NSF Award
1921545
Many educators in Science and Technology Studies (STS) are distributed across a wide range of institutions, disciplines, and home departments, and rarely find opportunities to engage other STS scholars interested in pedagogy. STS pedagogies may be used to help STS students further their education or career path, to help STEM students critically reflect on their assumptions about technological progress, and to help social science and humanities students critically interrogate information, media, and knowledge production. Regardless of the specific learning site and objective, important pragmatic questions remain about how to conduct STS pedagogy as a practice informed not only by STS theories and methods, but also by critical pedagogies from other traditions. This project will benefit society by developing and codifying effective STS pedagogical strategies and researching STS pedagogical interventions as sites of knowledge production and theoretical inquiry. It will also help to create a new mode of STS engagement and intervention through education and pedagogical research on STS teaching and learning in K-12, in college/university contexts, and in museum education and other public engagement arenas. In addition to scholarly articles, this project will result in a repository of publicly accessible STS teaching materials for a range of K-12 and higher education audiences.<br/><br/>This project supports a two-day workshop on STS as critical pedagogy to bring together scholars and educators from a variety of educational contexts and disciplines that employ STS in their teaching. Project participants include individuals who teach and engage in STS work at teaching-oriented colleges and universities, K-12 contexts, and other institutions of educational engagement, such as science museums. Our goal is to create a new subfield within STS - 'STS as Critical Pedagogy' - that seriously considers STS pedagogies as learning interventions and areas of legitimate scholarly inquiry. This subfield will foreground pedagogy within STS and create a space in which pedagogical work can be rigorously theorized and assessed by a community of STS scholars. The two-day workshop will be held at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA in the summer of 2020. The timing of the workshop is oriented towards being as inclusive and accessible as possible to bring together a diverse group of individuals from a variety of institutional and teaching contexts. The workshop will be held over the summer months to accommodate individuals from teaching-oriented institutions, who might have significant course loads and teaching responsibilities, and otherwise might not be able to attend a meeting during the school year.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
