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Prophecies of Tomorrow Guide Us Toward Transformative Teaching

Thomas Banyacya was a Hopi elder chosen to share Hopi prophecy around the world. In one of his talks in 1995, he shares the image of Prophecy Rock. “This rock drawing shows part of the Hopi prophecy of two paths. The first path is towards life determined by technology that is separate from natural and spiritual law which leads to chaos. The lower path is one that remains in harmony with natural law. Here we see a line that represents a choice like a bridge joining the paths. If we return to spiritual harmony and live from our hearts, we can experience a paradise in this world. If we continue only on this upper path, we will come to destruction. It’s up to all of us, as children of Mother Earth, to clean up this mess before it’s too late” (Param, 2020). “The Hopi tell us that this story has repeated itself many times for as far back as human memory reaches, and they have predicted where we will end up if we don’t change course immediately” (Thomas Banyacya as cited by McLeod, 2020).

A photograph of a man who wears a headband while standing behind a podium in Las Vegas. He points to a drawing of a rock that represents a part of the Hopi prophecy with 2 paths.
A close-up photograph of a rock with a hand-drawn path.

Thomas Banyacya and Prophecy Rock photo credit-Christoper (Toby) Mcleod (2020)

Fast forward to 2022, while in an eighth-grade science classroom during a Social Focus lesson that positioned students to grapple with the question, how should science and technology serve all communities and the future?, a student shared, “Ya know, what I really think it’s about is right now, I mean, it’s like two roads, one where adults care and do something and one they just don’t, that will determine my future the most I think.”

Each of these profound prophecies locates educators, science educators in particular, as guides and narrators of learning and doing, with the power to steer students toward an Anthropocene of catastrophe or a hopeful otherwise. Within these shared prophecies is acknowledgment of hegemonic structures that funnel the masses onto a path of destruction and chaos via coloniality and white supremacy blocking healthful pathways of kincentric living. These prophecies gift us clarity on the urgency and potential outcomes of our actions/inactions, learning/unlearning, and (un)met obligations to youth, multispecies kinfolx, and planet.

Holding these prophecies as truth, I invite others to consider the trajectory of their science pedagogies, as they materialize consequential realities. It is at this point of conformity and departure that I endeavor to disrupt the shepherding of youth and educators toward settled tracks of destruction and injustice. In this chapter I provide an antiracist and anticolonial framework for science education to act as compass and map to forge new science pedagogical pathways toward collective thriving and liberation in alignment with natural laws.

Remembering Forward

Before setting a pathway ahead of us for engaging in dreaming and designing for liberatory pathways toward science education transformation, we must first face the nightmares that colonial schooling has brought to life. This requires remembering forward to be critically cognizant of the white supremacy of colonial schooling that has been designed to continuously erase and silence Black, Brown, and Indigenous livingness, rightful knowledges, and ways of knowing—to speculate, dream, and design forward, toward a just otherwise. This means deeply knowing that as replicas of colonial society, schools function as sites that reproduce systems and structures that maintain the education racial contract (Leonardo, 2013). Schools mirror society’s hyper-validation of whiteness and coloniality through rhetorics of capitalistic success with a model of learning that is transactional, inflating the value of Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies. Our educational systems have busied themselves up with achievement gap nonsense and racist disciplinary rate data, failing to see that these outcomes are inevitable when the infestation of white supremacy and coloniality is simultaneously ignored and defended. In short, dominant education has bamboozled the masses from pre-kindergarten to higher education about the purpose and promise of learning and set us on this course of socio-ecological discordance and turmoil.

The field of science education uniquely propels us toward and fuels discordance with its over saturation of utilitarian narratives and progress agendas rooted in settler eco-logics of invasion, extraction, and expansion (Dietrich, 2016). Through positivist messages of innovation within reductive and settled science learning (Bang & Marin, 2015), students are conditioned to displace their ontological intuitions and values of relationality as well as reciprocity with white supremacy values of individualism and human supremacy. And while this may secure white interests and comfort for the time being, by failing to heed the cultural and generational science knowledge of BIPGM (Black, Indigenous, and People of the Global Majority) communities who have been long-standing designers of socio-ecologically caring innovation and have endured multitudes of Anthropocenes (Yusoff, 2018), as science educators are we not guilty of shepherding students toward their own peril, both socio-culturally and ecologically? In short, yes; therefore, if we intend to be the elders that our youth and our multispecies kin need for collective continuance (Whyte, 2013), we must identify and overturn epistemic and pedagogical stones that maintain white supremacy and coloniality.

