Perturbing Current Boundary Conditions in Discipline-Based and Science Education Research in the Anthropocene: Implications for Research and Teaching Communities

Abstract

The field of research on science teaching and learning at the college level has recently divided into disciplinary communities. In this chapter, we meet in the middle of our disciplinary inquiries in astronomy education x geoscience education x education research to make meaning of the possibilities between and among our communities, and within the broader landscape of research on science teaching and learning. By examining knowledge at the interface of these disciplines, we believe we can use science teaching and learning to address problems facing humans and nonhumans today. Accordingly, we looked for ways to generate an affective sense of freedom to communicate and deliberate across perceived discipline-based education research community boundaries both in our research and in our teaching. Playing with geologic representations rendered during five research meetings over the course of three years, we explored possibilities of and limitations to disciplinary perturbations. We examined our previous engagements to convey real-time difficulties and humors involved with communicating across disciplines, with an aspiration to carve joy into our readers’ continued inquiries with others in our broader, shared science teaching and learning research landscape.

Introduction

If we are to develop political vision, if we are to develop some sense of living and dying with each other responsibly … I think the practice of joy is critical. And play is part of it. I think that engaging and living with each other in these attentive ways that elaborate capacities in each other produces joy. (Haraway & Wolfe, 2016, pp. 252–3)

Hello, reader. We are Michelle and Katherine. Michelle is an educational research methodologist who teaches undergraduate astronomy and qualitative research methods. Katherine is a geoscience education researcher who teaches undergraduate geology and graduate geoscience education research courses. In this chapter, our intention is to detail communal problems we experience in our crisscrossing treks throughout the research landscape to which we both contribute—research on science teaching and learning—in addition to how our differing perspectives push each other to think differently about that landscape. We do this with a nod toward Haraway and Wolfe’s encouragement to play, showing how engagements across boundaries evoke attentiveness toward one another, elaborate our capacities as educators and researchers, and produce joy. We will also detail some ways we have attempted to conceptualize and work through these problems—what we call perturbing the features in the landscape to enable perceived freedom to move across boundaries (see also, Wu et al., 2018).

This study emerged from Michelle’s doctoral dissertation, in which Michelle explored material (affectual, intellectual, and physical) dynamics involved in the development and maintenance of communal divides between and among researchers of science teaching and learning from 2015 through 2018. Michelle interviewed twenty-seven researchers contributing to what she conceptualized as a landscape of research on science teaching and learning to which she and the study’s participants contributed. Katherine was one of the participants in that study and was invited because of her unique (aforementioned) expertise.

Michelle learned that different groups of researchers who study science teaching and learning used theory or scientific practices to render their research recognizable and acceptable to some education research communities and not to others (Wooten, 2018). For example, Katherine,¹ as a member of the geoscience research community (GER), felt that the GER community had experienced a lack of recognition in the broader community of discipline-based education researchers (DBER) and science education researchers.² She described that GER was not (at the time) often recognized among other discipline-based education research (DBER) communities (e.g., chemistry education research, biology education research) as a newer field, which could be seen in rates of tenure and promotion (e.g., Libarkin, 2015, as cited in Dolan et al., 2018; Singer et al., 2012). Consequently, her community was focused on developing standards of quality research for the purpose of developing recognizability in the landscape of research of science teaching and learning, the hope being that “other communities start to cite our research because they believe it’s high quality, not just because it’s something they have to cover: ‘Oh, a geologist did this. We can ignore that’ ” (Katherine, interview excerpt from March 2017). And yet Katherine also expressed tensions her community experienced in gaining recognizability: the practices they invoked to incur status, such as gatekeeping, also had the effect of potentially eliminating particular forms of research that did not appear as recognizable.

