A Science Education Genealogy of Black Possibility: Historicizing Black Science Teachers' Unsettlings of Antiblack Disciplinary Norms (1900–1974)

Curtis O'Dwyer

Official efforts to recruit Black science teachers have been predicated on the premise that they will broaden Black students' participation in STEM and cultivate their appreciation for science. This tacit expectation tends to position Black science teachers as corrective agents for presumed student deficits rather than professionals with expansive teaching philosophies, pedagogies, and perspectives that should shape the discipline writ large. My dissertation is a genealogy investigating how racialized premises and practices of science teaching have historically governed the position, and how Black science teachers nonetheless created otherwise liberatory possibilities. Through historical epistemological methods of archival, journal, curricular, and newspaper analysis, I first examine the construction of the normative science teacher in the early 20th century as entangled with biopolitical efficiency discourses that discipline and organize students along different science and life trajectories. Secondly, I consider how those normative premises position Black science teachers and students as pedagogical 'Others' whose ways of being and knowing are deemed socially inefficient, thereby engendering particular antiblack strategies of moral intervention through science education. Thirdly, I investigate how Black science teachers during the Cold War/Civil Rights era navigated tensions between normative teaching expectations and Black liberatory commitments, redefining the position toward Black liveliness. By illuminating these approaches, the study redefines Black science teachers not as diversity solutions but as architects of Black possibility. In doing so, it provides a historically grounded approach for reimagining the science teacher in relation to Black liveliness, both before and after Civil Rights legislation and its subsequent rollbacks today.

About Curtis O'Dwyer

Curtis O'Dwyer, a doctoral candidate in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator with a decade of experience in secondary and post-secondary education. His work is characterized by his commitment to advancing equitable, justice-centered, and innovative approaches to science teaching and learning. His scholarly interests lie at the intersection of science education, science and technology studies, and Black studies. His research investigates how the teaching philosophies and practices of Black science educators—past and present—foster otherwise possibilities for Black liveliness by unsettling norms within the profession that are productive of antiblackness. Curtis's project, along with receiving the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation fellowship, has been supported by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Science Education and Education Graduate Research Scholars fellowships, as well as the Black Teacher Archive. His publications appear in the recent book compilation, Science Education and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, and the St. Louis American newspaper. He holds a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Mathematics from Roosevelt University and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Washington University in St. Louis. Beyond his research, Curtis continues advancing educational possibilities through his service as a graduate representative for AERA's Division B–Curriculum Studies and as a board member for a local school in Madison, WI.