Generative contexts

Abstract

Educational research has identified how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice and education have underperforming metrics in racial and gender diversity, despite decades of intervention. These disparities are part of the construction of a culture of science that is alienating to these popula-tions. Recent studies in a social science framework described as “Generative Justice” have suggested that the context of social and scientific practice might be modified to bring about more just and equitable relations among the disenfran-chised by circulating the value they and their non-human allies create back to them in unalienated forms. What is not known are the underlying principles of social and material space that makes a system more or less generative. I employ an autoeth-nographic method at four sites: a high school science class; a farm committed to “Black and Brown liberation”; a summer program geared towards youth environ-mental mapping; and a summer workshop for Harlem middle school students. My findings suggest that by identifying instances where material affinity, participatory voice, and creative solidarity are mutually reinforcing, it is possible to create educational contexts that generate unalienated value, and circulate it back to the producers themselves. This cycle of generation may help explain how to create systems of justice that strengthen and grow themselves through successive itera-tions. The problem of lack of diversity in STEM may be addressed not merely by recruiting the best and the brightest from underrepresented populations, but by changing the context of STEM education to provide tools for its own systematic restructuring.