 introduce Professor Sarah Tolberg, who's an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at University of Canterbury in Ottawa, New Zealand. Previously an associate professor in teaching, learning and social cultural studies at the University of Arizona. Sarah represents a very important strand of scholarship within science education that is concerned with equity and social justice, which Ayush beautifully introduced us to. And of course it takes on the task of critically investigating and interrogating mainstream STEM education practices, which concerns itself with what is called science in the laboratory. This strand of work politicizes science education by placing it within the larger oppressive political economic regimes which perpetuate to quote from one of her publications, New Liberal Capitalism, Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and New Global Appetites between haves and haves not. Sarah is a former science teacher and environmental educator and has worked with students in multilingual contexts. In the USA, Ottawa, New Zealand, Mexico, Guatemala. Her scholarship draws from feminist studies, anti-colonial and critical theory, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical pedagogy to explore possibilities for justice through science and education in the Anthropocene. Some of her current projects include post-digital pedagogies of care, the Pangarau Unleashed, a multiple case study of de-streaming secondary mathematics, Freire, a praxis of radical love and critical hope for science education, and reimagining science education in the Anthropocene. She co-leads the Ototahi Food Justice Research Collaborative, the UC Community and Urban Resilience Initiative, and the UC Learning for Earth Futures Research Cluster. The title of Professor Tolbert's talk today would be Science Education as a Social Movement. The talk would be for about 45 minutes, after which we will have 15 minutes of discussion. So over to you, Professor Tolbert, welcome. And once again, I'm very glad to have you here. So there are questions that spring up during the presentation. Please feel free to type it into the chat box. We could take it later. Or we could have Q&A for the designated time afterwards. So feel free to put in your questions there, as and when you have them. Over to you, Professor Tolbert. Thank you so much, Ashwathi. It's really an honor to be here. And I'm looking for it again, as I mentioned before, to having some rich transnational discussions and learning from all of you, because I know there's a lot of rich context for thinking about social movements in India, historically and also currently given the current political climate. So I'm just going to talk to you first a little bit about my background and how I came to this and how I continue to think about my role as a science educator. And I've broadened the focus of the talk to look at STEM education, because I know some of you are coming from disciplines other than just science. And my work is actually not limited to just science education. It spans across science, mathematics, as well as the humanities, as Ashwathi mentioned earlier too. My background is actually in environmental studies. That's how I started. I got my undergraduate degree in environmental studies at the University of Colorado and worked in environmental and outdoor education for a short time before I became a classroom science teacher in New York City. And if I'm if I'm being completely honest, I had kind of hoped for a social studies position at the time that science education was a shortage area. And I had a lot of science coursework in my undergraduate degree. So so I took a role as a science educator, science teacher in a junior high school in the South Bronx of New York City, predominantly African American and Puerto Rican students, and a highly economically marginalized community at that time. And my background started out there and I and I really enjoyed the work. And as I'm sure all of you have experienced just being an educator is so fulfilling and being able to work with such amazing young people and students who you know, who make you want to get out of bed and go to work every day. This is the most fulfilling experience I think that I've had in my life being in that in that role. But I started to feel disempowered after a couple of years. I started to feel like I was I was doing an okay job as a science teacher. But I started to feel like it wasn't enough because I looked at the structural conditions of inequity in which my students lived and the socio political conditions that they faced and I saw them go from the junior high and you know, going and really loving science into the local zoned high school where many of them would drop out at an early age. And I also saw conditions of like economic oppression that were institutionalized and part of the fabric of society. So I started asking myself the big questions, what does it mean for me to be a science educator in this space and how can I affect change in not just my own classroom but in the broader socio political context that that constrain opportunities to learn for the students who I love so much. And so I left and went and explored a few different possibilities with that particular frame of mind. And that's kind of where I've stayed. Those big questions of, you know, how do we intervene in the socio political conditions that constrain opportunities to learn for marginalized students who just are phenomenal people, right, and deserve so much better. So how do we disrupt that because there's a history of oppression that it's not, you know, it's not just within one generation, how do we work as part of an intergenerational struggle to to disrupt those conditions and transform them for the better. So I've been thinking about that since I started teaching in the 90s all those years ago and, you know, learned so much from from so many people along the way. I later went and worked in Mexico and Guatemala as Shwati mentioned an adult education and then came back and was a classroom teacher in Atlanta Georgia for a while before I went to get my PhD in science education at University of California at Santa Cruz. So I'm interested in the relationships between truth power and science education and Shwati Ravindran who just introduced me thank you who's also done great work in this space and Jesse Basil have have written recently about this in the context of India and just reflecting on the relationships between science education government and how science is used as the sort of a form of truth with the capital T and government represents power and wheels power and sometimes in the name of science, you know, as truth with the capital T. So it's really important as science educators to understand the politics of education but the politics of governance more broadly and the role of science and science education in that space. And I think Rulon who's written for science for the people has also said part of that understanding is to see the influence of politics in science and science education and to help us, you know, deconstruct that and then reimagine the ways that or the opportunities for practicing science from adjusted oriented lens. And this is not something that one person can do. This is not the work of a hero and I think that that's what really I think resonates with me because as a young teacher starting out, you know, in my early 20s in the South Bronx thinking that I had to fix it all somehow. And that's not how social change works. We have to see ourselves as part of a collective of people, reimagining the way that we practice science and the way we practice STEM education and so I'm so happy to be here to have the opportunity to hopefully chat with you about that as well and learn more about what you're doing in your own context. Yes, as we've written