We consider Katherine’s experiences of feeling differentiated from other communities—with whom she would like to sense belonging—reflective of normative relations in the Anthropocene. Relations in the Anthropocene have been critiqued for effectuating identities of things (humans, nonhumans, nature) separated from the dynamic, fluid, earthen phenomena in which they are embedded (Normand, 2015). The implications of these differentiations are that care for their multiple possible connected and joyful figurations and relational potentials may no longer be conceptualized or invested in.

Katherine: We need those changes to happen in order to have a healthy ecosystem. If you don’t have perturbations, then eventually you hit stasis: nothing is happening. Nothing is growing. Nothing is blooming. (February 2018)³

We longed for perturbations in our research and teaching communities to enable their diversification, growth, and blooming. In this chapter, we use the differentiated sensing produced in our shared landscape of research on science teaching and learning as a starting point to motivate and provoke our own (and incite others-in-our-communities’) mobility across our perceived disciplinary boundaries. To this end, we think with Deleuze and Guattari, who write that “to attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it” (1987, p. 22). We assert that practices that enable multiplicities (multiple, connected identities) rather than uniformities (singular, differentiated identities) in our shared landscape are supported by playful rather than a prescriptive method. Using a geologic framing of our connected research and teaching practices as a landscape, we considered our method of study toward our multiplicative becoming as “nomadic.” This becoming, as we show, was resistant toward a method of “stable identities and fracture[d] temporal linearity” and leaning toward, “affirmative alternatives which rest on a non-linear vision of memory as imagination, creation as becoming” (Braidotti, 2013b; p. 165). Adopting Braidotti’s theory of the nomad to inform our method enabled our journeying into uncharted territories in our landscape and enabled our sensing about our multiple possibilities in and across our research and teaching endeavors.

In our presentation of this study below, we begin by describing our entries into the concept of the Anthropocene, rendered somewhat differently in our disciplines of astronomy education (Michelle) x geoscience education (Katherine) x education research (Michelle and Katherine).⁴ We then begin traipsing through transcript excerpts from previous interviews-meetings (in February 2018, November 2019, and December 2019) to figure-together the shape (and possible re-shaping) of our shared landscape of research on science teaching and learning in the Anthropocene. As we do, we use nuances in our disciplinary perspectives to, as Haraway puts it, “elaborate our capacities” and become aware of how our practices both provoke and resist communal differentiations (Haraway & Wolfe, 2016). Through continual figuring of our shared landscape, we describe a method of cultivating disciplinary perturbations for the purpose of multiplying our and others’ sensing of identities within our communities.

Disciplinary Perspectives on the Anthropocene

Katherine’s Entry into the Anthropocene

Through my lens as a geologist, I think of the Anthropocene as a proposed new geologic epoch. The name “refers to the present, when human impact on Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and hydrosphere has been deemed to be global” (Finney & Edwards, 2016, p. 6). There are arguments within the scientific community about whether we can identify the changeover in geologic epochs while we’re in that change, as epochs are much longer than our human lives. In order to be fully recognized as an epoch, the Anthropocene needs to have concrete identifiers such that it can be distinguished from earlier and future epochs.

The lower boundary (beginning) of a unit of geologic time, like the Anthropocene, is defined by a golden spike. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) drives a literal golden spike into the type of location with the clearest indicators of the transition to mark the lower boundary. The location is called a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). In order to point your finger and say “There! That’s the transition,” a location has to meet a number of criteria (Remane et al., 1996). Normally, the boundary is marked by the first appearance of a fossil species with secondary markers (other fossils, chemical signals, or evidence of geomagnetic reversals).

A helpful way to visualize how geologists think about time can be seen in the stratigraphic column, or cross-section showing rock units, of the Grand Canyon in Fig. 16.1. The rock units on the bottom are older than those on top. In the same way, I think of “up” as being younger and “down” as being older. If you were to explore the rocks within the Grand Canyon, you would see distinct fossil species or markers in each layer, like a beautiful brachiopod in the Kaibab Limestone. If we were to imagine a layer of rock being deposited today as part of the Anthropocene, its secondary markers might include signals of notably elevated atmospheric carbon levels (as recorded in, say, a limestone) or the many plastics that will outlive us all. Below, as we envision the future of our disciplines together, I imagine this as “above our heads” because of this bottom-to-top view of time.

