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- Convenors:
-
jeremy hunsinger
(Wilfrid Laurier University)
Zachary McDowell
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Critical Science and Technology Studies teaching has taught "The Controversy" about the truths and myths around science and technology in our world. This panel seeks to go beyond the controversy model toward radical, foundational, and productive modes of STS teaching for positive transformation.
Long Abstract:
Critical Science and Technology Studies teaching has taught "The Controversy" as a method for learning about the truths and myths around science and technology in our world. This panel seeks to go beyond the controversy model and bring forth papers that discuss the radical, foundational, and productive modes of STS teaching. How do you engage, for instance, processual-relational technologies? How do you make your classroom constructivist or pragmatist? How do you move into producing and doing in the classroom in a manner consistent with the stories that STS tells? How do you incorporate alternative narratives, fictums, or life-worlds into your classrooms? How do we challenge the traditional classroom models through STS? How do we challenge the bureaucratic constructs surrounding that classroom and its developments?
We propose a combined panel, uniting papers and discussion into a productive dialogue. We seek papers and presentations from those who wish to speak STS to the power of the university/college classroom in the name of constructive and positive change. We hope to have a panel or two of papers and then a fishbowl discussion including those presenters and the audience, discussing and challenging the STS classroom as the locus of positive transformations spoken of in the CFP.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Larisa Mann (Temple University, Philadelpha PA USA)
Short abstract:
I want to share how addressing material, situated aspects of technology use in specific relation to labor, land and other resources, studying processes, and incorporating ethics and accountability in discussions and assignments can engage students as moral and critical thinkers and makers.
Long abstract:
Media & communication programs often rely on deterministic and linear models of technology when framing courses. Two courses I teach:“The Information Society” and “Emerging Media and Communication” are often presented to students as ways to learn about fundamental social changes that “new” technology creates. This approach ignores how technologies function in practice, in relation to communities, power, and social change (or its absence). It also risks framing technology and justice being mutually exclusive, since so much technology has not produced justice. My most productive tactic has been addressing the material, situated questions in specific relations of labor, land and other resources, and studying processes: “Information Society” begins with coltan miners and Foxconn workers, Emerging Media has shifted from focused on “the digital” to focusing on “moments when media technologies’ use emerge in a specific place, time and community” (so, Hmong immigrants’ telephone conferencing, Suffragists’ tea cozies, Ugandan mobile phone banking). Thus questions of race, colonialism, gender and class are intrinsic. I also have made significant changes especially in research and creative assignments –students discuss ethics of the technologies we use in educational contexts. I also require an ethical reflection in their writing practice: to consider how their collection and representation of information models an ethical practice in relation to the communities or individuals they are learning from. This approach also helps non-elite students see themselves as knowledge makers by building on their own lived experience and values.
Stephanie Jo Kent
Short abstract:
Differences within and between languages present opportunities for scientific communication. Disrupting anti-science rhetoric requires interrupting the homolingualism of English through comparing linguistic terms, concepts and theories to stimulate alternatives, creativity, and diverse perspectives.
Long abstract:
The controversy model sets up debate as an ideal mode of discourse for scientific thinking. Inherently, debate assumes winners and losers, instigating intellectual competition. Instead, a collaborative model for scientific communication seeks to produce shared understanding through utilizing different languages. How do you talk about evolution in different languages? How are the fundamentals of physics explained in, for instance, American Sign Language? Disrupting pervasive anti-science rhetoric requires interrupting the homolingualism of English, particularly in technical fields. Inviting linguistic comparison of terms, concepts and theories in other languages creates access to alternatives, creativity, and diverse life experience: instigating curiosity. Skills of inquiry about language use (Kent et al, in print) grounds rich point pedagogy, drawing upon the work of Michael Agar, who identified linguistic rich points (2000). We propose communicative rich points that purposefully introduce linguistic difference to support collaborative structures of social interaction that engage intellectual disagreement in terms that are essentially friendly rather than inherently antagonistic. Drawing on Canagarajah’s (2013) articulation of the use of later-learned English as a lingua franca (ELF) we show how co-constructing mutual, shared understanding is modeled by managers and employees in multinational enterprise (Kent & Kappen, in process) and politics (Kent, 2014). The plurilingual model applies to scientists in the academy and industry, across all levels of science education and science communication. Welcoming and utilizing language difference constructively rather than resisting it will make science more welcoming to diverse identities and promote scientifically-grounded social evolution, a radical and fundamental shift.
jeremy hunsinger (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Short abstract:
Introduces critical constructivist pedagogies as a remedy for the reasoning dilemmas of controversy based teaching.
Long abstract:
This paper presents some teaching methods of the critical constructivist classroom to move beyond the controversy. Constructivism is the learning theory based on the idea that people create their knowledges. Critical constructivism is a learning theory and a social epistemology that moves beyond constructivism, integrating critical, reflexive, situated, performative, and ethical materials into a praxis, moving the students into a position where they both are creating their knowledge and critiquing the creation of their knowledge. They learn to recognize and acknowledge their own critical positionalities in the learning process. The science controversies to these students become matters of common sense instead of choices, contradictions, and challenges to beliefs.
The methods presented will be active learning exercises and workshops that allow students to both build and reflect on their building of this knowledge. They vary from term projects oriented in ethnographic methods or technology to single-class and multi-class exercises.
The exercise centers are students' praxis, working together in groups to apply theory through action. The exercises are: 'material semiotics and the semiotics of materiality,' in which students attempt to map their understandings of signs and the symbolic to their mechanical world, and 'technographies of transit,' in which students map their own transit experiences as an ethnographic project; and 'networks of art, cultural networks' in which students engage in a several week project to understand the networked structures of our world by examining art networks. These examples will help teachers understand the possibilities of the critical constructivist classroom for STS.
Zachary McDowell
Short abstract:
This paper overviews Open Educational Practices as methods to engage students not only in learning about STS but also to contribute to knowledge, engage in knowledge creation, and to diversify knowledge in these spaces.
Long abstract:
Open Educational Practices (OEPs), teaching students with both Open Educational Resources (OERs) as well as engaging them with open platforms, systems, and the space to create, modify, and build upon those resources, offers incredible benefits not only for teaching the topic at hand, but also learning to produce information, learn the processes, and engage in real-world information creation. Focusing on teaching with Wikipedia, this paper will examine how engaging students with Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in various content and create project-based assignments that attend to issues of representation, bias, and social justice. These practices engage students in deep learning about informational creation processes, matching many of the frameworks provided by the Association of College Research Libraries’s (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy, illustrating not just how to access and understand knowledge, but also how decisions are made about what counts as knowledge, what gets included, and how to produce knowledge within these frameworks. These techniques work for many spaces outside of STS, but in particular, they are incredibly apt for STS as they engage students' metacognition around how to think about science and technology and how they understand themselves as researchers and participants engaged with the conversations in the field. Finally, these practices offer potentials for social justice as they both increase self efficacy for the learners, as well as offer opportunities to diversify knowledge systems.