To begin this upheaval and (re)navigation, we start with the critique of practices and advances in science and engineering education that have been heralded as promising yet merely give shallow, and often false, approaches of equity and justice. For instance, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been influential in the vertical alignment of science learning for all K-12 instruction; however, it must be asked what knowledge is being taught and who is absent in the authoring of these standards, and toward what definition of equity are they aligned (Rodriguez, 2015)? Furthermore, the marginalization of socio-ecological human impacts within NGSS maintains human dominance and settler innocence, by not providing clarity as to how standards and pedagogical methods are linked to colonialism, coloniality, racism, and white supremacy culture and traits—nor does NGSS identify how these ideological and epistemological orientations, that require ecological exploitation and extraction, are rooted in science and engineering standard-based learning, thereby contributing to the threatening and foreclosing of students’ well-being and futurities. New standards, perspectives, and ways of doing, learning, and knowing science and engineering should be authored and implemented that address matters of consequentiality over traditional methods of reductive teaching and learning. Therefore, to reimagine science education in the Anthropocene, guidance is needed that provides principles, dimensions, and enactments of science learning in which content can be set on a trajectory of antiracism and anticoloniality towards a new education Otherwise.

Remembering forward toward a new trajectory of science learning also calls for critiquing claims of equitable learning and instruction through the implementation of science core instructional practices, also known as high-leverage practices. While core practices such as conceptual models, summary charts, discourse moves, and phenomena-based units may increase repertoires of student participation and inclusion, by being enclosed within dominant culture curriculum and pedagogies, they merely veil Westernized science’s epistemic goals and allow instruction to remain race-neutral (Shah, 2021). As we consider science instruction practices and learning, we must ask ourselves toward what end? Toward what purpose are we utilizing instructional practices? For far too long, science instruction and practices have been promoted for their ability to support students’ participation in white, settled, transactional learning pathways—learn the fact(s), pass the assessment, get the grade, get access to the white institutional spaces of learning, then join the capitalist society, get the stuff, be successful. This rutted, circular path of false equity teaching practices sets generations of youth on a path toward destruction, destruction that has not only been prophesied but is here.

We are well past the point of accepting the rebranding or rearranging of science education with allegedly neutral standards and instructional practices that support and maintain goals of epistemic and human domination. These approaches within the colonial machinery of schooling busy us up, feeling like action is being taken, but merely mimic the rearranging of chairs on a sinking ship. For science educators committed to radical change and care, the classroom can and should be a place of movement toward (un)learning, unraveling, and undermining logics of white supremacy and coloniality. However, this requires new ways of seeing, knowing, and sensing. To this point, in the first edition of Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene, the editors cite Cash Ahenakew (2017) who states that “‘the work of decolonization is not about what we do not imagine, but what we cannot imagine from our Western ways of knowing’ (p. 88).” “We need new ways to (re)open what we can even imagine within science education as we respond to the Anthropocene(s)” (Wallace et al., 2022, pp. 6–7). We need new ways to critically see, sense, and make seen what is missing from science teaching and learning, to move toward “regenerative present futures” (p. 3). Given this understanding and call for transformation, I pose the question: What would it mean and what would it take for science education to honor BIPGM critical historicities and be beholden to present and future youth, BIPGM communities, more-than-human kin, and Land Air Water StarsFootnote 1 (Sanchez, 2023)?

By applying this question to science education together we can aim to critically notice what is missing and necessary to (re)orient science education toward a pathway aligned to natural laws and toward an acute awareness that our youth are on the front lines in our classrooms, well aware that the tapestry of our global community is unraveling and on fire, but not lost. In hopes of supporting science educators in this endeavor and new trajectory, I offer up the Social Focus framework, which provides three (inter)relational and multidimensional liberatory principles to be leveraged and elevated as guiding standards for desettling and transforming science and engineering learning, pre-kindergarten and beyond. In addition to the theoretical grounding of the Social Focus principles, I share classroom and curricular enactments, as evidence of the actualized power of utilizing the framework as lens for seeing what is missing, needed, and possible, and as compass to guide the development and implementation of antiracist and anticolonial science education.

