STEM education organizations, institutions, and programs often push the rhetoric of engaging learning experiences and positive outcomes for all students. Indeed, these are important aspirations and values. Yet, truly realizing and struggling toward such aspirations and values are not possible unless we disrupt the center. Typically, the center is comprised of the ideal/normal (1) student and (2) STEM curricula. The ideal/normal students are those more likely in positions of power (i.e., White, economically advantaged, cisgender male, non-disabled, and from the global north). Those closest to this center are better served/included, while those furthest (i.e., Black and Brown, economically disadvantaged, disabled, multi-lingual, and from the global south) are an afterthought, if even that. Similarly, ideal/normal (e.g., Western-centric) STEM curricula give an advantage to those closer to the center as they are typically designed by and seek to serve those at or near the center. Serving these centers will only continue to maintain the status quo. Thus, transformation toward more equitable, just, and democratic STEM learning ecologies necessitates disrupting who and what is at the center. ARISE blogs under the subtheme of “transforming STEM classrooms to equitable, just, and democratic places of learning” offer practical ideas and possibilities of work to disrupt the center. These posts draw on widely accepted best and evidence-based practices in STEM disciplines such as culturally responsive and sustaining practices, Universal Design for Learning, funds of knowledge and identity, and translanguaging.
While authors of posts under this subtheme may not necessarily identify themselves as abolitionists, these posts are abolitionist in nature. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prominent prison abolitionist scholar and activist, notes:
From Gilmore’s statement, posts under this subtheme offer ways to connect to building a better world by drawing on and experimenting with the resources that already exist in STEM learning ecologies: brilliant students and educators and scholarly STEM resources. Indeed, there are many ways to practice abolitionist struggle. At the same time, abolitionist practices are not “everything goes” types of approaches, rather, abolitionist practices can be roughly framed by three big ideas or what I call the three Is: Imagining, Intersectionality, and Immediacy. The posts under the subtheme of transforming STEM classrooms to equitable, just, and democratic places of learning will touch upon at least one of the three Is.
Imagining Different Futures
Many folks may equate abolition with the movement to end slavery in the U.S. While it is important to recognize such genealogy, Davis and colleagues (2022) remind us that abolition is not just about dismantling harmful logics, structures, institutions, and practices. Abolition is also about freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) and building a utopian society where all life forms can thrive. Envisioning such futures guides what we do here in the present (Kafer, 2013). What is the role of STEM in building a more utopian society? That is to say, we must recast current STEM education vision, values, and practices towards radical futures, ones based on interdependency and reciprocity with one another and our environment and the STEM of marginalized students (e.g., Tan & Kastberg, 2017). For example, scholars have long questioned the mathematics-for-all rhetoric (Martin, 2003) that does not serve the interests of those most marginalized while leaving the White, male, global north, non-disabled, and heteronormative center intact. Imagining different futures requires centering and being guided by those who are most marginalized.
Intersectionality: Multitudes, Interconnectedness, and International
Abolitionist movements towards collective liberation must be intersectional, involving cross solidarity among all oppressed groups and oppressors from across the globe (Davis, 2016). The big idea of intersectionality is that freedom struggles are inherently interconnected, crossing national borders, among seemingly different causes such as racial, disability, environmental, and worker justice as well as decoloniality. In the educational realm, prison schools exist as part of this fight against those deemed furthest from the norm where the interconnection of racism and ableism manifests (Annamma et al., 2013). Ability and disability are constructed as property in service of White supremacy (Harris, 1993). These are settler colonial and capitalistic logic related to ability and disability while harmful to those who are most marginalized. Students having so-called high ability are led to pathways to higher paying jobs in STEM fields and beneficial social networks. Thus, an intersectional approach is crucial to transforming STEM classrooms.
Immediacy
Blogs under this subtheme recognize that many students are not provided STEM educational opportunities that are rich, meaningful, and connected in ways that draw on their brilliance. Rather, too many students are dehumanized via STEM educational practices that are deficit-based (e.g., remedial and reflect very low expectations). Moreover, STEM education remains complicit and actively contributes to the containment of certain students (e.g., neurodivergent students) such as outsourcing special education services in self-contained environments (e.g., classrooms and separate schools designated for those with behavioral issues). This is a form of incarceration and denial of opportunities to [for] too many students. Relatedly, teachers and other students also miss out on experiences with diverse ways of STEM knowing and doing. Abolitionists have long pointed to the urgency of addressing such harms by stating that we cannot wait for alternatives to be in place. Similarly, blogs under this subtheme offer ways that seek to immediately address STEM educational harms while shifting classrooms toward more equitable, just, and democratic places of learning in all the ways we can.
My Own Work to Transform STEM Classrooms
I close by sharing one example of my own work with the three Is. As a mathematics teacher educator, I have challenged prospective teachers to collaboratively create abolitionist unit plans as part of their elementary mathematics education methods course. The unit plan represents one of many possible avenues of abolition work by utilizing and experimenting with what is currently available to build more just and utopian futures (Gilmore & Lambert, 2019). Unit planning and designing are geographies where educators enact abolition (Gilmore & Lambert, 2018) by disrupting dysfunctional mathematics curriculum, pedagogy, and relationships (Annamma & Morison, 2018). I typically front-load the first part of my elementary mathematics methods course grappling with Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013) and abolitionist concepts before extending these philosophical and theoretical ideas to mathematics education. For example, I challenge prospective teachers to tackle the interplay of race and disability and its symbiotic relationship with mathematics education such as how mathematics ability and disability are socially and politically constructed. Thereafter, prospective teachers create an abolitionist mathematics unit plan by collaborating in small groups of three or four and then submit their completed work during the midterm and final parts of the course. The three mutually informative components of the abolitionist unit plan consist of (1) dynamic student narrative and their context, (2) layered unit goals, and (3) lesson plans.
In constructing this abolitionist unit plan, prospective teachers center and think deeply about children who are the most marginalized in schools and society while aiming for social change. Prospective teachers break the traditional and intuitive mold of centering those closest to the so-called normal human and mathematics by focusing on one student whom they typically do not consider (e.g., students with “severe” disabilities”). While prospective teachers may not yet consider their small contribution to abolitionist work meaningful and, at times, defeating, their work is nonetheless crucial in that it contributes to a larger community of like-minded, intersectional, and justice seeking folks doing similar work. The cumulative weight and persistence of such contributions (as well as those featured under the subtheme of transforming STEM Classrooms to equitable, just, and democratic places of learning) will eventually topple the unjust and harmful ways by which we deny the flourishing of students in STEM. In this way, engaging the ARISE community with abolitionist practices can make important contributions towards radical transformations.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Paulo Tan for serving as an editor for the 2024 ARISE blog series and for working with Janelle Johnson, Metropolitan State University, on her blog, “Supporting Teachers’ Asset-Based Orientations through Focal Students.” Watch for it in January.
![](https://aaas-arise.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Paulo-Tan-e1732198838165.jpg")
Paulo Tan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Elementary Mathematics Education, University of California Santa Cruz
ptan19@ucsc.edu
My research focuses on advancing intersectional disability justice in and through mathematics education. Prior to my academic career, I served as a public school middle-secondary mathematics teacher for ten years in culturally and linguistically diverse settings. My lived experiences with my son led me to pursue a doctorate in special education with an emphasis in mathematics education, and I have been reckoning and challenging educational inequities and injustices ever since. My current and future scholarship includes building theories for abolitionist mathematics educational research and practices that center the brilliances of disabled students of color. I identify as Chinese-American, cisgender male, and non-disabled and am parent of three.