before, we look at how, you know, we feel as if there really is a socio political turn for STEM education for science education right now and has been for the past several years that we think that there are all kinds of movements around the world, whether small or large of people who are saying, you know what, we're not going to we're not going to tolerate science or education as a tool of social reproduction that we want. We want a different kind of education and we want a different kind of science. We want an education for liberation and we want a science for liberation. And so we see this bubbling up around the world in so many different places. And furthermore, we see this in the more recent context of the COVID pandemic. We can see how new opportunities for living well together for solidarity and commitment to others being guided by an ethic of care and equitable distribution of resources and pluralistic science that can help us all live better together that we've seen this emerge from the COVID pandemic. So while the COVID pandemic has been heartbreaking in so many ways, we've also seen opportunities for collective ethics of care and a new kind of collective politics. So just going back a little bit to thinking about what is this idea mean for us as science educators, because a lot of us do work within pretty small like particular classrooms or schools or institutions, for example. So we want to go from the big to the small for the micro to the macro and back and forth. And so for me, one of the projects that I've been involved with has I was called community engagement and youth leadership through science education. So I worked with a local teacher for four years in Tucson, Arizona, and we worked around the science curriculum for the state of Arizona. And we actually worked to make it a more justice oriented curriculum and start with local and global justice issues as what centered our curriculum and instruction. So we looked at things that mattered to the young people, we asked them what they were interested in learning. We looked to local organizations to better understand what were the local environmental justice issues that students and their families were facing that were the most pressing issues, as well as what are the local environmental justice justice issues in the state and historically, and we designed a curriculum around issues of water contamination, water rights, we looked at urban, the urban heat island effect, for example, how families in the south side of the town had less tree cover than those living in the more affluent economically resourced north side of town, and living in a desert, those kinds of things matter in terms of the way that we experience heat, particularly when you know, it's over 40 degrees Celsius in Arizona in the summertime. So we partnered with organizations that could help support us do this work again, because it's not just about me or the teacher in that one classroom, it's looking to draw from what others are doing in the community and across the state and in the nation. So we partnered with several folks who are already working on this issue for a while and we did a few field trips, one was to the Hopi Reservation in Black Mesa in Second Mesa. So we went to the Hopi Reservation and heard from Hopi Elders speak about their struggle with water rights and activism. Some students worked to create to secure funding for a bridge that they needed to get to school, because during monsoon season they were unable to get to their school. So they designed a unit, we designed a unit around that and they were actually able to successfully get their design funded. So just thinking about, and as one of the students said, thinking about all the different groups that you can work with makes you feel like you can actually make a difference in the world. So that's what a lot of the students took away from this, this feeling empowered through collective action and feeling like, oh yeah, there are others around me who are doing this work and who I can lean on and who I can become involved with to see change or at least learn, better understand the problems that are facing us. So related to that, another project that I've been involved with in Tucson, Arizona was called Sociopolitical Praxis in Science Education. And this project was really interesting because this was a bit wider. This was not just working with one teachers, but we worked with several teachers across multiple schools in the Tucson area who were science teachers and looking to do something different, looking to teach against the grain, to teach in non-traditional ways, not just to teach the standard decontextualized curriculum, but to really look at things that matter to students and things that matter to them. So sustainability issues, environmental justice issues, so they were working together to create lessons around local justice issues. But at the same time, there was a larger movement, a sociopolitical movement, teacher resistance movement going on in the U.S. and in Arizona. And so through these small acts of resistance, they found that they had to make space for, right, in their own schools, you know, finding ways to justify teaching from this non-traditional perspective. They also found ways to connect with each other and become part of these more spectacular resistance movements. And so they became involved in what was called the Red for Ed movement at the time, and the teachers went and strike for several days, and they marched to the Capitol and demanded better working conditions, but also better learning conditions for their students and for all the staff who worked in Arizona schools. So they realized at the time, and one of the teachers who participated in this project with us said that they actually have a lot more freedom than they know, and that was another thing that came to them through working in solidarity with others, you know, that they became empowered through that understanding that you can work as part of a collective to effect change. Again, disrupting that idea or that sort of isolation of being a teacher where you just shut the door and teach your own classroom and do the best that you can. More recently, I've been looking at food justice issues, and this came up in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which a lot of people even here in Otatahi Christchurch and in New Zealand are experiencing what we sometimes call hidden hunger, right, that access to food, but they don't have access to food that, you know, for example, is freshly grown or produce or organic foods or things like that. And so we're looking at ways to connect with local organizations as part of a broader food justice effort. But we're also interested in the ways in which participating in these food justice efforts or those food commons, as a lot of these spaces are being called, where everyone's allowed to come and take food from the commons if they need it. We're looking at ways that this also creates social and emotional well-being or enhances social and emotional well-being as people come together in these spaces, not just to learn how to grow food, but also to reconnect with each other. So that's been really promising work that just getting started. The work that I've been doing in mathematics over the past couple years relates to what's called tracking. This is something that's very common in a lot of countries around the world, but from what I've been told in India, it's not as much of a thing, especially not until you get to upper secondary from my understanding, but you can tell me later what's going on around this. But essentially, this is when students are placed into either lower mathematics courses, low-level mathematics courses versus advanced mathematics courses. That doesn't just happen in mathematics. It often also happens in science and other