The Social Focus Framework: A Principled Approach for the Cultivation of Antiracist and Anticolonial Science and Engineering Education

The Social Focus framework has been iteratively developed, researched, and implemented for over six years alongside science educators and students, in K-12 public school science classrooms in the Pacific Northwest, with the explicit intent to serve as a tool for serving Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth through a commitment to radically care for their onto-epistemic security (Bang & Marin, 2015). The Social Focus framework aims to call out, desettle, and counter the ways dominant science instruction and materials habitually decontextualize science and science learning from the complex socio-political-ecological entanglements, temporal tapestries, and global sinew in which they pulsate. By purposefully embracing radical transdisciplinary boundary crossing, the Social Focus animates and stories science to weave critical and relational knowledge, with multiple ways of knowing so students focus their learning on worlding, dreaming, and creating worlds that sustain collective thriving. The Social Focus seeks to foster critical consciousness by unapologetically elevating socio-ecological matters of consequential concern and antiracist, anticolonial counternarratives through the critical and liberatory presencing of knowledges, values, and brilliant beingness of those who have been made absent.

Principle 1: Critical Consciousness

Critical consciousness has been a long-standing endeavor and theoretical lens in the analysis of education in multi-scalar ways. Channeling Paolo Freire (1985), critical consciousness, or conscientization, is the development of critical awareness of social realities that determine the conditions and possibilities of living and defining one’s own reality. Critical consciousness also encompasses awareness of others’ realities and requires critical reflection and reflexivity of social inequities forced upon marginalized peoples by white-dominant culture and ongoing coloniality.

All too often, students are limited by teachers’ settler consciousness (Kulago, 2019), animated by adult supremacy logics, fakequity, and standardized learning access agendas, which together maintain a course of ontological and epistemic colonization and racialization. In the classroom, a pedagogical goal of critical consciousness is to design learning to dissolve boundaries of empire which decontextualize content from the known and unknown socio-political and ecological realities of students’ lived worlds during wicked times. To do so would require the transformation of dominant science education by unmasking the multi-scalar ways its inhabituation within society and the classroom perpetuate harm by concretizing socio-racial hierarchies and erasure—the invisibilizing of diverse knowledges and divergent ways of thinking, being, and doing science. To be critically conscious as an educator means to tear oneself away from the narcotic haze of white normativity that engages educators and students in relationships that further necropolitical practices which maintain within our academic system and science learning BIPGM students, multispecies kin, and Land Air Water Stars (Sanchez, 2023) are and have been set up to die, to fail, to be sacrificed. This haze dulls the ability to see beyond fake-equity rhetorics of participation and access to a false meritocracy as salvation, as if participation and access are anything but harmful and leading toward pathways of prophesied destruction. Critical conscientization, as it is taken up in the Social Focus framework, dimensions and pedagogical approaches, requires an eyes and heart wide-opening of productive clarity to care for ushering youth toward healing and critical hope in our classrooms. This would mean that learning is (re)purposed to center the loving care of students’ “intellectual health” by providing students “healthful ways to deliberate about the world and to think about the world” and to think about the consequences and “challenges of Eurowestern systems, things like decolonization, things like understanding colonial systems, but also things like, how is it that we generate anew, always?” (Bang, 2020, 20:06–20:36).