Fig. 16.1

Representation of layers from a stratigraphic (strat) column (modified from Nelson, 2017). The top layer is the youngest layer or stratum. The name of the rock unit (e.g., the Kaibab Limestone) is in the middle column, and the geologic period is listed on the right (e.g., Permian, Pennsylvanian). The Precambrian represents the entirety of Earth’s history prior to the Cambrian era

Michelle’s Entry into the Anthropocene

My (Michelle’s) introduction to the Anthropocene stemmed from my readings in philosophy that suggested social and environmental relations cannot possibly be jump started to a desirable state (such as a utopia, or “back to the way it was”) that will be desirable for everyone for all time. Braidotti (2013b) helped me think about how in the present age of the Anthropocene, we might continuously reconfigure the relationship to our “complex habitat, which we used to call ‘nature’ ” (p. 81).

Braidotti (2013b) encourages a both/and perspective: that while phenomena like deforestation and climate change have significantly shaped humans’ present relations with their complex habitat, it is still possible to perturb⁵ these relations, for example, by:

• (i) developing one’s awareness of the dynamic capacity they have in concert with others—human and nonhuman, living and nonliving—in organizing their dynamic, material world.

• (ii) enlarging the frame and scope of identities that disavow traditional identities, visualizing “the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals, and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language” (p. 82).

I responded to Braidotti’s recommended perturbative practices through my research. Firstly, while I began my study as one in which I studied participants’ practices, as if separate from the study’s participants, I began to study with my participants, for example, by asking them to respond to my representation of landscape features and mapping on large sheets of paper logics enabling and disabling connections in our research practices. Secondly, I began looking for ways to adopt language and practices that seemed mutually generative to the study’s participants. For example, Katherine’s use of the term “perturbation” had significance for us both, and by using it to frame and represent our shared research-intentions in this study, we blurred sensing about differences in our identities. Finally, I thought about how traditional identities within the landscape of DBER and science education research could be rendered perturbable. Haraway suggests that such “permeability of boundaries” involves constructing a “network ideological image” (Haraway & Wolfe, 2016, pp. 45–56, italics added). The project of networking an image contrasts with the project of creating an ideology of the purpose of things, the latter of which may lead to heightened sensing about differences. In the next section, we begin describing the process by which we networked an ideological image of research on science teaching and learning—in particular, one that did not invoke the categorical differences that provoked our individual and communities’ feelings of isolation.

Constructing a Network Ideological Image of Research on Science Teaching and Learning

Constructing a network ideological image to me, Michelle, was necessarily a relational process, learning from others about how they experienced and practiced boundary-marking. I reflected on my own boundary-marking practices. To support constructing a network ideological image, Haraway, like Braidotti, suggested that in the Anthropocene, “if you can’t use a different rhetorical toolbox with different audiences…then you’re never going to get anywhere” (Haraway & Wolfe, 2016, p. 289). To investigate how my representations were experienced by participants in my study, during one of my interviews with Katherine, I asked about a figure that I had included in a manuscript under revision (Wooten, 2018). It represented a philosophical concept that I used to think about the landscape of research on science teaching and learning. The figure’s caption read, “Each of the black dots is a possible practice. Those practices that are similar to one another are closer together” (Wooten, 2018, p. 214). I anticipated that the figure could be helpful to researchers of science teaching and learning to consider how “accumulation of like practices” is not without effect, that is, normalizing practices in our landscape makes some practices (dots) appear deviant. Katherine’s response to my figure took me by surprise:

Katherine::

I was so fascinated by that [figure] because I can’t tell from reading this if this is a representation or if this is mapped out from the data.

Michelle::

That’s a good point. Because in the visualizations you make, everything is data with a referential X and Y meeting place.

