Wonder in the Science Classroom

Emily is a sociologist. She hated science at school. She was one of those people to whom science was a boring world of right or wrong answers, of doing experiments correctly. She was growing up queer in the 90s, the age of Madonna’s Erotica, a time when not fitting in was cool, was the thing to be, as hard as it was. Emily got low scores in science and spent her late teens working in gay clubs, returning to education at 23 to study sociology—finally finding a way to make sense of the world. Queer theory gave her a framework for understanding herself: where gender is performative (Butler, 1990), and sexuality is too. Emily now understands that the social world is not necessarily “real,” and that we all have a hand in (re)producing it all the time through the ways we speak about and act in it. Andrew is a science educator. He was raised in suburban Washington, DC, by a single mother, where money was always tight. The experiences in this workingclass environment shaped his understanding of social justice, particularly in terms of gender and class. In ninth grade, he moved in with his father to attend high school in an upper middle-class community. He didn’t fit easily into this new environment. He rebelled against the structure and banality of this suburban existence through punk and metal music and shunned anything remotely associated as “popular.” However, despite his angst toward this John Hughes-esque high school experience, life in suburbia as a straight, newly middle-class, white male presented few challenges. He attended university right out of high school and finished four years later with a degree in geology and a license to teach earth/physical science.