By setting critical consciousness engagement and nurturing as our purpose, science and engineering education can hold greater possibility to disrupt settler colonial logics through critical dialogic conversations. Elevating critical consciousness as a classroom purpose sets a learning trajectory of mutuality that promotes radical caring (Hobart & Kneese, 2020) and healing because “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion” (hooks, 2000, p. 215). The Social Focus framework asserts that science learning can and should aim to nurture students’ critical consciousness not merely to increase understanding about social and ecological injustices but rather in the hopes of “forging critical consciousness as part of creating a world we can get behind rather than only describing the one we reject in front of us” (Said, 1983, p. 234). Educators committed to this critical hope engage students in this just worlding project by designing science learning that attends to the critical consciousness dimensions of self, others, and society. Within these dimensions, students—and teachers—are able to see themselves as vital to the perpetuation of harm or healing by promoting a sense of reciprocity and valuing relationality with human and more-than-human kin. Critical consciousness enactments are actualized by directly connecting science content to complex socio-ecological contexts. The unfolding of contexts and the content are then investigated in the classroom as a radical learning community. Learning enactments explicitly decenter whiteness and coloniality through critical considerations about how and why things are the way they are and speculation about how science can and should be considered and carried out for the purpose of relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility.

The following are the dimensions and enactments of the Social Focus Framework’s first principle, critical consciousness:

  • Dimension: Awareness of Self

    • Science learning provides opportunities for engaging in critical self-reflection, critical noticing and developing self-awareness about one’s identity in society to promote personal obligation, agency, and activism by positioning learners as essential contributors to science for complex problem solving as co-creators of change.

  • Dimension: Awareness of Others

    • A sense of interconnectedness is developed by providing learning opportunities that position learners to value the experiences, stories, truths, and historicity of others in relation to their own identities, and holistic development through critical reflection, radical caring speculation, and anti-racist and anti-colonial science education.

  • Dimension: Awareness of Society

    • Science learning fosters the development of critical and complex views of society through crriculum and instruction that explicitly promote awareness of, and caring for racial justice and multispecies/ecological well-being as a necessary justice priority for global well-being.

To elucidate the power of designing science and engineering learning that cultivates critical consciousness, I offer the following vignette. This vignette occurred in a seventh-grade classroom during a geology unit that was developed using the Social Focus framework. The Social Focus unit centered the question, “How and who should determine the value and use of Land?” This question situated students to critically consider the issue of having Bears Ears National Monument opened for uranium mining. Students moved through various stations, which provided a range of stakeholder perspectives, including those of the Ute tribe, archeologists, geologists, and government officials, using various authentic sources, including first-person videos, podcasts, and articles about the youth Land back movement. The following vignette was captured during a stakeholders’ conversation between three white males about the push for uranium mining by the U.S. government:

S1::

“White dudes, we just do whatever we want.”

S2::

“Seriously, oh, here’s some Native land, yup I’ll take that, just because I can…”

S3::

“Yeah, and you know what I am going to do with that land is make bombs!” (student mocks an evil laugh)

S1::

“Yay, I’m a white guy, a total d**k, great, but why?”

S2::

“We gotta be better, the Ute tribe, should have the land, I mean, it is their land, you know what I mean.”

Student dialogues such as this vignette rippled through the classroom, with students deeply critiquing settler logics of expansion and progress and considering ways their identities are mirrored in our racially stratified society. While this lesson was placed at the beginning of the unit, this knowledge and further learning that nurtured critical consciousness were carried through the entirety of the unit. Ultimately, the nurturing of students’ critical consciousness is directly related to, and dependent upon, the ways in which science learning is situated in socio-ecological contexts of consequentiality, as these contexts are defined and considered by the BIPGM communities most impacted by white supremacy and settler colonialism. Thus, the next principle of the Social Focus framework is consequential concern.

Principle 2: Consequential Concern

Years ago, during a lesson on clouds, a Samoan student interjected, “No disrespect, but I just don’t get why we should care about clouds, we got real sh*t to worry about.” And as I looked at my classroom, with black garbage bags covering the windows, gang affiliation symbols carved into the desks, knowing the lived and looming turmoil outside the classroom, I knew my response could not be, “Well because it is science,” or “So you could get a good grade,” or even, “Because weather and climate affect all of us.” I realized, despite my institutional learning, science knowledge, and teaching degree, it was my obligation, not students’, to connect science learning to multigenerational and temporal matters of consequentiality—sociopolitical and socio-ecological concerns facing and impacting students’ communities, pasts, presents, and futurities.