Katherine::

It could be something like the output of a social network analysis or similar analytical technique that I just don’t know…?

Michelle::

My audience is possibly used to seeing points on a grid that they refer to as having X and Y coordinates, so (based on your response) I am interpreting that this figure could actually be confusing.

Katherine’s response made me think about how scientists’ interpretation of dots on a grid would typically involve looking for correlations or standard deviation ellipses. Katherine suggested that “When you [Michelle] are talking about the density of ideas, it seems very rare that any practice would pop up in isolation.” While my interest in adopting a landscape metaphor used an assumption that all landscape contributors’ practices were connected, the representation I had made detracted from that impression.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as a geoscientist, Katherine had her own ideas about landscape representation: When I, Katherine, think about landscapes, I think about what their shape tells us about the processes that made them, which makes me wonder what caused the dots in Fig. 16.2. For example, there is a feature known as a linear island chain—simply, a line of islands in the ocean that vary in elevation from the highest at one end of the chain to the lowest at the other. If you’ve ever looked at a map of Hawaii, you’ve seen this shape. I picked up my pencil and began drawing (Fig. 16.3).

Fig. 16.2

A reprint of a figure in Wooten’s (2018) article representing how individual researchers’ practices (dots) produce recognizability, or norms, in the landscape when they are practicing similarly to one another. Research practices are deemed deviant, or unrecognizable, when appearing distant from normative practice

Fig. 16.3

A figure of Katherine’s representation of the landscape using a linear island chain (February 2018)

In this figure, the Pacific Place, a piece of lithosphere made up of oceanic crust, is moving to the right over a hot spot. At a hot spot, relatively warmer mantle rock is rising and melting, creating magma that can push through the lithosphere to create an active volcano. As the plate continues to move, the original volcano is moved with it, no longer actively being “fed” by the hot spot, so it becomes dormant and then extinct. It’s experiencing erosional forces, though, so it’s also getting smaller and smaller while a new active volcano is forming. The result is a line of progressively smaller volcanoes, connected by pieces of higher-elevation oceanic crust.

Katherine::

I wonder if there’s an analogy to be made here—we’ve got the constantly shifting state of the [landscape of research on science teaching and learning]. The [landscape] is moving along with the plate. Practices such as generalizing feed the topographic highs in the landscape like the hot spot. Over time, the specific practices may change. And so how those play out in the literature and in conversations with each other may become “lower” or less relevant. Then the “active volcano” is the hot topic in the field today.

Michelle::

That’s really interesting. I’m drawn to that representation.

Katherine::

See, we have lots of different mountain features that we can build on!

Michelle::

That’s true. It doesn’t have to be one landscape or one [representation], yeah.

Katherine::

Pretty much any shape that you come up with regarding the relationship between different practices or logics—you could probably find a geologic process to match it.

By inviting Katherine to literally network an ideological image, I (Michelle) was learning what it meant to de-center my practice and disavow my identity as the inquirer. I also realized that my initial landscape representation—read by another landscape generator (Katherine)—had the effect of boundary-marking: its form was too far off the map to be recognizable by another community member. An effect of embracing Katherine’s logics toward representation was that I was learning what it meant to have my “capacities elaborated” through shared inquiry (Haraway & Wolfe, 2016).

I (Katherine) was also being pushed and humbled (and excited!) by this new way of thinking about topography outside of its traditional meaning within the disciplines of geology and geography. Two years later, I still think about the creation of Fig. 16.3 when I draw a similar figure of a hot spot for my introductory geology students. As I’m drawing, I think back to our conversation and how the joy inspired Michelle’s manner and willingness to explore new concepts. I also think about how students’ learning can be supported by different manners of knowledge production in the classroom, from drawing to oral and written expression, and thus, how the different representations can be useful in researchers’ knowledge generation as well.

