Moving the lab into the field: The making of pathologized (non)citizens in US science education

ABSTRACT

This article examines how notions of health and citizenship have become entangled in US science education reforms targeting particular populations. Current science education policy assumes that marginalized groups have been historically ignored, and that new research is required to “make diversity visible” in order to adapt instruction for those students. This article questions that premise, asking instead how key practices of US science education emerged in response to the fabricated presence of racialized (non)citizens. Interweaving lines of inquiry from cultural studies and science & technology studies, I analyse a set of pedagogies that circulated across US science education, public health, and colonial projects in the early twentieth century. I explore how this pedagogical apparatus doubled as a strategy of governance, rendering citizenship into a biomedical status that had to be proven rather than assumed. Finally, I raise questions about recent reforms that hope to leverage public health concerns (e.g. obesity) to make science instruction more inclusive and culturally responsive. A danger is that efforts to respond to the needs of “diverse groups” may inadvertently reinscribe diversity as pathology. This can occur when reforms continue to rely on educational practices that mark exclusionary boundaries of biomedical citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum studies
• educational practices
• multicultural/diversity education
• subjects and disciplines
• school/educational reform
• international education

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge support for this research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Curriculum & Instruction and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies. I thank the editorial team and anonymous reviewers, as well as Jennifer Diaz, Christopher Kirchgasler, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Noah W. Sobe, Daniel Tröhler, and Noah Weeth Feinstein for their insightful readings and critical comments on earlier iterations of this article. Any faults remain my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Morrison uses Africanist to refer to the “denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (p. 3).

2. A central question was whether the Fourteenth Amendment (granting citizenship rights and equal protection under the law) applied to the inhabitants of the Philippines, whether they fell under the exception for “uncivilized tribes,” or whether the precedent of Dred Scott v. Sandford made it possible to conceptualize them as non-citizen nationals (e.g., McGovney, 1934; see Aguilar, 2010).

3. My use of the term “Filipino” is to track the precise discourses of historical actors as a means to examine and denaturalize the historical construction of racialized categories.

4. These dates span from the first issue of the Philippine Journal of Science in 1906 to the joint publication of teachers’ manuals by the Philippine Health Service and Bureau of Education in 1928.

5. While my focus is on mapping these official techniques, it is important to recognize that such attempts to classify and normalize pupils’ everyday lives were always partial and insecure. The very non-fixity of the boundaries and trajectories they projected provided some of their regulatory force, as well as openings for what Butler (1995) calls a plurality of resistances and resignifications. See Aguilar (2010) and Mendoza (2015) for studies exploring various modes of resistance in the US-occupied Philippines and among Philippine nationals living in the United States.

6. See Bazzul and Carter (2017) for a recent synthesis of Foucauldian analyses in science education, including several examining biopower. For studies of how biopower techniques traveled and gave distinct contours to how populations were pathologized and regulated in educational projects, see Gastaldo, 2006; Nieves, 2014; and Tunc, 2017.

7. Importantly, articles in General Science Quarterly tended to discuss so-called “comprehensive schools” without referring to the existence of segregated institutions such as “Negro Industrial Education” and “Indian Schools.” While an analysis of science pedagogies in these schools is beyond the scope of this article, contemporaneous US reports on Negro and Indian education called for the external surveillance and enforcement of hygiene habits that more closely resembled the military-medical interventions in the colonial Philippines. According to one report, health officers in Indian schools were given “large authority to direct and control the sanitary conditions on their respective reservations” (Reel, 1908, p. 24). Teachers were urged to “make frequent visits to homes of pupils, gain the confidence of their parents, [and] impress upon them the importance of observing the laws of hygiene and sanitation” in hopes of “civilizing the adult Indian who has never attended school” (p. 139). Likewise, in Negro Industrial Schools, school nurses were charged with visiting the community to teach “simple lessons of hygiene to all” (Jones, 1917, p. 484), as top–down inspection and control were seen as necessary “for the better protection of both races” (p. 25).

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Kathryn L. Kirchgasler

Kathryn L. Kirchgasler is a lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at The University of Kansas, United States. Her research combines historical and ethnographic methods to examine how difference is seen and sorted in science education research, policy, and pedagogy. At stake is how these dividing practices embody values, norms and assumptions of human difference that undermine commitments to equality. She has also studied equity implications of data-driven reforms, and how science education formulates sustainability in ways that marginalize certain people and forms of knowledge. Her work has appeared in the journal Science Education and edited volumes such as A Political Sociology of Educational Knowledge.