Efforts to appropriately and holistically (re)evolve science learning to attend to consequential concerns of socio-ecological, cultural, and generational gravity requires critical attunement to positivistic and utilitarian narratives of Westernized-settler science education which feign objectivity and neutrality. Attunement to these falsehoods brings opportunity to pin-point how and when science education has been mechanized for transactional learning, which purposefully ignores the wicked entanglements of science, ongoing racial and colonial harm, and need for future-facing radical care and reality-based learning. White normative science and engineering severs learning from consequential contexts and relation(s) with others and Othered, producing sterilize(ed) and malnourish(ed/ing) learning and progress agendas, void of radical livingness, and lived affects and effects of felt science (Wallace et al., 2022) and felt knowledges (Harjo, 2019). To do so requires that science educators become productively mindful and critically response-able (Higgins, 2021; Higgins & Tolbert, 2018) of the consequential concerns, consequential realities, consequential historicities, and consequential being(s)(ness) that embodied science promise and of the precarity in BIPGM lived worlds, the Land Air Water Stars, and our multispecies kin.

The Social Focus pedagogical framework, with roots in consequential learning (Jurow & Shea, 2015; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), calls for consequential science instruction and materialities through critical-reality pedagogies (Sims, 2018) and critical response-ability (Kayumova & Tippins, 2021). Critical-reality pedagogies “not only looks at the macro level injustices, à la critical pedagogies, but it also positions students to understand, identify and begin to deconstruct and subsequently redress individualized issues while also helping students realize that the individualized, localized injustices that inform their lived experiences are part and parcel of a larger, macro-level system of oppression that is disproportionately injurious to poor people of color” (Sims, 2018, p. 9). Critical-reality pedagogies are concerned with the actions that are needed for students to thrive and to “develop critical analytical thinking so that they can use that knowledge to shift the socio-political constraints that oppress them” (Sims, 2018, p. 9). Complementary to critical-reality pedagogies, critical response-ability entails creating locations of possibility for the design of socially, culturally, environmentally sustainable and just learning contexts. Drawing from Karen Barad’s theorizing of response-ability, Kayumova and Tippins (2021) state that critical response-ability should reopen STEM education toward its responsibilities so that “Black, Brown, Latinx, and Indigenous young people are recognized as authors and owners of their existing and emerging knowledge that they co-construct in affective and embodied ways within the complex web of human and more-than-human relations” (pp. 825–826).

Given the horrific events that are ongoing, unfolding, and yet to be unearthed due to interlocking systems of domination, as educators, do we not have an obligation to grapple with consequential matters alongside students? By not taking up matters of consequence, are educators and systems of education guilty of onto-epistemic injustice/violence and inter-generational incompetence? Is it not true that it is students’ epistemic right to receive an education that best prepares them to navigate and speculate about current realities and yet-to-come realities, especially given the weight of the roles they will inherit? Pero, ya basta, es la tiempo para libertad, para todo gente y relaciones. For science and engineering to be consequential requires fierce epistemic and pedagogical shifts away from normative, Eurocentric education norms that decontextualize learning from relational livingness on a shared planet.

While it is necessary to provide a compelling argument for consequential learning in science that is grounded in theories of critical-reality pedagogies and critical response-ability, I also hold the words of Fred Hampton, “Theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together” (1969). Therefore, I contend and offer up that teaching practice must be a practice of countering settled enclosures of science education through instructional moves that make vulnerable the positivism of Western modernity narratives and decenter whiteness through expansive student-led critique and contestation. In this vein, the Social Focus framework asserts that all science and engineering learning/units should be foregrounded and centered in “should we questions” (Bang, 2020). By positioning students to engage in “should we” questions, educators engage in countering deficit frames and developmental theories of youth as incomplete humans—or not-yet adults (Nxumalo, 2015). By posing consequential “should we” questions in science classrooms we recognize youth as agentic beings and as vital, critically aware stakeholders in a world torn asunder from colonial projects and white supremacy, yet not without profound love and possibility. Clarification is needed about what is meant by “should we” questions. This means that all science units have a consequential concern that positions students to grapple with an expansively written question, authored to attend to each of the dimensions and enactments of the Social Focus framework. The Social Focus framework provides science educators guidance with identifying the consequential concerns that avoid the centering of white supremacy culture, concerns, values and comfort. The enactments are rendered as offerings and invitations to embark upon a path of onto-epistemic, critical antiracist and anti-colonial hope and justice.