subject areas. But what happens if you look at the data on who gets access to the lower ability or the calm ability, but lower mathematics courses versus higher mathematics courses, it's very highly racialized, where you see students of racial minority background in the lower tracks or in the lower streams and white students and often more white male students in the higher tracks or the higher streams of those mathematics courses. So in partnership with a group called Takona Teraki, they're a Maori Futures Collective, indigenous rights activists who have basically looked at all the data from what happens in streaming in New Zealand schools and said that this is a racist practice because if you look at the outcomes, the outcomes are racist. More Maori and Pacifica students are in the lower-level mathematics classes than in the higher-level mathematics classes. And this is a pattern of inequity that's existed for decades. So if a pattern of inequity has existed for decades and despite what we try to do by getting more Maori and Pacifica students in more advanced mathematics classes, and it's not having an effect, it's a racist practice. It continues to reinforce racial hierarchies. So we're basically saying that this cannot be allowed to happen anymore. So we've been working with schools across New Zealand, across Aotearoa, who are on the journey of streaming. So they're looking at, yes, they've accepted that this practice is inequitable and that they can't support it anymore. So now they're thinking, what does it look like to do it differently? Because the minister of education has said, this is a racist practice, we're not going to tell you how to do it. We're going to say that it's racist, but we can't mandate that you do anything different. Now, because of that, we're working with schools who are actually already on the journey of doing this and hoping that they can create and provide models, that they can be leaders in the space, so that other schools who are sort of thinking about how, if they were to stop streaming, what would that look like and how would they do it? They can look at these other schools that we've been working with and see that it is possible and there's not just one way to do that, but there are multiple ways to do this work. There are multiple ways to de-stream mathematics and so basically we come together. It's a partnership of, as you can see, multiple schools and organizations and university researchers and we meet periodically and we share resources. It's a collective where we come together, they talk about their individual journeys and struggles and opportunities that they're facing as individual schools and then another school might have a different kind of perspective to offer the school, to help support them in that struggle and help them move forward and vice versa. So it's a really supportive space where people can feel like, I mean part of the problem of being at the front of a movement that's not very popular with some people is the feeling of isolation, right? So being able to come together and share and talk through what they're doing and how to bring others into the movement successfully is really, really important for them and for us. And related to that, I've done some similar work in science education with secondary science teachers around and this was mostly in the United States. So they were all in different places around the US and we came together and loosely called ourselves a teacher empowerment collective where we would meet once a month online and we started with just two teachers and then myself and Alexis Chandel as the university partners and just meet once a month and part of it was Alex and I actually at the time when we first started out because I was working with a teacher from the community engagement project and she was working with a teacher in Rochester, New York and we wanted the community. So we came together as just a group of four to share ideas and we thought all these two teachers have got to meet each other because they have so much in common. They're both trying to do this work and they would have so much to say and do and ways to support each other. So we started with just those two teachers and then the group grew over the years and eventually we had anywhere from 10 to 12 science teachers meeting together once a month and each teacher would take a different session so that we'd rotate each month and a teacher would leave the session and what they would do is they would do a reflective piece of writing just a couple of paragraphs in a Google doc the day before the meeting. We would all read what they had written and we call these critical incidents so they would share something that was going on with them in relation to teaching for social justice or youth empowerment and share a little bit about what happened and what they did and then we would come together and talk about that critical incident. So it'd be one or two teachers each meeting who was facilitating this dialogic conversation around a critical incident that occurred in their own in their own institution in their own educational space. So things were you know we talk about things from just a classroom activity that they've done that they wanted to share and get feedback on all the way to people who were feeling you know like they needed support because their institution was giving them a hard time for the work that they were doing and so we talked about how to navigate those kinds of situations. So it's really about again building solidarity and drawing from our collective professional and personal expertise to support teaching science for social justice. So moving from these smaller school based initiatives or small groups of people and thinking now about what does it mean to go from that to build a movement I think is a really important question for all of us and I've actually been thinking about this since 2018 at the science educators for equity and diversity and social justice conference which is an organization that a few of us started in 2016 but we didn't have our first conference until 2018 because we felt like we also needed a space that was outside the mainstream science education institution or outside the mainstream education research communities in which we felt we didn't get enough support for what it means to do this kind of work and what it means to teach for social justice what it means to be an academic for social justice or an educator for social justice or a little bit of both or a community organizer and and what does that look like and how can we how can we build community around that because the small spaces behind the scenes that we found and those more professional mainstream organizations just didn't feel like quite enough wasn't quite what we needed so not finding what we needed we built our own and and so far we started with I think a handful of members and now we've grown to 500 members but at that first conference in 2018 after we had you know we're so happy to have met each other and had these three days together where we all shared different activities or different research or different you know units and different types of curriculum that we were working on we asked the question of each other where do we go from here and one of our attendees at the time one of our seeds members Sidharth Barath he said we all need to be thinking like a movement so when we leave here how can we each think like a movement when we go back to our our own locations and that's something that's stuck with me since then as well so thinking about how do we build movements how do we start where we are and there's some great examples too for example the seeds organization it started out very small it's just a handful of us who are who are working together to just put on a conference once a year and then from there trying to build and