ARCHIVE LOGICS: WHY?

The archive is designed to recollect stories, experiences, examples, and initiatives that have attempted to reimagine science pedagogy for various ends. It is also designed to cover stories of success in pushing against the grain of science education.

STEM has unprecedented aspirational value in shaping how people think and make decisions, from shaping subjectivities to macro-level political and economic issues. At the same time, STEM actively limits possibilities of selfhood and society, as evident from its colonial, imperial, carceral, and heteronormative entanglements. How does pedagogy shape science, and broadly, STEM? How is science transmitted as a social, political, and cultural object through pedagogy in different settings and times? In turn, how is science shaping pedagogy? To approach these questions, this archive brings together insights from science and technology studies, science education, anthropology of education, critical university studies, and pedagogical theory and history. This archive responds to anyone who is interested in thinking about entrenched ways of learning and teaching science, and reimagining science pedagogy. The archive is actively evolving to the concerns of scholars and educators. 

ARCHIVE DILEMMAS 

1. Science as both aspirational and aesthetic; and extractive and deterministic
2. Schooling as both a disciplinary and a laboratory space
3. Interdisciplinarity and recuperation of disciplinary silos
4. Reproduction of conventional educational hierarchies and classifications while naming them 
5. Reproducing cultural and place-based essentialism in STEM education while critiquing systems of oppression and reification 

ARCHIVE GOVERNANCE 

The archive will be hosted in STS Infrastructures. This ethnographic and collaborative digital research and publication platform is an “instance” of an open-source, Drupal-based public knowledge infrastructure called PECE. The instance is designed to support people and collectives working on social and cultural analysis of science in different settings.

PECE implements recommendations for data management made by the Research Data Alliance (https://www.rd-alliance.org/about-rda), an international organization that brings together technologists and diverse domain communities (including cultural anthropologists) to support research data sharing within and across disciplines, countries and technologies. RDA’s recommendations (released by its Working Group on Practical Policies) include directives for metadata interoperability; data access control; data format control; data retention and disposition; recording of provenance; and data backup.  These recommendations can be accessed at:doi: 10.15497/83E1B3F9-7E17-484A-A466-B3E5775121CC.

Researchers can remove their data from a PECE instance at any time.