1st Edition
Disrupting Secondary STEM Education Educator Experiences of Teaching for Globally Just Futures
This volume brings into focus the pivotal educational years during adolescence, when many learners are exposed to implicit and explicit messages that STEM is not a viable educational pathway for them.
Challenging this notion, Disrupting Secondary STEM Education brings together a collective of critical educators, who share what disruptive STEM teaching looks and feels like from an insider perspective, as well as ways they purposefully create curriculum to subvert existing structures that can confine learning. Through disruptive STEM teaching, a joy for learning is kindled as well as a sense of empowered criticality in students that can support their development as global citizens facing complex futures. The collection shares stories across a spectrum of educators, from those beginning their teaching journey to those who’ve stood up against narrow curriculum and standardized testing for years in the capacity of both P-12 teachers and teacher educators. The voices of these educators illustrate how the work of disruptive STEM teaching can be actualized within cohorts of future teachers, achieved through early engagement with critical theories and generative field experiences that support and affirm a wide array of identities.
This book provides multiple theoretical and practical access points for the reader to understand the work of disruptive STEM teaching and offers a way forward for those interested in developing more critical curriculum in their own classrooms. As such, it will be important reading for postgraduate students and researchers in Social Justice Education and STEM Education, as well as in-service educators.
Preface
Margery Gardner
Theme 1: Introducing disruptive STEM and basic approaches
Introduction: Setting the stage for disruptive secondary STEM education
Margery Gardner
1. Portraits of STEM Disruptors
Margery Gardner
2. Planning for disruptive STEM
Margery Gardner
Theme 2: Content-focused, disruptive STEM curriculum, with specific in-depth lessons
3. Understanding eco-colonialism through globally competent STEM praxis
Margery Gardner
4. Teaching for racial and environmental justice - Flint, Michigan U. S. A.
Margery Gardner
5. Centering Indigenous Voice: STEM Teacher Training in Service of Decolonial Futures
Hugh Burnam and Margery Gardner
Theme 3: Process-focused, disruptive STEM pedagogy, with interwoven thematic explorations
6. Queering the Biology Classroom: Intersections between queer pedagogy and disruptive STEM teaching
Providence Ryan
7. The City Budget Project: Proportionality, Financial Literacy, and Culturally Responsive Mathematics
Enrique Nuñez
8. Addressing wicked problems in teacher preparation through educator solidarity
Randa Elbih, Anita Bright, Margery Gardner
9. Learning with an unprepared mind is like walking into a forest without a map: Developing reflective meditation practices in math
Payal Patel
10. STEM teaching for collective care and action
Margery Gardner and Hugh Burnam
Appendix
Index
Biography
Margery Gardner is Director of Teacher Preparation and Assistant Professor in Educational Studies at Colgate University, USA.
