Science class as clinic: Why histories of segregated instruction matter for health equity reforms today

Abstract

Research has recommended centering health disparities to make science instruction relevant to students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups. While promoted as a recent innovation, the repurposing of science instruction to improve the health of demographic groups has a longer history traceable to segregated and colonial schooling. Using a historicizing approach, this study explores how certain U.S. science classrooms have become clinics of preventative care aimed at transforming groups into healthy citizens. Analysis identifies how U.S. science education studies have used psychological, sociological, and anthropological lenses to divide students into populations, classifying some as needing intervention to improve their minds (e.g., basic health knowledge), home lives (e.g., daily habits), and cultural beliefs (e.g., attitudes toward science and medicine). Through systematic analysis of U.S. science education journals and sources cited therein, I map shifts over three periods: the rise of urban, segregated, and colonial schooling (1901-45), postwar desegregation and international development (1946-89), and equity reforms (1990-2021). Despite declines in deficit language, analysis suggests the intervention space of

“Real-Life Needs”: How Humanitarian Techniques Produce Hierarchies of Science and Mathematics Education

“…This productive power still yields dominating effects, including (1) depoliticizing systemic inequities and (2) pathologizing targets of reform. First, in turning structural problems (e.g., food deserts/apartheid) into clinical or pedagogical ones (e.g., a need for smarter food choices), humanitarian techniques can supplant sociopolitical demands for policy reform with medicalized programs of habit acquisition and attitude adjustment (K. Kirchgasler, 2022). Second, humanitarian techniques, while seeking to improve community wellbeing, tend to pathologize those identified as diverse.…”

“…Even more striking are past modes of expressing deviation from norms (e.g., pejoratives such as ignorant parents or housing evils). Indeed, the midcentury shift from claims of Anglo-Saxon superiority to universalized quality-of-life standards has made it harder to notice these norms in research and pedagogy today (K. Kirchgasler, 2022). Juxtaposing recent studies with those a century prior helps us parse changes in how humanitarian tools fabricate hierarchies of people and their needs.…”

“…Norms are not necessarily good or bad, but dangers exist to the extent that they shape school subjects—establishing a singular, superior mode of being by which children are distinguished as strong or weak in domains such as science or mathematics. What delineates school subjects from the disciplines they reference is that they are designed for “someone, and we, as researchers and practitioners, must figure out who ‘they’ are to make it accessible, engaging, or practical to ‘them’” (K. Kirchgasler, 2022, p. 5).…”