Between and Among Education Research Communities

Another way that landscapes can be perturbed and grow or shrink is through processes at a convergent plate boundary. Here, plates move toward each other, causing stress that produces mountain belts. I (Katherine) think back to a stress I expressed in Michelle’s article (Wooten, 2018) about going to a conference put on by the National Association of Research on Science Teaching (NARST): I perceived that I would be seen as “less than” with my limited knowledge of theory or even that I would not know what was going on at the conference.

Katherine: That stress has driven me to claim 2019 as “The Year of the Theoretical Framework” (laughs). I’m just diving in—that’s all I’m doing is just reading and reading. So it could be stress that perturbs the topography. (November 2019)

This claiming of 2019 caused me (Katherine) to do so much reading, writing, and reflecting, resulting in growth (a raised elevation in the landscape) in the form of new projects. For example, I have been applying Ajzen’s (1985) theory of planned behavior to develop a better understanding of why students enroll in introductory geology classes and how their thoughts shape their intent to take (or not take!) a second geology class. This has meant playing with and immersing myself in new bodies of literature. It has brought a new sense of joy in my understanding of knowledge production. Reflecting on this growth process again invoked a geologic parallel for me.

Katherine: When the bottom of the crust breaks off, it’s called delamination or decoupling. When it breaks away, it’s replaced by something that’s less dense—part of the asthenosphere. And that means the whole topography rises. So removal of something could also allow the topography or the peaks to increase. For example, losing confusion over what constitutes a theory or losing the fear of being accepted as a scientist: those could be different forces sort of driving that change. When we’re able to let these things go, the topography is elevated—at least for the individual. (November, 2019)

Constructing a network ideological image seemed to afford us our own (re)constructions of perceived communal boundaries as mobile—flexible, bendable, and consequently, capable of permitting a multiplicity of identities. Each image we conceptualized in relation to our landscape generation led us to a broadened social imaginarium about our landscape’s possibilities.

Between and Among Education Research and Science Communities

One of my (Katherine’s) favorite papers is a play on the idea of misfit toys. It’s a qualitative study that explores feelings of isolation and lack of representation or recognition faced by GER scholars among the geoscience community (Feig, 2013). The way that paper resonated with many members of the GER community indicated those feelings had widespread existence in our landscape’s layers, like an index fossil that marks a rock layer as belonging to a particular time. As the landscape continues to expand, and there’s growing recognition of the importance of science education research to science disciplinarians, I would suggest that these feelings of isolation would become less prevalent when moving up toward the more recently formed surface layers. This might be one way to identify an idealized Anthropocene for research on science teaching and learning: the absence of the fossil of “feeling like a misfit toy!”

Michelle::

It sounds like you’re speaking with hope.

Katherine::

It’s that ideal landscape that eventually we’re building (referring to Fig. 16.1): 10 feet above where we are right now, like, what does that look like? In an ideal world all those feelings of isolation and lack of representation, those are just gone. (November 2019)

Using a Network Ideological Image to Conceptualize and Permeate Boundary Conditions

Constructing a network ideological image—a shared landscape at ten feet above where we are now, in the “Anthropocene”—encouraged us to think about ourselves as in the middle of the past and the future. We wanted to consider how we could reconfigure the topography—assert stress to flatten the peaks (or hierarchies) that positioned us in seemingly bounded communities.

Through Our Research Practices

Within the Anthropocene, I (Katherine) conceptualized that Michelle’s interviews with researchers of science teaching and learning could be represented in a single stratigraphic layer, like the Supai Group in the Grand Canyon strat column (Fig. 16.1).

