Critical Transdisciplinary STEM: A Critical Numeracy Approach to STEM Praxis by Urban Environments and Education Research Coven

Abstract

Aligned with the call to view STEM as critical literacies, we will describe the Crit-Trans approach (Strong et al., Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2016) where we emphasize research, teaching, and learning centered on the lives and geographies of learners, their local knowledges, and place experiences and accentuate critical, decolonizing, and desettling frameworks to provide learners and educators tools necessary for critical civic participation in STEM. The Crit-Trans (Strong et al., Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2016) heuristic emphasizes a critical numeracy that critiques and connects the form and content of mathematics education to struggles and realities of learners, particularly those at the K-16 levels. Critical numeracy emerges from experiences, reflections, politicization, and research into public schooling as a site of tracking (Oakes, Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd Ed). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), exploration (Dewey & Small, My pedagogic creed. Battle Creek, MI: E.L. Kellogg & Company, 1897), death (DeJesus, http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/05/carlisle_indian_school_repatri.html, 2016), and possibilities (Giroux, Teacher Education Quarterly, 31, 1, 2004), indicating an urgency to organize, teach, and practice toward human emancipation particularly as State violence continues to intensify forms of occupation in a settler colonial and anti-Black society (Patel, Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability (1st ed.). New York: Routledge, 2015; Hudson & McKittrick, The CLR James Journal, 20(1/2), 233–240, 2014).