Exclusionary Nature of Traditional STEM Education

Exclusionary Nature of Traditional STEM Education

STEM pedagogical practices throughout K-12 and higher education in this country have been and, sadly, for far too many underrepresented minority students, continue to be characterized by what Friere (1997) termed the banking model of education, wherein students are viewed as empty receptacles or sponges whose sole purpose, academically, is to receive the (deposited) knowledge that their benevolent teachers see fit to bestow upon them. Linn and Eylon (2011) later termed the stultifying, anti-critical educational paradigm the absorption model of education.

The old adage that likens or even equates children to sponges is the byproduct of this educational paradigm. This is problematic because this approach obviates any consideration of what it is that these students bring to their respective classrooms precisely because the ability to create knowledge, in the form of rote, decontextualized facts (Gutstein, 2006), is viewed as the exclusive domain of the adult knower. This top-down pedagogical approach disallows students to question the knowledge they receive and it disallows them from devising ways to critically contextualize and therefore connect and apply STEM to their own lives in a meaningful way (Gutstein, 2006; Brown, 2006). So, then, STEM—for many of these students—is decontextualized. This is why the way that STEM education is conceived is an issue that inheres around opportunity and not simply achievement.

Emdin (2010), Nasir’s (2011), and Gutstien’s (2006) respective work demonstrates the clear benefits of connecting students’ lives outside of the classroom to the STEM course content. However, for the majority of low-income, underrepresented students of color, the opportunity to engage in rigorous, relevant STEM course work is scant (Scott, 2010). More likely than not these students will be forced to endure STEM course work that is decontextualized, disempowering and, perhaps, worse yet delivered by under qualified or even wholly unqualified teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2010). And, according to Leonardo (2010) this form of structural and institutionalized inequity, which is made manifest in the STEM educational attainment (i.e., grades, AP courses, degrees, graduate degrees, and careers) of underrepresented students of color, instead of addressing the real issue of delimited education opportunity instead works to recriminate the victims of this by making it seem as though their academic struggles are endemic and or innate due to their ethnicity, culture and or socio-economic status. This is especially true where low-income African American males are concerned. More simply put, the chasm between the opportunity to receive and engage in quality, critical STEM education as opposed to the staid traditional (banking) approach to STEM education is a much more reliable predictor of STEM educational attainment (DarlingHammond, 2010)—not intrinsic and or innate drive, intelligence, and ability, as the term achievement connotes.