Principals, Paradigms, and Possibilities: STEAM Education Reform and the Centering of Black Life

Abstract

This analysis explores how middle school principals in the southern U.S. made sense of a multiyear STEAM education reform. Principals’ retrospective and prospective accounts, conveyed in interviews ( n = 9), are dominated by neoliberal paradigms and seldom reflect Black families’ everyday cultural life as a resource for learning. We conclude that without redirection, the reform stands to continue divesting from Black life in schools. In an exercise in Black specificity, we propose Black Futurity STEAM as an alternative reform imaginary that centers the creative impulses and capacities of Black children and cultural life in disciplinary learning.