Katherine: What would we consider the fossil or other evidence to suggest that there’s been a large enough “shift” to justify the new epoch label? In your [Wooten’s] 2018 article (Fig. 16.2), you identified two landscape peaks of scientific and theoretical practice. Geologically, these topographic highs could decrease (e.g., through weathering and erosion; a volcano moving off a hot spot, cooling and contracting) or increase (e.g., at convergent tectonic plate boundaries), such as in our 2018 sketching exercise (Fig. 16.3). (November 2019)

Using the strat column network ideological image Katherine had invoked (Fig. 16.1), I (Michelle) asserted:

Verse

Verse Michelle: My wish for that top layer would be a lack of Othering [between science and education research communities]. But I don’t know how to get rid of Othering unless firstly, education adopts a really strong goal of sustainability: reducing climate change or hierarchies between economic statuses. These goals seem like they would require disciplinary perturbations. But that means not focusing on discipline anymore, which means restructuring all of higher education! [Katherine and Michelle laugh] Katherine: That might be 12 feet above. Michelle: And it’s not that you disagree or I don’t recognize your value [for identification in the broader landscape of science and education research]. However when you express an interest in dispelling the negative affect associated with lack of representation, I’m on the other side saying “Yeah, we need lack of representation: we need to eliminate the notion of identity altogether.”Footnote

Thinking with Braidotti (2013a) who writes about “disidentification.”

Katherine’s response reminded me that being identifiable in the landscape had professional implications:

Katherine: I feel stress to identify as a scientist for professional reasons. When I was a graduate student, I asked myself, if I want to be a geoscience education researcher, “What is my degree going to be in [for geoscience education research]?” I wanted my degree to come from a science discipline like Earth Science or Geology because I feared my science colleagues wouldn’t listen to The Other from the College of Education. And so I thought that I could be more effective at producing discipline-level systems change by embedding myself in this geoscience community. If I have the same training as my colleagues I can say [uses comical, persuasive voice], “You will accept me as one of your own and I will have some kind of magical team change power within this community!”

[Michelle laughs]

Katherine was using science disciplinary identity to position herself among science colleagues in such a way as to invite an appreciation for education research. She was perturbing boundary conditions through systems of relations in which she was embedded. And thus I was reminded of Braidotti’s assertion that it is perhaps less generative to strive for utopias, for example, one in which identity is eliminated, because we cannot possibly disconnect from our systems of relations and the possibilities these afford us. Even though these systems of relations had some power in determining our recognizability in the landscape (identities) and our potentials, we could generate (even joyfully together) oppositional stress toward fixed, unitary identities. For example, Katherine’s investment in theoretical frameworks and Michelle’s de-centering of her research practices produced oppositional stress toward having clear identities in our own disciplines.

Through Our Teaching Practices

As academics, we’re perhaps most keenly aware of our communal boundaries through our departmental disciplinary assignments. Harkening back to our network ideological image of the strata (Fig. 16.1), in December 2019, I questioned Katherine, “What do we need to do as a community in our local contexts, or as a faculty member in our disciplinary departments, to start assigning value to disciplinary-perturbations?”

Katherine::

I think that if the transdisciplinary gradient is part of our holistic landscape, where the top strata is where we’re getting to (Fig. 16.1), what is the evidence that we would see that the state has been reached? Are there valuations that would themselves be evidence? And what would that look like? Would it be the offering of more interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary courses? Would it be valuing that my graduate students in geological sciences take classes over in Education, and vice-versa, because there’s value in that exposure or (inter)disciplinary thinking? I don’t know what all that would look like, but I can see that as being sort of a hypothetical, hopeful future state that we could get to.

Michelle::

And also, what do you think about natural phenomenon markers for the Anthropocene? Would you expect there to be a decrease in the effects of climate change? We bring students through courses to learn stuff that’s already been learned when they’re actually really capable people to start addressing socioscientific problems.⁷ That we’re wasting the potential of education is a new idea for me because I haven’t thought about it that outside of the box: why wouldn’t we use education—all the people sitting in our classes—to address socio-environmental injustices instead of teaching only accumulated knowledge?

Katherine::

That’s a really fascinating idea. I have five to seven people in my [geoscience education research] methods class. They’re incredibly talented. Why am I not utilizing them as a knowledge producing body in a better way?