bring in more things that we can do to stay connected and provide support for each other so we're now having activist organizing sessions or in the U.S. for example how to push back against the anti critical race theory laws for example but there are other organizations as well there's abolition science and those are free podcasts radio podcasts basically that you can find online that's a website where Latoya Strong basically and colleagues interview people who are doing work in and anti-racist science and those are really great resources and available to the public and there's also science for the people which is another great organization that started in the 60s as kind of a response to science and technology being used for the war machine essentially and so they they started science for the people in the 60s to create a space for science enthusiasts and scientists to really be committed to science for for human flourishing for ecological flourishing and they I think we're pretty active around the 1960s and then kind of didn't do much for a while but have been reignited more recently and now are producing magazines again and have chapters I think and have chapters all over the U.S. but also internationally I believe so looking at ways that we can connect with these larger movements and thinking about what are the opportunities in your own in your own context that you know could be opportunities for movement building and finally just reflecting on this thinking about being the change communicating the change and organizing the change which is something that Satish Kumar has said and talking about how great movements to transform societies don't start from the center they do start in these small places you know so oftentimes I think what we're what we're doing seems so overwhelming but this is how these great movements start this is how social change originates this is how it looks like to do science differently or to do science education differently it starts in these small places and as Gina Anion has said those smaller acts of resistance can constitute the spade work for a larger social movement for economic and educational justice as we've seen with a lot of our own teachers that I've worked with I think one of the challenges and maybe we can talk a little bit about this if you're interested is the challenge of becoming undisciplined so the challenge of thinking outside our disciplinary boundaries or outside the ways in which we let our discipline police us or the way we've been trained police us to think inside the box and not outside of it you know messages we tell ourselves when we want to teach um maybe something that's more justice oriented about it not being sciency enough for example because as Sheila Jason office said disciplines cling tightly to their paradigmatic boundaries reflect reluctant to reflect too deeply on whether they're asking the right questions so I think it's important for us to reflect on when we're doing that to ourselves and to each other um yeah and then from there how do we reimagine STEM knowledge and practice for for solidarity and collective well-being as part of a wider social movement we've written about the ways in which political imagination and love aren't necessary tools that help us see those different possibilities so if we start with our political imaginations and political love and and hopes and dreams about a different kind of world in a different way to be that that's when we see these different possibilities it starts with idealism idealistic thinking and um related to that I've been working with Alejandro Frausto as Seves and Beto de Torres Olave on looking at drawing inspiration from Ferreira's work from Paulo Ferreira's work in science education and celebrating his centenary last year so thinking a little bit more as well about the small pockets of resistance that we are involved with and how they can be connected to international solidarities as an active love in STEM so again reaching out across national borders to see what people are doing and how we can support each other around the globe as as an active love in science education as a transgressive possibility and as a way to to cultivate solidarities toward a science for the people from below in the service of liberation and that's where I'll stop because I really just I want to have us a few minutes to talk with you and um have an opportunity to hear things that are going on with you or for you to talk to each other about your successes and struggles or questions in this space so I will just open it up I'll stop sharing and if you'd like me to go back to the slide feel free to ask I'm happy to do that um yeah I'll just open it up to questions now um I do see a question here actually from thanks Ishan um from Sunithra if there's time I'm interested in knowing the specifics of how detracking mathematics is being implemented just to understand ways to think about learning levels yeah so that's a really good question I think um it depends on the school but what a lot of schools are doing is looking at or drawing inspiration from complex instruction if you're familiar with that at all it's work that comes out of uh Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lothan's um work in mathematics but also Joe Bollard um they're working mathematics that looks at the ways in which um helping all students engage in high level mathematics through what they call like group worthy tasks are um actually help help to overcome their own lack of confidence to see that they can actually that they are capable of problem solving with support from their peers and so that's one one way that that I think people are addressing that um there's also work from Bobby Hunter um with Pacifica students here in Aotearoa New Zealand that's kind of a similar type of project and that's called um designing mathematical inquiry communities I believe DEMIC they call it DMIC so there are a couple of different ways that people are doing that um but I think that's that's kind of the critical question that we're looking at right now in terms of working with the schools that we're working with um we're working with a couple of schools that are predominantly Maori serving schools who have never never tracked students anyway so they sort of provide this model of like well we've never done that you know because it's a smaller schooling environment plus it's um it's not really in aligned with their own ethical commitments right so so they're providing I think a lot of support to some of the other schools who are who are doing this as well but yeah great question there's also a question from Ishan uh where he asks what kinds of risks theoretical epistemological social and personal did you have to take throughout your work oh so many Ishan so many I mean it's so fascinating right because we read about the policing of disciplinary boundaries a lot right but when you see it in your own lived experience this is fascinating um I have uh I was told when I first did my my first job talk um after I completed my PhD that I shouldn't use the word sociopolitical in my job talk because I will never get a job so that was kind of one of the first times that I um that I experienced that I did anyway because I thought to myself I don't want to work anywhere where I'm not allowed to talk about sociopolitical stuff you know like I'll just go back and I'll go back to classroom teaching and I love classroom teaching so if I can't get a job being a professor doing the work that I want to do then I'll go back to the classroom and yeah so um that's one example another example is um when I've publicly pushed back on some of the mainstream organizations I've literally gotten phone calls of people who tell me like I'm gonna lose my job because no one is going to let me get tenure or people are going to start to talk and if I ever