanglements and agency is in the intra-active enactment of both humans and non-humans (Barad, 2012). This presentation will discuss how a reimagined science education research that takes matter seriously and embraces intersectionality would connect ethics, equity, practices, and concepts and produce new knowledge through the use of varying theoretical frameworks and re-thinking data analysis and outcomes.
References
Achieve Inc. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards. Washington, DC: Achieve Inc. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831. http://doi.org/10.1086/345321. Barad, K. (2012). What is the measure of nothingness? Infinity, virtuality, justice’. dOCUMENTA Notes Thoughts, (13), 4–17. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, Feminist Studies. 14(3), 575–599.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.