Michelle::

So then if you wanted to also collect evidence on a global level, you would hope that you could measure education’s coincident effects on socioeconomic hierarchization or climate change. It seems like there would be measurable social and natural phenomenal changes if undergraduate education is no longer just about teaching accumulated knowledge. So maybe disciplinary perturbations are about applying learning in our local communities. I’m wondering if that’s how you would also envision it?

Katherine::

I think that’s a fair claim.

Michelle::

Do you have any hesitation?

Katherine::

No, my only hesitation is more like, what are the other indicators that might suggest there is change one way or another? There’s another simultaneous line of thought going through my head of like, “How do I stress this in my intro class next semester?”

Katherine and I were once again elaborating each other’s capacities, this time regarding our personal plans of action for practicing disciplinary perturbations in our teaching in the Anthropocene. Through the discussion of disciplinary perturbations in our teaching, our hopes for the Anthropocene were rendered on a larger scale than our research communities alone. Methodologically, our thinking together about disciplinary perturbations was slipping past its singular focus on our research communities—we were beginning to construct a network ideological image for undergraduate education.

A Vignette with Michelle’s Astronomy Teaching

Katherine and I were both earth educators of a sort. Because our December 2019 dialogue had slipped into disciplinary perturbations within education, I (Michelle) felt eager to vet my ideas for a sustainability project in my astronomy course the following semester (Spring 2020). I explained that part of the course would be devoted toward traditional disciplinary content, and part would be devoted to a project that connected course topics to the local context: mitigating light pollution in students’ local community.

Michelle: One effect of mitigating light pollution is being able to see the Milky Way, another is nonhuman animals’ ability to navigate. This semester, out of seventy-five students, only three have seen the Milky Way. One student saw it for the first time last week when completing my trial light pollution assignment!

Despite Katherine’s apparent interest in playing with the idea of disciplinary perturbations in undergraduate education, I felt nervous telling Katherine about the light pollution project and nervous about doing the project in general. Among scientist colleagues like Katherine, I felt that I needed to defend doing a project that was only tangentially related to the science of astronomy. Because by studying light pollution on Earth, students would not be studying astronomical phenomena or doing astronomy, I feared judgment that I was not teaching real science. So I quickly began talking about the project’s more scientific aspects:

Michelle: Students will submit measurements of stars’ visible apparent magnitude to the Globe at Night app, which stores persons’ measurements from all over the world. You can download their yearly maps to see how light pollution changes over time in your neighborhood (https://www.globeatnight.org/maps.php).

I was grateful when Katherine responded with encouragement rather than critique:

Katherine: Oh! That sounds like undergraduate research. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity to apply what they’ve learned to take something that’s out in the universe and bring it in locally. That sounds like an assignment that would make a long-term difference for students and actually get them involved somewhat in a meaningful capacity moving forward.

Because of her encouragement, I felt safe to share with Katherine the potential risky professional consequences I envisioned, as I perturbed the norm in undergraduate introductory astronomy education:

Michelle: I’m not asking for permission. And there is a question of—if all of my colleagues who teach introductory astronomy are teaching straight astronomy content and skills, and I’m dedicating a significant chunk of my instruction toward a transdisciplinary project—“Am I allowed to… ?” Or, “Should I be?” Further, “What do students expect? Do they expect to enter this class doing this project?” And so I also get nervous about students’ expectations.

Thinking with Braidotti, taking risks such as these was worthwhile because they are a motion toward academic freedom, enabling generations of students, universities, and communities to form transdisciplinary networks informed by their “yearning for sustainable futures, which “can construct a livable present” (Braidotti, 2013b, p. 192).

A Vignette with Katherine’s Geoscience Teaching

I (Katherine) had my own teaching experience to share that illuminated uncomfortable affectual effects associated with perturbing science disciplinary boundary conditions.

Katherine::

[When I worked at] Eastern Michigan University, several of my colleagues from different disciplines (chemistry, Earth science, philosophy, and communications) arranged our students to meet in small, interdisciplinary pop-up groups to discuss climate change. We invited other faculty to have their students participate, and one faculty member pushed back: “Yeah, I don’t want my students going to that, but I’ll come and watch them.” He wanted to judge them doing this exercise that he was highly skeptical of from the beginning.

