[Re]considering queer theories and science education

The Power and Politics of STEM Research Design: Saving the "Small N"

“…To the STEM education researcher seeking a more reflexive approach, the LfSN researchers' elicitations of students' individual stories, which are messy and disordered from the perspective of "lessons to be learned," instead and valuably, "put at risk illusions of a unitary, sovereign self," in the terms offered by Fifield and Letts (400). 9,11 A second sense in which LfSN disrupts conventional STEM education research centers on the ways in which qualitative evidence poses a retort to such quantified data as standardized test scores; GPAs; and recruitment, retention, graduation and job placement rates. Even more exciting, the stories that constitute the raw material of this small-n research are revelatory of the nature of those data sets as inscriptions.…”

“…As Fifield and Letts make clear, such sorting will readily "reduce the self to normalized and naturalized identities" at "great convenience to the continuance of scientific norms and expectations and great loss to emancipatory educational reform." 11 With these social instrumentalities of quantitative research in mind, we might now ask still more questions, this time about the larger intellectual arena in which STEM education researchers (including ourselves) seek reputational security: Why do disciplines count the things they do? What roles do funding institutions or peer expectations play in perpetuating such counting priorities?…”

“…There is no question that LfSN steps back from that self-serving and conservative development, again hinting a disruptions of the uses of science more broadly. And we are urged in no uncertain terms by Queer Theorists to consider that where "complexity and indeterminacy prevail, there is little here on which to hang equity and inclusion as they are normally conceived" (395), 11 an incompatibility which, we hope we have made clear, is all to the good.…”

“…11 Riley similarly incites us to consider the indeterminate relationship of knowledge and resistance. 4 But our aim in this paper is not to focus on science writ large but on the scientized conventions of STEM education research.…”

“…5,11 In recent years, Disabilities Studies scholars have cast a raking light on the means by which human sciences have historically determined that differences among individuals (bodily or intellectual) can be detected, measured and (potentially) remediated. For example, "medicalized" ideas of physical disability delineate impairments or deficiencies that scholars now recognize to be based on social normativities.…”