The dimensions of Principle 2, consequential concern, include:

  • Dimension: Matters of Justice and Cultural Significance

    • Science learning is designed to investigate contextualized issues of consequence that threaten non-white communities’ rights and cultural ways of knowing by addressing systemic oppression and white supremacy, which limits access to resources, power, and physical and ecological security and well-being.

  • Dimension: Matters of Relational and Collective Well-Being

    • Instruction and learning disrupt Westernized dominant paradigms, narratives, and practices of science that depoliticize science learning and promote human supremacy. Content moves beyond reductive “science for science’s sake” furthering white progress narratives and traits and instead calls for critical responsibility and reciprocity. Teaching centers antiracist and anticolonial counternarratives and methodologies of science that are relational, interconnected, and for collective thriving.

  • Dimension: Matters of Futurity & Ecological Caring

    • Topics have social gravity as they position students to make/nurture caring connections between science content and socio-ecological consequential concerns facing society. Learning aims to be generationally relevant and future-leaning as classes investigate topics that have significant impacts on the future well-being of society, ecosystems, and marginalized communities and cultures.

All branches of science taught in schools are interconnected and inherently, temporally, and geographically enmeshed in matters and contexts of monumental, consequential concern. For example, middle school science standards require teachers to cover the phases of the moon and sun. Using the Social Focus approach to science learning, eighth-grade teachers in Seattle have been exercising critical responsibility by connecting the content with the investigation of global and local socio-ecological impacts and causes of tidal flooding. These teachers did this by engaging students to co-think about the expansive question: How are communities in Venice, Italy, and Miami impacted by tidal flooding, and what should be done?

Just as critical consciousness about one’s positionality and the positionality of others within various socio-political scales requires caution to avoid the centering and valuing of whiteness, the elevation of consequential concerns also risks being narrated and perceived from a lens of whiteness. Therefore, moves toward antiracism and anticoloniality necessarily nurture the (re)forming of connective tissue with others and Othered—Othered knowing, beingness, and mattering across timelines and a multiplicity of BIPGM justice projects (Tuck & Yang, 2018). In an effort to avoid falling into defaults of centering dominant culture values, perspectives, and knowledge, educators must be diligent about the critical and liberatory presencing of BIPGM peoples, Land Air Water Stars, and multispecies kin.

Principle 3: Critical and Liberatory Presencing

Ultimately, teaching is storytelling: teachers tell the stories of facts and knowledge they have accumulated, either by living life and/or through academic institutions. As Shirley writes, “Teachers are storytellers who decide what to include in their curriculum” (p. 11). Understanding this to be true, coupled with the fact that most science and engineering educators are white, it is fair to say that even with the best intentions, by default, narratives of BIPGM, multispecies and Landir Water Stars kin will be negatively skewed due to white supremacy and colonial social programming of domination and exploitation of all, affirming their identities and protecting white innocence. Therefore, without explicitly storying learning with liberatory counternarratives of BIPGM communities, Land Air Water Stars, Earth kin and natural forces, their subordination will continue, impacting us all. Truly attending to justice in the classroom requires the desettling of false settler narratives that reify white identities as the originators, makers, and doers of science and engineering. To do so means designing and developing learning based on the principle of critical and liberatory presencing, which centers the rightful representation of the language; multiple ways of knowing (Warren et al., 2020); and historical, ongoing and global science contributions and perspectives of BIPGM peoples and cultures, contextually throughout learning.

