What we believe in: like Paolo Freire, we reject the idea that students come into educational institutions as empty vessels that need to be filled and their minds shaped into a certain form.
We believe that students come into the classroom with a unique set of skills, senses, attunements, and understandings of the world. We believe in honoring these complex skill sets and meeting students where they are to create collective learning experiences that are guided by curiosity, joy, and mutuality. This is our ideal of how education could be.
We are acutely aware of the fact that ever too often, this has not been the case. On the contrary, educational institutions have a history of solely focusing on Western ways of thinking, learning, and doing science at the expense of every other way of processing information, transferring knowledge, and making sense of the world. The institutions working in this tradition have equally sidelined, excluded, and in its most extreme form eradicated indigenous ways of knowledge production and transfer. They have historically treated BIPOC scholars and practitioners as less than, often with existential consequences. We firmly believe that these institutions have a historical responsibility to repair these relationships.
As teachers/learners, we see our work as a contribution of doing science education otherwise.
Below you will find a collection of writing on our philosophy and visions for creating new STEM pedagogies.
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What we believe in: like Paolo Freire with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we reject the idea that students come into educational institutions as empty vessels that need to be filled, their minds shaped into a certain form. We believe that students come into the classroom with a unique set of skills, senses, attunements, and…
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Relatability: connecting abstract ideas to concrete examples Create a list of the most important key concepts (as abstract as they may be). Then, break them down to the most ubiquitous/relatable concepts that you can connect these more abstract ideas to. Ex. Teaching about Arduino based air quality sensors (technical) What are the scientific components &…
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Bodies as technologies have been exploited over hundreds of years. But bodies can be technologies beyond the notion and practice of exploitation and extraction. Looking at bodies as sites of inquiry, information processing, storage, and aggregation, with nuanced and multiple ways of wading through this information and coming to a variety of results, based on…
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How to bring intuitive technologies/capacities/skills in conversation with analytic capacities? Intuitive skills/technologies help us gain a deeper understanding of the world around us and access a deeper level of knowledge. There’s a way to only take the surface level into account, for example only the material aspects of a concept and see all the pieces…
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We are acutely aware of the history of dominant science and technology as emergent from oppressive systems and extractive practices. Thus, we see an even greater urgency to suss out modes of engagement with technologies that are not rooted in oppression and extraction, not used as instruments of surveillance and conquest. We seek to turn…
