Oh My God.

Today’s our last class for the “Justice in STEM Education” course at @umasseduc and I couldn’t be prouder of the students. They’re sharing their final papers and I’m blown away by the questions they’re addressing & their commitment to justice. I’ll be sharing some of their slides

— Enrique Suárez 🇻🇪 (@SciEdHenry) December 5, 2019

I dare you to make objective engineering sense out of this malodorous steaming pile of leftist ᛒᚢᛚᛚᚲᚱᚨᛈ :

“Another student is concerned with how ableism undergirds all kinds of Learning Management Systems, pointing out how the design logics behind these learning platforms are inequitable”

“OMG! One of the other students just asked: “how could these platforms also integrate translanguaging in order to, for example, integrate indigenous languages?” “

“Using dis/crit the third student asks: what teaching and learning would be like for students with dis/abilities if learning environments would provide and value different ways of knowing, and what how do we support teachers? “Nothing *about* us *without* us!””

“A fourth student builds on the work by @furtak @bpenuel @ScienceEdDPS and Lorrie Shepard to ask what more just and equitable systems of student-centered assessments look like that disrupt the teacher-student power hierarchy”

“The fifth student is concerned with decolonizing a K-5 outdoor curriculum, understanding their positionality as a settler and partnering with local Native communities”

“The final student (who’s also a secondary science PST) asks us to reconsider the “humanizing” v “dehumanizing” binary through multiple critical lenses, and is designing an ecology unit that prefigure new forms of culture-nature phenomena and relations”

W.

T.

F.

One can only hope that at least a few of the students cranking out this useless gibberish are simply feeding a few appropriate buzzwords into a gibberish generator and are laughing themselves fuzzy out of the sight of the “educator” who is taking their money whole providing them no aid in becoming actual STEM majors.

This being twitter, there is at least some valid snark:

Seeing these malleable young minds come into their victimhood is so beautiful ✨

— ₿randt (@CornbasePro) December 6, 2019

When’s the next struggle session I mean course?

— Nemesis Online ☢️ (@nemesis_online) December 6, 2019

I had to get half-way into the thread and comments to realize this is ostensibly not a parody account.

— Mike Patterson (@patterson087) December 7, 2019

Today's students are amazing. They are so good at figuring out what their teacher wants to hear. When I was a kid I just thought hard work and study was sufficient. I was a returning adult student before I figured out the value of ego stroking the gatekeepers.

— FluffyMcDeath (@FluffyMcDeath) December 6, 2019

Thank you Enrique for preparing these students for their future: shining my shoes. Or cleaning the Slurpee machine…..

— Austere Religous Kameleon_o (@kameleon_o) December 7, 2019

You have done these vulnerable youngsters a lifelong disservice. They now know less science, but more about how to whine in a socially accepted way.

Be ashamed.

— Epstein hat sich nie umgebracht (@TrumpWasHere) December 6, 2019

“Clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness” -Carl Sagan

— Yautja Vishaun (@youwinski) December 6, 2019

Looks like you are bringing "justice" to STEM the same way Hugo Chavez brought prosperity to Venezuela.

— Flame Angel (@FlameAngel8) December 6, 2019

And for the win:

Decolonize this, asshole:

6CO2 + 6H20 + (energy) → C6H12O6 + 6O2 (photosynthesis)

-b±√(b²-4ac))/(2a) (quadratic equation)

The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero. (3d law of thermodynamics)

— Sandra (@SandraShreve6) December 6, 2019

And from this minor gravity well’s Twitter feed comes this graphic representation of madness:

This guy’s Twitter feed is astonishing in it’s banal evilness, using randomized word salad to bastardize science education into a stew of useless feel-good decay and filth. This guy is to STEM education what boils and sores are to healthy skin.

I love the way the student is able to navigate the desire to know and the desire to respect and value the life of the Taro plant. Often times we don’t stop to think about the consequences of knowing coming to know; we should also think about when to know and why

Also, Django paris’s framework of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies foreground the dynamic aspect of culture and warn precisely against pedagogies rooted in stereotypes and essentializing communities

We need to create translanguaging spaces for students to use linguistics resources that we don’t share (e.g., Arabic, Tagalog). Equitable science learning environments must invite, value, and leverage their languages, and we must figure out how to get there

That’s why I look up to @emilynmachado and her work on (what I’m calling) semiotic solidarity: I may not understand what you’re saying, but I will support you in using that language in order to make this a brave learning environment for yourself and your ideas

Translanguaging spaces. Translanguaging spaces.

TRANSLANGUAGING ᚠᚢᚲᛜ SPACES.

Stalin and Orwell nod sagely.