From a Cultural Context: Rethinking STEM

Welcome to the Cultural Context of Knowledge podcast. I am your host, Donald Easton-Brooks. This podcast invites learners to pause and reflect on how their own cultural experience shape the way they learn, interpret information, and define what counts as knowledge. Each episode will focus on how cultural context impact the way in which we understand the world around us.

Whether it's the classroom, work, environment, or relationships. Today's episode is gonna feel a little different. Think of it less like a lecture and more like a guided professional learning moment. Something you can absorb, revisit, and pause whenever you need time to reflect on your classroom practice.

And if you teach math, science, engineering, or computer science, then yes, this episode is definitely for you. Let's jump right in. Most of us, were trained to believe that STEM is objective, neutral, clean. You know the phrases, we've all heard them. Math is objective, science is factual. Engineering is technical.

Data speaks for itself. But here's the point I wanna make. Clearly, neutrality and STEM is not neutral. It's cultural. STEM classrooms often prioritize linear reasoning, speed, abstraction, individual performance, and language heavy explanations. These aren't universal ways of knowing. They're academic traditions that have been normalized as intelligence.

Now, before we go any further, let me be clear. This is not about lowering standards. It's not about adding bits of culture onto stem, like sprinkles. This is about redesigning stem. So rigor isn't confused with restriction. It's about creating learning spaces where students don't have to earn belonging before they can learn.

I want you to think about a moment in your classroom. Picture a student who clearly understood a STEM idea, but struggled to show it in the right way. Maybe they could explain it verbally, but not in writing. Maybe they could build it but couldn't formalize it. Maybe their reasoning was solid, but they worked too slowly to be rewarded.

Hold that student in your mind because what happened in that moment wasn't an exception. It was a signal In many classrooms, neutral practices show up as one correct pathway to a solution. Timed assessments treated as indicators of intelligence. Word problems, stripped of context. Silence interpreted as focus and speed interpreted as mastery.

None of those practices are actually neutral. They privilege students who already align with traditional academic norms while others are forced to translate their thinking before it can even be recognized. Translation is labor. Over time, it becomes a tax. Instead of asking, why don't students get stem?

Try asking what kinds of sense-making does this STEM environment allow? Let's pause again. If you were to describe a good STEM student, what would that look like? How do students learn that image? Who benefits from that image and who becomes invisible because of it? These are uncomfortable questions, but essential ones.

Here's one of the most powerful redesign moves in STEM change where learning begins. Traditional STEM instruction often starts with abstraction formulas. Definitions, procedures, and only later connects to real applications. This assumes abstraction is accessible to everyone. A culturally responsive approach flips the order.

Start with systems. Students already recognize things like why ride share prices surge, why bridges vibrate, how social media algorithms shape visibility, why materials fail, how energy moves through everyday devices. Let students notice question and reason first, using their own language. Then bring in formal notation as a tool.

Not a gatekeeper. This doesn't lower rigor. It strengthens conceptual grounding. Students don't just memorize formulas. They understand the problems those formulas were designed to solve. Pause again. Think about an upcoming lesson. What real world system does it connect to? Do students experience that system before the formula appears, and if they understand the system, but not the notation yet?Do you value that understanding? Let's address something head on. This critique is not an argument against formulas. Formulas are essential. They compress complex relationships into clear expressions. They help us predict, design, and communicate across time. The problem is in formulas. It's when they show up first.

Students often encounter symbols before meaning. Some adapt, well, others feel shut out. And this is where culture matters. Long before students walk into a classroom, they're already reasoning mathematically and scientifically. Managing time, comparing prices, troubleshooting, tech, navigating physical spaces.

If we ignore this. Formulas seem disconnected. If we build on it. Formulas become translations of lived experience. Let's make this real with the most iconic formula in science. E equals mc squared. For many students, this formula feels untouchable, like something only brilliant people understand. But E equals mc squared isn't magic.

It's simply describing reality. Matter and energy are two expressions of the same thing. Even small amounts of mass hold, enormous amounts of energy. Now, how do we teach that culturally, not by starting with the equation. Instead, start with everyday energy, fuel, food, electricity, heat, ask, where does all this energy come from?

Students can talk about that. They can talk about power outages, gas prices, community energy needs. Now introduce mass, not as vocabulary, but as something real. The material in cars, buildings, phones, tools, explain that matter. ISN and static. It's concentrated energy. Now. The formula appears e equals mc squared becomes a way to write down what students already know.

Mass and energy are linked, and the speed of light squared shows the scale of that relationship from there. Connect to phenomena. They recognize why nuclear energy is so powerful, how the sun produces energy, why energy policy matters. Rigor is still there, units, variables, calculations, but now the abstraction grows out of meaning.

Let's shift to another area, how students express reasoning. Neutral STEM classrooms often reward, certainty, speed, and single path solutions, but real stem. It's messy. Collaborative, iterative redesign invites students to explain thinking through diagrams or models, work collaboratively. Treat errors as data show reasoning, not just answers.

Pause and reflect. Do you reward only correctness? Whose strategies get affirmed publicly? Do students get to think out loud or only perform certainty? This is where the myth of neutrality can do the most damage. Time to test heavy language, single answer tasks. These often measure speed and familiarity with academic norms.

Not understanding a redesigned approach separates what students know from how they show it. If the goal is understanding, students might demonstrate. Models, oral explanations, lab design, real world applications, reflections on iterations. Rigor doesn't disappear. It becomes more precise. Pause again. Think of one assessment you currently use.

What is it actually measuring? What alternative evidence could show the same understanding students come with rich experiential knowledge, mechanics systems, materials, technology. Yet schools often don't recognize it because it's informal. Redesign honors that knowledge as real data. Pause once more.

Whose experiences are treated as technical knowledge in your classroom? What expertise goes unseen? STEM classrooms often reward, silence, individual work and emotional restraint. But in many cultures, collaboration and expressive engagement are signs of learning, not distractions. Redesign means recognizing productive noise, teaching collaboration, questioning our own assumptions.

Ask yourself, why do I associate intelligence with speed? Why does silence feel like learning? How has my training shaped what I see as legitimate knowledge? This isn't about guilt, it's about growth. Culturally grounded STEM is not less rigorous, it's more accurate. It reflects how knowledge is actually created through human experience, collaboration, curiosity, and context.

When we move beyond neutrality, students don't need to earn belonging before learning. Recognition opens the door, redesign transforms the system. Thanks for spending this time with me today. Take what resonated, reflect on it, and bring it into your practice in ways that make sense for you and your students.

And remember, STEM is not just what we teach, it's how we understand. The world. Thanks for spending time with me on the Cultural Context of Knowledge podcast. If you know someone who would benefit from this conversation, pass it along. It helps more people find the work and subscribe wherever you listen, and I'll meet you back here.

Next episode. I'm Donald Easton-Brooks. Until next time.

This transcript was generated from the episode recording and may contain small transcription errors.