want to move from the institution where I was um nobody will hire me because um I'm out there saying all these things about um you know critiquing mainstream science education for example and again it's sort of well I mean I don't want to work at a place I'm not going to hire me because I have an opinion about about something like you know higher education should be about um being able to to entertain these radical ideas I mean we have to protect that and we we don't protect it if we don't practice it so we absolutely have to push back but it is hard right it is really really hard um I think that when I did go out and look for a position um there were certain certain institutions that were really looking for someone who could fit inside the box of mainstream science education so you know that you know they're not going to be interested in in your work or in my work for example and so it's kind of coming to terms with with that and and really um you know being able to make a strong commitment and I think I see it partly as doing what we what we possibly can within our own arena of power like my choices might have been available to me maybe they're not as available to someone else um but we do what we can so that the person who comes after us has a bit of an easier time right so it's hard and we push back and it's a struggle and you get a lot of backlash but maybe the next person who comes along has an easier time and that that kind of helps too as well thank you Ayush has a question I'll read it out I'm curious to hear more about challenges you have faced in starting these movement spaces and also are there specific challenges pertaining to forming solidarities across lines of power and privilege would love to hear some stories of how you navigated these challenges thanks Ayush yeah I mean I think um there are always challenges in any movement space and particularly how do you build solidaries solidaries across power and privilege is a really important question and that's um that's something that I think is really important anywhere particularly important here where we have like intersectional struggles but it doesn't look the same for everyone right for example we have um indigenous um communities here Māori communities in Aotearoa New Zealand who have particular um histories and particular kinds of justice struggles that are really really important that are different from refugee and immigrant background communities who also have really really important particular justice struggles so I think part of the challenge is bringing people together and being able to listen you know practice radical listening but I think that that happens through um you know just a lot of of attention to being a community first and then developing a collective platform second right so I think it's challenging when the politics are so urgent to build these intersectional coalitions um but in order to for those intersectional coalitions to stay together and not fall apart uh there has to be time to just you know come together and be with each other and get to know each other and develop relationships of trust um or at least relationships of connection of feeling you know um like there's a there's there's a mutual benefit let's say of all of us being in this space together um but before we kind of develop a platform around that we have to we have to feel good about who we are together as a collective and we have to spend some time developing our collective identity so I think that startup like that visioning work that that mission of a new organization for example our new collective is really really important and some people might find that um takes away from those action oriented items but it's essential yeah um Ayush has a follow-up also curious about this so often uh academia rewards knowledge mining uh rather than creating social material changes in the lives of folks grants awards etc structure to prevent that kind of social material change what changes do you think are needed to academic structures to allow us to do that work yeah there are a lot of a lot of changes in academic structures that I think are needed and there are a lot of us who need to also be more transparent about the ways in which you can do it differently and um you know again again it's a it's a form of policing academics too right that you have to publish in certain journals you have to get certain types of grants in order to be a successful academic in order to keep your job and you have to be about knowledge production in very traditional sense um or very patriarchal sense of the word um so there there are a lot of people I think working to change this I think partly um part part of what we've done by establishing an organization is to change the narrative so that was part of our rationale for wanting to create something different because a lot of the narratives that we heard around that kind of um you know that talk that that socialization of of junior academics happens in those professional spaces and so we wanted to um create an organization that could help support a different kind of narrative and help people really enact it so by having a new organization like seeds for example we have people who are more established academics who can write tenure and promotion letters for those who are coming up um we have people who are serving as reviewers who are offering support rather than trying to police people um or make it really hard for people to publish so a lot of that type of work can be done as a community as well if we want academia to be different how do we make it different and I think that's part of the the larger project and and it is hard because there's so much work but again it's less work if we all do it together and and provide support for each other and talk about ways in which it can be done um yeah so I think that's still ongoing but I really do like um if you've read our Come Across Love Paperson's book on a third university is possible Love Paperson writes with Eve Tuck um under the name K. Wang Yang but um they also write about what it means to be a cyborg in a third university so not necessarily always being focused on reforming the institution because there's so much energy and it can be really like self-defeating that goes into reforming the institution and we need that we absolutely need that but also creating spaces to be cyborgs where we actually just use the tools of the institution for a particular like decolonizing purpose for example so I think that's a really good approach too to kind of and you know it's what like black feminism has talked about as well like working within the margins to affect change kind of under the radar um so so those things need to happen as well we support each other to to get the sort of you know publications or the grants or you know bringing junior scholars on board so that they can have what they need on their CV and have those experience as well to make sure that they're protected so that they can continue to do the justice-oriented work that's so important yeah thank you so much for that excellent after response thank you so much that was very very useful oh good good I mean I could talk all day about that one maybe some other time but thank you yeah it's a great question great question um there's a question from yeah sorry saying are you seeing something um were you saying I was looking at the questions you go ahead yeah yeah I mean if you'd like to read it out yourself that's no no you please go ahead I can drink my tea the next question is from professor Sugra can you elaborate how the pandemic had a silver lining especially as in India and many places online education has led to a learning loss and inequities yeah I mean I think that's a really good question I'm going to turn that one I'm going to say something about it but I'm also going to ask Ashwathi