Critical and liberatory presencing necessitates the discontinuing and demystifying of beliefs that racism will or can decline simply with anti-bias training, and/or access models and methods of diversity, equity, and inclusion within white-dominant culture spaces. These harmful approaches risk the perpetuation of tokenization, cultural and racial gaslighting, as well as extraction and exploitation of BIPGM as a human workforce resource for nuanced modes of settler comfort and saviorism. In schools this is often done with social justice accessorizing of dominant curriculum, or relegated to monthly “celebrations” of non-white cultures and/or by having students’ or teachers’ report on racial and cultural unicorns—individuals touted as having made it despite the odds. Of course, the odds are never identified as white supremacy culture and systemic oppression, sending a vile subversive message that it is not the structures in which we live in that have so many BIPGM struggling but rather their character, and thus sowing seeds of internalized racism and Othering. Within the materiality of the classroom, false equity practices are often dressed up as white gaze “cultural” approaches (Paris, 2019) and/or language accommodation approaches that are mere addendums, optional extensions, and cultural accessorizing of dominant curriculum—pretty paintings on the walls of empire. Inclusion and knowledge making-building without structural change that makes present that which has violently been made absent, merely reifies internal and external racism and anti-Indigeneity which are the foundation of deficit frames of BIPGM students and peoples.

Additionally, critical and liberatory presencing is also not about the inclusion of justice issues impacting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in ways that (re)victimize or essentialize them through damage-centered narratives (Tuck, 2009) which fail to disrupt racial injustice, much less center their liberation. Instead, the principle of critical and liberatory presencing asks educators to engage in the refusal of representation and storying of BIPGM as communities inherently bound to suffering, by replacing such narratives with, dignity-conferring and rights-generative (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014), honest representation of their legacies of and lived-living brilliance, joy, and relationality, through a process of refiguring presence (Nxumalo, 2016). Refiguring presencing as an orientation in “curriculum-making that does not shy away from the oppressive realities of settler colonialism and anti-blackness, yet simultaneously includes speculative curriculum-making practices that seek an otherwise decolonial future” (Nxumalo, Vintimilla & Nelson, 2018, p. 448). Refiguring presences, as a theory of change, invites educators and researchers to engage in the unsettling of what is seen as belonging in curriculum and critically consider making “what is invisible noticeably absent so that it can be remembered and missed” (Ahenakew, 2016, p. 337). This requires radical (re)searching and seeking out erased stories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and their relationality with more-than-human thriving. To be clear, the storying of science through critical and liberatory presencing means seriously countering white settler temporalities which make impossible the temporal co-presencing of Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples. This countering makes BIPGM peoples boldly present, not as myths or legends but as truths of the past, with embodied, self-determined and active nowness and futures of corporeal, spatial, spiritual and onto-epistemic sovereignty secured. Critical and liberatory presencing provides BIPGM students opportunities to safely, identify and (re)connect themselves and their cultures to scientific brilliance led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities currently and since time immemorial as acts of reclamation of birthright, as legacy. It must also be said that by decentering whiteness in the classroom, critical liberatory presencing disrupts the hyper-macro-affirmation of white students, which fails to nurture their humanity and ability to see BIPGM people as holistic beings-impeding their/the possibility for authentic and meaningful relationality and collectivity.

Therefore, if we are to imagine science and engineering learning as a methodology for moving toward pathways of being and knowing in alignment with natural laws and collective relationality and reciprocity, the Social Focus framework guides educators to design and develop learning based on the following dimensions of critical liberatory presencing.

  • Dimension: Restorative Justice-Oriented Representation

    •  Instruction and learning names the multi-dimensional, intersectional, injustices faced by racially, linguistically & ability diverse communities. It situates their experiences, solutions, healing and thriving throughout the context of science learning as restorative justice priorities. Designing, development and instruction prioritizes cultural resurgence (Bang et.al., 2012) and the desettling of STEM by centering justice goals that care for the futurity of BIPGM communities. Woven throughout learning, across units, the ways communities (human & more than human) have been, and continue to be extracted from, exploited and erased/marginalized due to embodies and enactments of colonization & white supremacy, thusly foreclosing lush potentialities for collective sustainability throughout time and in all spaces.

  • Dimension: Rightful Representation

    • Science instruction and materials respectfully and rightfully elevate BIPGM scientists/engineers/leaders/cultural knowledge keepers as essential sources of expertise for complex and consequential learning and speculating and designing of solutions and innovations. Dignity-conferring and rights generative representations of BIPGM change makers are contextualized throughout the learning as best practice, as norm for generationally relevant, and responsible science instruction. Critical analysis is given to representation to ensure that problems of practice such as tokenization, essentializing, and (re)victimizing of marginalized communities are not perpetuated.

