Read Me Last: Constructing a Scholarly Catchment Through a Black Feminist Reading

Abstract

In this commentary, I highlight the importance of my role, your role, our role in engaging this special issue, “STEM Learning: For Whom and Toward what ends?,” as researchers, scholars, and, above all, as readers in the learning sciences. The guest editors, Maxine McKinney de Royston and Tesha Sengupta-Irving, assert a forceful question that is unrelenting in its two parts. The question pushes us past the ubiquitous and high-minded mantra, STEM for all (see, for example, Martin, 2003) and beyond the purported and played-out purpose of participation and access to the political economy as the sole means for learning (see, for example, Bullock, 2017). I read the guest editors’ questions, following Philip, Bang, and Jackson (2018) and The Politics of Learning Writing Collective (2017), as a demand for politically-salient knowledge production within the learning sciences at this particular political moment and an acknowledgement of STEM learning as a particular oppressive context. Equally demanding, the special issue approaches this question not only with theoretical and philosophical imaginings of what STEM learning can be, but resolves the question through praxis, e.g., inside of the unruly reality of classrooms, the world wide web, community centers, and, in one case, the kitchen table. Each article seeks to manage this ambitious call teetering at great heights within microand mesocontexts of learning to answer the most pressing question for those of us within STEM and deeply concerned about the growing artifices of social inequality and environmental neglect in our local and global communities. How, then, might we read this special issue in a way that maintains a measure of scholarly and activist accountability to the field of learning sciences and, simultaneously, engenders the necessary support, i.e., scholarly catchment, so that these authors are not holding up an edifice of social imaginaries and radically liberatory futures in STEM learning on their own? Further, what are the challenges in reading as a scholarly catchment? Such a question is not a matter of reading generously but responsibly and inside of our humanity.