Revolutionary STEM Education: Critical-reality pedagogy and social justice in STEM for Black males

Shifting the paradigm: Critical-reality pedagogy in STEM Education
Clearly, there is room for criticality in STEM. Students should be encouraged to question naturalized axioms (Philip, 2011a) as well as their own positionality and subjectivity within their specific socio-political, socio-historical, and socioeconomic realities (Freire, 1997). Therefore, the MAN UP instructional team sought to implement components of critical pedagogy in our instructional practices. Critical pedagogy is decidedly Marxist in that it is concerned with alienation and exploitation (Giroux, 2011; Freire, 1997) and, it is simultaneously postmodern precisely because its ontological vocation is deconstruction (Derrida & Caputo, 1997).

Critical pedagogy seeks to re-empower traditionally oppressed students by presenting them with the necessary tools to come to consciousness so that they can begin to exercise their power to deconstruct the ideological and juridical bulwarks of inequity that wreak havoc on and in their lives. More specifically, it works to provide students the means to think meta-cognitively about their own ideological predispositions (Althusser, 1971; Leonardo, 2010; Apple, 2004) as well as the unmistakably Eurocentric, Western-centric ideology that pervades their social reality (Fanon, 1968; Leonardo, 2010). The goal of this kind of critical interrogation is that students would begin to question the assumptions and limitations that they have placed on themselves because of the sadistic ubiquity and proliferation of the negative stereotypes, which have been sutured to their identities as urban Black males.

The impetus of critical pedagogy (Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Giroux, 2011), then, according to proponents and practitioners is to equip oppressed students with a critical framework that will afford them the means to extricate themselves from a pedagogy that has continuously repressed and oppressed them, educationally, socially, and consequently culturally (Freire, 1997; Baugh, 1996). Furthermore, critical pedagogy seeks to facilitate this transformation by encouraging, equipping, and empowering students to develop their agentive voices so that they can begin to transform their worlds by deconstructing the seemingly axiomatic Eurocentric meta-narratives that animate Western culture (Philip, 2011a), both nationally and globally. By centering critical pedagogy, the goal of MAN UP’s curricular approach was to emancipate students from STEM education that is predicated on uncritical, rote memorization and regurgitation. Wise and Elyon (2011) named this science-specific educational approach the absorption model. We have to break away from this stultifying STEM educational approach so that students would begin to identify as change agents capable of breaking this cyclical educational inequity by making STEM their own, by contextualizing, appropriating, and subsequently applying STEM in the remediation of societal issues that are important to them. More simply put, MAN UP students were encouraged to be critical producers of STEM, not merely passive consumers of it. Freire’s work was indispensable in conceptualizing the way that MAN UP sought to alloy critical pedagogy and STEM education. Reality pedagogy (Emdin, 2010; 2016) argues that students’ lived-experiences need to be valued and incorporated, not unlike critical pedagogy; however, Emdin (2010), in defining reality pedagogy, argues that it is perhaps most useful specifically within STEM educational context. Thus, the pedagogical approach that MAN UP instantiated was a combination of critical-reality pedagogy because I felt that this approach provided the optimum way to engage MAN UP students as individuals full of potential, promise, concerns, and expertise vis-a-vis the rigorous STEM work that this program featured.

According to Freire (1997), the pedagogy of the oppressed disallows intellectual discourse between the student and teacher, teacher and student, in favor of a monologue, or worse, dictation. Furthermore, Freire contends that the pedagogy of the oppressed functions to maintain the hegemony that exists in a given oppressive society. He writes: “If people, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity (1997: 66).” He goes on to write, albeit, in much more pointed words, “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence…to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects (Freire 1997: 66).” To this point, I feel a pellucid quote from Frantz Fanon (1968), a noted racism and anti-colonial theorist, reflects perfectly Freire’s own polemic against the oppressive nature of the banking of education that educational humanism espouses:

In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order (Fanon, 1968: 3).

The “agents of law and order”, the elites, are the ones who determine what knowledge is, and, what knowledge should be disseminated (Kuhn, 1970). Consequently, what is taught concretizes the social arrangement that educational humanism simultaneously presupposes and promotes: i.e., that there is a knower, who by her or his knowledge is societal elite, and one who does not know, who, conversely, is marginalized due to her or his lack of knowledge. For much of our Nation’s history, Black people and more specifically Black males have been forced to assume this obsequious position—the non-knower (Leonardo, 2010). As Fanon (1968) writes, this inequitable, White supremacist based positioning makes the maintenance of the status quo, speciously, in the name of “order”, much easier to infuse and indoctrinate into the subordinate class, i.e., the oppressed. What is more, this hegemonic relationship purposely leaves no room for critical inquiry: the knower knows, and his knowledge is unquestioned.