to elaborate because she and um Jesse Basil wrote a really beautiful piece about about some of that um and so I I will say that I mean it is really really hard like we we have to be kind of frank about the the many losses and the tragedy of it all and I think we are a lot of us still focused on on how that how the pandemic has exposed these broader persistent historical inequities and continue to work in that space and at the same time see how communities came together to help each other out I mean part of that was because the state isn't providing what they need to be providing so there's still a real critique to be had there about supporting the state but what happens when when the state isn't providing um is you can also see how communities care for each other and that kind of care becomes more visible even though it's it's still important to highlight uh the lack of of infrastructure and and the lack of support at those multiple levels Ashwathi did you want to say anything about that so um I my guess is that Professor Sugra has already read my the work that I did with Jesse on the pandemic in the Indian context but there I think we were mostly trying to explore the kinds of the power dynamics that emerged in the context of the pandemic especially around medical knowledge and medical systems you had a lot of controversies uh being reported especially in the media found space you had alopathy and then you had Ayurveda and there were questions around you know ways of validating knowledge for instance uh which became very moved uh in in in the debates in the debates within the public sphere so um so as Sarah was pointing out we were kindly interested in the questions of scientific knowledge and its nexus with the state uh and the the legitimation that of course it gained through the state and in the process how it's marginalized specific kinds of knowledge systems so um I mean if you'd like to read more I think I'll also share a link of the publication with you but I think there are more questions uh the next question is from Ankush have you come across instances when in process of building community people's personal identities conflict with collective identities and how do you navigate such conflicts in creating new collective identities this can be better negotiated when new communities being created but what happens when communities evolve over time with new with new members joining yeah those are great questions I mean yeah there are always going to be those organizational politics right that I think every every community and every organization has to continue to deal with and we kind of like we're going through that now um with seeds even just kind of reflecting on where we've been and where we've come and bumps along the way and and really taking time to to error all you know any concerns um that have come up along the way because we've just been working so hard to build and grow this new organization so we're in that process now of kind of taking time to reflect and sit back and talk about the good the bad and the ugly that's come out of it um and I think that that is really really important it's like family you know I mean family is complicated so you have to have times when you just you know you get to talk to each other more directly about um yeah about the the successes that you'd celebrate but also the conflicts that come up and certainly there are conflicts all the time because again these are intersectional communities and so you'll um well I think one of the things that we try to do is have norms so every meeting or every new get together for example or every time we're bringing new folks into a community like seeds for example we revisit our norms and talk about and our vision and talk about what we're about and why we're here together and as part of a collective I think there is a sense that at some point it's it has to be about the collective first but people have to feel like their individual interests are represented in the collective and then there has to be boundaries around what the collective is and what it isn't and I think that also happens um as as a new organization kind of forms or community forms and that can change over time right you can decide actually we're not so much about this we're also about this other struggle and broaden out to that as well um but it becomes collectively negotiated by I think being intentional about you know making sure that people are included in the community from the get-go like that the community is actually intersectional because I know there are times for example when you know I I've kind of wanted to be in solidarity for example particular indigenous movements or indigenous struggles but if you don't have the people in you know at the table who represent those spaces then you're you're bound to um to get it wrong I mean to be frank so I think just ensuring that you have that you're really intentional and and you're um reaching out to people to bring them in from the beginning is important and then continuing to create space and time and slow down to actually have those conversations as a family about how things are going um and then yeah be very intentional about how do we bring new members on board how do we help them understand the history of this organization but how do we also accommodate you know the um the new energy and new justice struggles that others might want to bring into this particular organization while also maintaining our focus in our own and our identity yeah so it's a constant process I mean I don't actually have one clear answer because I just think it's messy it's just messy it's just something you always you always are working on yeah other questions or thoughts these have been really really great questions thank you or experiences that others want to share I know it's kind of intimidating in an online room full of 90 people can I ask a follow-up sure please and that's that you know like like you were mentioning the various challenges and um and also you know the messiness inherent in these spaces um like how does one as a scholar as an activist as a movement builder like you know uh like keep their footing in a way right like and and and maintain uh meaning I don't mean to maintain a set path but by meaning it can sometimes feel like getting lost in this messiness in this complexity it feels like sometimes like you might be losing your footing right and so I'm wondering if you're resonating with that and if you have any comments on that kind of a how does one engage in that kind of self-care to be able to continue to do this work yeah so I feel like there's self-care right and then there is the issue of like yeah not getting lost in the messiness so I think not getting lost in the messiness like I do think there's something to be said for um having a really clear vision right having a kind of collective mission for an organization and being really clear about what we're about and what we're not um for example and this is just kind of a small example Danny Morales Doyle and I are are co-leading and I encourage you to submit co-leading a new section for science education on critical perspectives and so we had some extensive conversations about what is this and what is it not what is the space it can't be just a catchall for everything critical right it has to be a particular kind of space that protects the work that actually doesn't have a place elsewhere or where people can have the conversations that are difficult to have in other areas of mainstream science education research journals and so we had conversations around how we want this to be a place that really um challenges the politics of how things are done that's not just about inclusion and the status quo because there's a lot of research right now about inclusion and um and that stuff I think either you know there needs