And he was so convinced by the conversations he saw students having: “I didn’t realize that our students would get to that level.” He thought that students would sit in their silos. He was willing to be involved in a future semester, but he needed to see evidence that students would be inspired by the idea and would communicate across their disciplinary boundaries, because it’s not how he’s been thinking about his students for the twenty-plus years he has been teaching.

Michelle::

Yeah. Wow, that’s really beautiful.

Katherine::

But also scary when someone shows up to experience like “This is new for me too. I can’t tell you how it’s going to go!” (December 2019)

In later renditions of the pop-up course, many of my science colleagues were appreciative of the pop-up integration of another scientific discipline (chemistry) and could see the value of communication as part of a discussion on climate change. Philosophy was a harder initial sell to the same colleagues, many of whom weren’t sure what their students would get out of it. This may be because philosophy appears too far off the map in the landscape of climate conversations. And yet, the contributions of the philosophers in small-group discussions were cited as some of the most helpful by their traditional science colleagues for their ability to dissect arguments and lay out their logical underpinnings. I would describe the day of the pop-up learning communities as one of the educational peaks of my time at that institution.

Conclusion

The turn of the year offered us a turn in our teaching contexts. I (Katherine) reflected on the journey Michelle and I had invested in together—elaborating one another’s capacities toward enacting shared values. In an email to Michelle in January 2020, I wrote,

Katherine: I’ve had several of our conversations running in the background of my mind as I prep for this semester. I’m teaching ~450 students in our intro geology courses. I’ve been thinking about how you changed up your course, which is changing how I talk about science and the class with them. The conversation is much more oriented around creativity, curiosity, and what can we accomplish with so many amazing minds and experiences in the room.

Halfway across the United States, I (Michelle) entered my astronomy instruction feeling bolstered rather than frightened, remembering Katherine’s encouragement toward enacting the perturbative project I had proposed: “That sounds like undergraduate research.” “A wonderful opportunity!” “make a long-term difference!”

The study presented in this chapter was precipitated by Michelle’s dissertation study, in which she perturbed traditional research practices by inviting interview participants to think together with her about how to shift the landscape of research on science teaching and learning toward increased connectivity. Katherine and Michelle both desired producing flows in the landscape oppositional to ones that maintained stable identities leading to othering and feelings of isolation. Through our studying together, we constructed numerous networked ideological images to support our interest in perturbing boundary conditions in DBER and science education research communities. In doing so, I (Michelle) felt an increased sense of belonging to Katherine’s community of GER and even attended a conference they organized. I (Katherine) understood myself more acutely as an education researcher, beyond the more limited scope of GER. In a sense, we each became landscape contributors “marked by the interdependence of [our] environment through a structure of mutual flows and data transfer that is best configured as complex and intensive interconnectedness” (Braidotti, 2013b, p. 139).

We consider that our sensing about our interdependent, multiple identities came about through nomadic inquiry, a method that enabled us to construct our sensing about them. Our nomadicity was akin to what Katherine described as fault slippage in geoscience. As our dialoguing and writing about practices continuously slipped past a singular focus on either research practices, research communities, or our teaching, we both felt we were disavowing traditional research practices and consequently required a stabilizing remedy, in the same way that terracing or driving nails or bolts could be used to stabilize a slipping surface. However, we found that the non-prescriptive methodology of nomadic inquiry was an affordance, as it enabled networking an ideological image for diverse ways that our present communities construct notions of science, science education research, DBER, and their potentials. Although disciplinary perturbations at times feel scary, and have professional implications, we argue that nomadic, networking research and teaching practices are worth the risk in terms of how they enable connected, permeable entries into engaging with one another’s communities, shaping undergraduate science education, and producing joy in human–nonhuman relations.