STEM and the Social Good: Forwarding Political and Ethical Perspectives in the Learning Sciences

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.

Tesha Sengupta-Irving is Assistant Professor of the Learning Sciences in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Her research explores the sociocultural and political dimensions of teaching and learning that resist the stratifying power of mathematics as a project of race, gender, and class in schools.

Maxine McKinney de Royston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin―Madison, USA. Her research examines the multidimensional, relational, and politicized nature of teaching and learning, namely how schools and mathematics and science classrooms operate as racialized learning spaces.