The Emotional Valence of Hyperrationality in STEM Learning: Reinscriptions and Contestations of Coloniality

Abstract

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper examines the emergence and performance of hyperrationality in STEM classrooms. Hyperrationality describes verbal and embodied expressions whereby learners try to maintain an appearance of neutrality and emotional distance to give credence to political, socioscientific convictions, even under conditions where complete emotional detachment would be unconscionable. Hyperrationality in STEM learning environments poses a threat to human dignity (Espinoza et al. 2020) by reinscribing approaches to STEM that devalue the lives and lived experiences of those “othered”. We present a comparative analysis of cases taken from our respective (individual) studies focused on ethics, historicity, politics, and STEM learning. The first case is drawn from an undergraduate engineering ethics class discussion of militarized drones. The second case is from a year-long socioscientific unit on water enacted with Black children in a city wrestling with water shut-offs. In our analysis of these two cases, we consider how hyperrationality, the ungrievability of the other and racialized fear become components of interpretative repertoires that learners co-construct to compartmentalize and/or partially reconcile the inherent contradictions arising from these entanglements. Our cases evidence the emotional configurations of colonality that reinscribe imperialism, while also recognizing when/how nondominant communities resist these logics as they surface in STEM classrooms.