  • Dimension: Self-determined Representation

    • Counters harmful narratives that pre-determine the lives of BIPGM, ecologies, and ecological kin by highlighting materials, research, innovation(s), knowledge, and stories from authentic sources/documentation generated by BIPGM and more-than-human communities as essential to understanding and advancing science. BIPGM students engage in self-determined representation and presencing of themselves within the learning content and context and as embodying epistemic sovereignty in STEM.

For context and clarity, I provide the following example of critical liberatory presencing that has been taken up in several local second-grade classrooms. The unit required teachers to cover the concept that Plants need Water, Sun, and Animals for Seed dispersal and growth. District-mandated curriculum was identified as being absent of the cultural ways of knowing and caring for Seeds and real-time consequential concerns, nor did it identify humans in relation to plants, animals, or seeds, negatively or otherwise. By designing learning in alignment to the Social Focus principle of critical liberatory presencing, students’ learning was grounded in the antiracist and anticolonial learning about African, and Central American, Seed Guardians. Students learned about the radically loving action of seed guardians from Africa, stolen as agricultural experts, weaving seeds into their hair, who knew/know that to love current and future generations is to care for and love seeds (Penniman, 2018). Due to this learning, students were able to ask about why people in Africa were stolen and be told that they were stolen because of racism and colonialism, taken for their knowledge of the Land—how to care for and be cared for by Land. This provides students a counter story to slavery in white–Black history, which simplifies the reasons for the enslavement of Black peoples while collapsing those stolen as a mass of peoples, without a multitude of gifts, stories, brilliance, and promise. By centering the science and activism of seed guardians, students were positioned to challenge settler eco-logics of expansion and Land exploitation by researching why Seeds are endangered. This research led to classroom experiments on how overdevelopment “on stolen Land” (second-grade student) and the use of harmful agricultural practices impact seeds, rather than the mandated curriculum which had students learn that Plants need Sun and Water, facts they already knew. And with stakeholder lessons woven throughout the unit, students were positioned to also learn about seed guardians from Central America, as leaders and scientists addressing growing climate change realities, Students were then able to deeply and agentically consider the interdependent-relational, potentially reciprocal, bonds between LandAirWaterStars, human and more-than-human.

Teaching for the critical liberatory presence of Black, Brown, and Indigenous knowledges and ways of being, doing, and thriving fills the void of colonialism separatism with kinship and radical care for all Earthly beings measured by the securing of BIPGM futurities. And while the three Social Focus principles are presented individually, as is evident in each of the examples, each principle, dimension, and enactment are fortified by and built upon the others. Therefore, the framework should be taken up in its totality, interconnectedly. To do so would shift the way that science is felt and how it is either leveraged as a mechanism to maintain a course toward destruction or as a compass toward relationality, reciprocity, and alignment with natural laws.

Conclusion

Currently, we are neck deep in the muck of a convergence of many battles: battles to maintain the classroom as white property rather than infuse truth into the learning through critical race theory-based pedagogies, and battles between wielders of settler colonial extractivism causing ecological devastation and brave, Indigenous Land and Water Protectors and allies. And at the center of these ongoing battles that have seemed to reach a relational and ecological tipping point (Whyte, 2020) are the youth, future generations and our multispecies and natural relations. Given these urgent and ongoing realities, science education that severs the visceral connections between content and the socio-political-livingness and ecological-livingness in which science is situated is an insidious act of onto-epistemic harm and irresponsibility, further leading students toward a pathway of prophesied destruction.

Therefore, the Social Focus pedagogical framework takes seriously the stance, “If we do not do this work, if we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices, if we do not produce and share stories that honor modes of humanness that cannot and will not replicate this system, we are doomed” (McKittrick, 2020, p. 73). The Social Focus Framework, principles and dimensions, and embedded learning enactments shared contend and illuminate how science and science educators have the profound obiligation and capacity to transform our shared world and move us toward a path of liberation. Liberation toward worlding an Otherwise that embraces the un-dooming of futurities and youth through the reclamation of alignment with natural laws as the path towards antiracist and anticolonial collective well-being.