Journal Club meeting: STEM Education and equity

Our lab held its third Journal Club session this week. Every two weeks, we gather to read and discuss research that isn’t directly tied to our dissertations: the goal being to absorb lessons both about how academia works and how scholarly articles are structured and argued. This time we read “STEM Education With a Focus on Equity and Justice: Traditional Approaches, Contemporary Approaches, and Proposed Future Approach“ fro JRST by Okhee Lee and Scott E. Grapin.

The paper traces how STEM education has shifted over the decades in its treatment of equity and justice — from approaches that largely ignored structural inequality, to contemporary frameworks that center it, to what the authors propose as a next step forward. What surprised us was how much the piece resonated beyond its stated domain. We found ourselves drawing connections to activism research, particularly around questions of who gets to define “best practices,” how field-wide paradigm shifts get legitimized, and what it means to embed justice not just as a topic but as an epistemological commitment. These are questions our own work keeps running into, even in very different contexts.

We also used the session as a chance to zoom out and talk about broader shifts in pedagogical theory over the past decade or so: the turn toward justice-oriented frameworks, the growing unease with neutral or technocratic language in education research, and how those changes show up (or don’t) in the structure and rhetoric of published work.

Looking forward to session four.