to be more space for it but it is getting increasingly more space but there isn't um a lot of protected space for people to have conversations about how to change the whole system or how to critique the system or you know things that really take a more historical and sociopolitical perspective on on change in science education so that's that's one thing I mean there is something to be said for you know determining or trying to find out and we did that as seeds as well like what are we and what are we not and um continue to do that and so I think it can be messy but it can't be a catchall for everything that's you know and so you do have to have a collective identity and that just takes a lot of work I think at the beginning um and that's co like co-generated with with people who are who are looking for that kind of space um as seeds we had that conversation around what do we want to be about but also how do we want to be right so it's not just about the content of the conversation it's about how we want to be with each other and we wanted to be very anti-hierarchical because we wanted to disrupt and be something different than the sort of traditional hierarchies of you know a very patriarchal hierarchies in in academia so we wanted that to be a space um that's anti-hierarchal which is very hard to do in an institution like academia where we all have these titles you know and their and power is there right like power differentials you can't get you can't actually work completely outside them so we have to call them out from time to time and recognize that they still play out um so yeah I think that's that's important and the self-care um we can't we can't do this work if we don't care for ourselves like we have to give ourselves permission I mean Angela Davis has written so much about this right and she's written more beautifully than I can articulate but that self-care is a radical act and we can't sustain ourselves without that so there are times when we have to say and that's part of the beauty of being part of a collective like I can't do this right now this is what I'm going through or I'm mentally and emotionally drained um and that's what allyship is about too like I feel like that's what what allies are there for um and good allies are there to kind of hold space um and take things from you that you can't carry all the time by yourself and so that's about like and it's about teaching people how to be good allies which I know could be exhausting work but I think that's the benefit of a community too is like look I don't need you to speak for me this is what I need you to do I'm like all right I'll step up I'll I'll take on that responsibility so that you can focus or that you can take the weekend off or um that kind of thing yeah so that um that self-care is a is a key part of of sustainable communities like the ones I've been talking about um we we won't we won't be able to keep doing this if we just burn out so you're doing the collective a favor when you need to step back and let someone else step in it's hard for us though isn't it because we feel like all the work is so urgent it's hard to step back but important thank you are there any further questions I just see one from Hamanshu here is someone from Hamanshu but I see also hi I'm here yes yes hi hi uh I am from West Bengal and uh I don't know whether my question will be relevant that's why I was hesitating like during this entire pandemic situation we have seen that many community-based initiative has I mean had propped up and they have started to work collectively particularly led by a few students from the other pre-university presidency university and all but the thing they are doing amazing work in the education particularly in the primary level education and all but the thing is that lots of insights are coming from that but those community people and young students they do not know how to translate gather those data or experiences and translate into something to send it to the larger platform so that people can understand that or at least get to know about that so I don't I was hesitating so this is not really a question in that sense but this is also I think is important that the works that are being done and particularly during pandemic situation communities I have seen particularly marginalized communities they the community members they have become really avar in many spaces about their children's education and all so they are giving their inputs which inputs are very important so like this is also I think they find a kind of struggle to translate the entire what should I say experience or whatever coming into some kind of academic language and put it in there I mean have my question is not very well formed so can you like can you give me some kind of any kind of like guidance or idea like how collective collectively we can actually do something in this space I mean how because those inputs are very important and intriguing as I have found yes so if I understand your question correctly it's that there are a lot of really great communities doing work important work but your question is about how to make sure that others can learn about it on the one hand and on the other hand that the work that families are doing to advocate for students is equally important and how to kind of take that into account and communicate that as well and and so is that correct do I understand that correct yes yeah I mean I think that's important I think part of the time like I see myself you know in my role as an academic and as as a researcher university researcher I always kind of wanted to do the work that's more participatory and I think that's really really important to do the participatory action research alongside so that I'm also vulnerable and not looking like the more educated other writing about people but to be fair there are times when communities actually just want me to do the research right because they're doing the activism and I'm the university professor and what they need is me to do the research and communicate the research out or document the thing that they don't have time to document because they're too busy doing the work so I think part of part of our role as researchers is that process of negotiation with the communities that we're working with how can we support in in the role that we hold so I mean I hold a position of power as a university professor right so I I can I might want to you know position myself as someone who's a participant observer or doing activist work but I actually need to prioritize what that community wants from me first so sometimes that's just documenting and I think that's part of the support that we can provide and there are different ways to do that like I've done I just wrote a piece recently on on plastic pollution and waste colonialism because in New Zealand we like to send all of our plastic waste out to other countries for recycling and so I've been doing a lot of like radio interviews around this issue of looking at systemic change and not not just exporting our problem for example and doing that public kind of engagements and those sharing of things that are going on I'm not necessarily an expert who's written about all those issues but I can share out what others in these activists and community groups are really working on what their struggle is and what they want others to hear and sometimes I'm the one who gets the platform to say the thing but while I'm saying the thing I can also you know give them credit for for what they're doing and and get support for the activism that's already going on so I think that that's a big part of it is just thinking about how can I in my role as an academic or in whatever role that you hold help communicate and share what's going on and sometimes it's about the writing sometimes it's about the speaking sometimes it's