This is how STEM is positioned in K-12 education (Emdin, 2010). If these conditions are accepted, criticality is discouraged in the student. If Fanon is correct, this is a controlling mechanism. The marginalized groups ‘learn’ or more precisely, they are inculcated with the “virtue” of living out a subservient existence according to the auspices of the “social institutions…that embody the fruits of civilization (Fanon, 1968: 31).” Freire warns that any attempt to re-order this dynamic will greeted with bitter opposition: “to resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of the student among students would be to undermine the power of the oppressor… (1997: 56).” However, this ambitious and potentially contentious goal was the goal that impelled the development of MAN UP’s pedagogical approach.

Deconstructing this reality was (and is) crucial precisely because the persistence of the hackneyed banking model of education (Freire, 1997), in general, and in STEM education specifically, continues to oppress and stultify Black males. According to the traditional model of STEM education, mastery necessitates a kind of rote, passive acceptance. MAN UP was designed to move away from this anti-critical model to reinvigorate the tension between criticality and STEM. The curricular approach if the MAN UP program was intended to first encourages, empowers, and equips, then, requires students to critically (and meta-cognitively) interrogate and subsequently employ STEM in order to better not only their own lives but also the lives of members from their local, national, and global community/ies. For the MAN UP instructional team, this is a matter of social justice.

Ring the alarm: Social justice and STEM education
Gutstein’s (2006) analysis of math education is a microcosm of STEM education writ large in that math has, traditionally, been viewed as a gatekeeper that wards off hyper-marginalized students and precludes them from achieving academic success at comparable rates to their European American and Asian American peers (Gutstein, 2006; Moses & Cobb, 2001). Gutstein argues for a version of math education that affords hyper-marginalized students a nutritive educational space where they can not only learn math, in the canonical sense but also where they can agentively apply math to issues that inform and affect their sociopolitical and socioeconomic realities. He argues that this has not been the impetus of math education, traditionally:

The goal of increasing equity within mathematics education does not explicitly position teachers and students as having the transformative power to rectify fundamental structural inequalities through their participation in civil society, both within and outside of educational remiss. In this sense, it does not connect school into the larger sociopolitical context of society (Gutstein, 2006: 31).

Furthermore, Gutstein (2006) argues that by canonizing a form of depoliticized math education that serves to maintain an inequitable status quo, the National Council of Teaching Mathematics is contributing to an exploitative capitalist endeavor that necessitates the positioning of the poor and uneducated as mechanistic workers upon whose backs capital can be accrued:

Thus, in analyzing the sociopolitical context of mathematics education, my contention is that (a) mathematical literacy, as a form of functional literacy distinct from critical literacy, serves the needs of capital accumulation in the United States; (B) the NCT M, as the major organizational force within the mathematics education community, has frame mathematical literacy largely from the perspective of US economic competitor to this in the global order and has avoided discussions of whose interest is served; and (C) mathematical literacy from various groups of students in a stratified labor market, unfortunately, has divergent meanings for different social groups. A reconceptualization of the purpose of mathematics education is needed – one that includes envisioning mathematical literacy as critical literacy for the purpose of transforming society, in its entirety, from the bottom up toward equity and justice, for all students whether from dominant or oppressed groups (Gutstein, 2006: 281).

To this point, Barton (2001) writes: “...marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity (2001: 847)”. She goes on to argue that this dynamic is especially prevalent and especially pernicious in urban educational settings. Thus, the MAN UP approach sought to immerse students in STEM education and curriculum that encouraged them to make connections between STEM and their real lives so that they could transform the seemingly static bulwarks of structuralized race-based inequity that inform their lived-experiences as low-income, urban, Black males. In order to position them as young people who were attuned to the varied manifestation of social injustice that characterized their lives as urban, (predominately) low-income Black males in addition to our critical-reality based pedagogical approach, course content inhered around and was derived from matters of social justice and social injustice.

Social justice, as an educational framework, is impelled critical pedagogy (Giroux, 2011; Smyth, 2011; Gorski, Zenkov, Osei-Kofi, Sapp, Stovall, 2013; McLaren, 1994). It functions to empower, encourage, and equip hyper-marginalized students to use their agentive voices so that they are armed with and have the propensity to employ critical theoretical lenses, which are necessary to disrupt the inequitable milieus that students are forced to navigate. These milieus can be social, political, civic, and/or educational. In MAN UP, we were especially interested in the educational spaces where social justice is routinely enacted. However, this is not to say that we turned a blind eye to the other areas that inform MAN UP students’ lived-experience as Black males within a National milieu that has been (and continues to be) inhospitable and traditionally fearful of Black males (Noguera, 2008). According to Gutstein emancipatory, critical math education should disambiguate: “underlying ideologies and begin to understand how mathematics can be used to reveal or hide injustice” by using “statistical examples that draw students’ attention to social inequalities such as how poor people pay taxes they cannot afford while the rich use loopholes to avoid taxes (Gutstein, 2006: 3).” One of the goals of an emancipatory, critical math education should be to ensure that “students understand mathematics and the political nature of knowledge whose knowledge is, and is not, valued, as well as how mathematics is often used to hide social realities (Darder, 1998: 24).”