about just connecting teachers with each other and giving them a space to actually talk to each other so you know just inviting them to come talk to each other for example or inviting parents to come talk to each other and providing the food for that to happen or providing the space for that to happen so it's yeah it's about how can we be that facilitator to help connect to help communicate outward with all the great work that's going on and not all of that is stuff that's going to get us credit you know on our CVs but like that's that's the important work isn't it yeah thanks for that question there's a question in the chat box so okay this one from Hamanshu the I think that's you want me to read it out just do you have an advice for young researchers interested in working on social and environmental justice yes I um yeah so I have written a piece with Alexa Chandel and Alberto Rodriguez about thinking about relationships and positionality in justice oriented research and I can share that with you let me see if I can find the link I forget the name of it I think it's called relational responsibility or something like that in justice oriented science education research but also there is a great organization called the clear lab and that's the civic laboratory for activist science research I believe and I can send you that link as well let me see if I can find that one here yeah and that one is Max Liberon who runs that in Newfoundland and they have really amazing resources on their website including little videos and notes about about how to do that work let me see if I can just put that in the chat real quick here we go so I would start there because there's so many yeah so much that that we could talk about there but they they have this awesome set of resources and then the other one we'll share with you as well let's see here relational responsibility I think it's called where we write a lot about those like those issues with sometimes for example research is not always what communities want either and there are others who have written about the you know the idea of refusal research refusal so sometimes as an academic we're just there to support provide resources do the work of like like a lot papers and talks about in a third university is possible about redirecting resources from the university to communities but yeah there are lots of different ways to be in solidarity it's not just just one way so they're different different models of participatory research but it really starts with centering the agency and the desires of that of that community thank you very much for sharing those resources there's a question from Sunita I think she'd like to unmute you'd like to unmute and talk yeah yeah hi Sara I'm Dr. Sumita from Delhi University hello am I audible to you am I audible to you Sara I can yes yes I can am I audible to you yes hello yes yeah hello I'm from Delhi University yeah my question is related to parenting what I understand that teachers objectives curriculum books all are very necessary but during pandemic all parents just associated 24 by 7 with kids so is there is any awareness program regarding educational attitude of the parents towards the children and how to deal with it's 24 hour how much the parents have the space and what kind of policies provided by the by your government for right kind of parenting during pandemic situation kindly give your such kind of experiences during lockdown thank you so much thank you thank you Sunita actually um yeah I think for us when we were in lockdown was just short little short periods of time here and there but the teachers were the ones who were in charge of developing the online curriculum so I know for my own children they were just at home on their devices and the teachers were directing their learning and I was trying my best to help them but to be honest like I gave up I'm not the person to ask I was probably not the best lockdown parent because it gets really really hard when you're trying to manage the household and your own work responsibilities from home and my partner was an essential worker at the time so not always here um so yeah I mean I think that's a great question that we probably need to take the time to really think about like what kinds of supports and what kinds of not just learning resources but what kinds of like um you know social educational institutional supports can we provide for families to make that easier but I just I don't know I think that's really hard I'm yeah really sorry because we need all this quality education and then developing country like India and Pakistan Bangladesh you know there's the poor parenting they're not ever about the educational uh parameters of assessment they're just bothered about the conventional kind of assessment and during pandemic there is an alternative for the assessment process that they are very open minded that now the assessment is not only in the form of marking so uh there's an equality regarding assessment and parenting because there's a big problem that parents always have one mindset that their kids or their learners having a good marks and all of that kind of situation so during pandemic do you go for the parameter of assessment any any idea about assessment that how they deal with assessment because virtual assessment process is also playing a vital role for the quality education yeah I mean I I'm probably you know of course my response to this is going to be very much grounded in my own experiences and ideas about the world and those are very um limited to my own worldview right but I actually think that um like the pandemic is maybe a time to rethink what we're actually doing in education and how we're assessing learning and maybe it's a time to think about um ways in which children and families are involved in like rich um community oriented activities that just aren't valued by our educational system like supporting each other or learning how to cook or helping out with the younger children um you know with sometimes the older children end up helping out with the younger children's schoolwork or um you know playing playing together out on the streets for example like there's a lot of learning that happens in those spaces but it's not traditionally valued by um you know the way education is is currently set up and assessed so I I wonder a little bit about how things like that can make us think more broadly about what learning is and the ways in which like learning happens all the time and really rich learning happens in in ways that aren't aren't traditionally valued by classrooms and schools and how do we recognize that and support it and also I think recognize the ways in which families and are often just doing their best to survive in those types of situations day to day so that that would be my my question about not that but I don't have the answers thanks yeah it's important I think assessment and practice is important for the for the thinking and rethinking and just regenerate all this process because it's important we have to change our mindset first thank you so much Sarah thank you thank you very much I think we've overshot time so I'd like to thank you very much for taking us through your both your personal as well as academic journey and for introducing us to the work that you have done with communities of students and teachers with you to empowering them especially on matters such as food water and practices within mainstream STEM education which are racist so for me a key takeaway was the notion of social change as not being about practices as an individual but practice as a collective and specific ideas that you mentioned about the notion of undisciplining and imagining transgressive politics through science education so some very powerful ideas thanks a lot Sarah so we'll probably close the session now over to the