There is, unequivocally, a certain degree of plasticity regarding the working definition of social justice framework. However, in developing the MAN UP pedagogical approach, I along with the STEM instructors, Mr. K and M.S, adhered to a straightforward criterion that we agreed our particular social justice frame must adhere to: (1) It has to work to disambiguate false metanarratives (e.g., meritocracy, melting pot metaphor, etc.); (2), In addition to this, it must work to disrupt the banking model of education (Freire & Macedo, 1987); and, contiguously, (3), if it is to be an efficacious social justice-oriented frame (and curriculum), it must be vitally concerned with empowering agents to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; and, (4) it must seek to equip students to deconstruct oversimplified explanations for societal injustice and inequity; (5), and, it must seek fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities, while (6), building social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.
The (peculiar) institution of compulsory, K-12 public education, from its inception here in the United States, has been a tool or ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1971) that has been employed to mechanically reproduce a certain type of purportedly normative student (Giroux, 2011). To be more precise, schooling here in the United States is, essentially, a factory that reproduces a definite Eurocentric, middle-class aesthetic (Leonardo, 2010). This is why our schools have failed many Black male students (Noguera, 2008; Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008). The reality is that, according to Toldson and Snitman (2010), 80 percent of America’s teaching force self-identifies as European American (this term is interchangeable with white in this study). And, what is more, more than 65 percent of all teachers are in fact European American women. Make no mistake: I am not arguing that these statistics are not inherently problematic. European American teachers, whether female or male, are not unable or incapable of teaching Black males simply by their differential ethnicity (Howard, 2006). Nevertheless, the reality for the clear majority of Black male students is that they will encounter very few teachers who come from where they come from and very few teachers who look like them (Ladson-Billings, 1995) in their respective educational careers.

Reasonably, many instances of cultural dissonance arise because of this dynamic. This program, MAN UP, was created—in addition to educational preparation—as a space where the issues that spring out of this cultural (and gendered) mismatch can be addressed, and ultimately redressed. I was convinced, in developing the pedagogical plan for this program, that a focus on critical-reality pedagogy, as the pedagogic and curricular vehicle, held the potential to begin ameliorating this mismatch—precisely because a critical education is, in fact, a matter of social justice (Smyth, 2011). And, practically, it should work to prepare MAN UP, students, to begin thinking through ways to use STEM for societal uplift. Far too many hyper-marginalized students, especially poor, urban Black males are not exposed to critical, socially just, relevant curricular material in school in general, much less in their STEM coursework (Delpit, 2012). This is perhaps more pronounced concerning STEM education, precisely because STEM education, according to scholars like Barton (2001) and Gutstein (2006), is routinely taught in a depoliticized and decontextualized manner that functions to further strengthen the United States’ multibillion-dollar Military-Industrial Complex. According to Gutstein (2006), this anti-critical approach to STEM education runs counter to a social justice educational agenda:

From a social justice perspective, there is a significant problem with framing mathematical literacy from the perspective of economic competition. In essence, this positioning places the maximization of corporate profits above all else. This is fundamentally in opposition to social justice agenda that instead places the material, social, psychological, spiritual, and emotional needs of human beings, as well as other species of the planet, before capital’s needs. (Gutstein, 2006: 24)

The goal of the MAN UP pedagogical approach involved a constant unveiling of reality, which strived for the emergence of conscious, critical contextualization of STEM by MAN UP students. In this study, I define the critical contextualization of STEM thusly: The critical contextualization of STEM is evidenced by students beginning to appropriate and critically apply STEM as a tool to redress issues or problems, which are connected to students’ lives that inhere around notions of equity/inequity and or social justice. This approach sought to increase the opportunities for MAN UP students to critically interrogate and intervene for socially just individual and collective outcomes. In order to create opportunities for our scholars to become proficient and in adroit in applying their STEM knowledge for social justice, we had to create a safe, nutritive educational environment by simultaneously fighting against the negativity that has been sutured to their culture while welcoming their language and culture into the various educative spaces that the MAN UP program represented.