“All sciences are equals, but some sciences are more equal than others:” constructing children’s STEM education as a pedagogical need

This contribution presents a critical examination of the social construction of children’s STEM education as a pedagogical need, understood as an expression of the neoliberal paradigm in education (Burman, 2011). The work is grounded on the results of a content and discourse analysis of a sample of 100 Italian online texts concerning the relationship between children and STEM education. As suggested by Chesky and Goldstein (2018), a lot of what is learned about STEM and its educational implications comes from media productions on the topic. The data analysis sought to answer two main research questions: - What type of texts, and with what contents and characteristics, are disseminated online concerning the relationship between children and STEM education? - What kinds of discourses are socially constructed through these texts and through what discursive strategies? The content analysis aimed to answer the first research question by "mapping" the discursive territory with respect to the following variables, coded in a mixed inductive-deductive fashion (Saldaňa, 2012): typology of text; children’s age, where reported; gender perspective, where reported; generic or explicit target of the text (e.g., parents, educators, generic reader, etc.); subject of the enunciation (i.e., institutional; popular – Benveniste, 1971); epistemic authority of the text (reference or lack thereof to scientific knowledge – Kruglanski et al., 2009). Instead, discourse analysis has been mobilized to try to illuminate some of the discourses constructed as interpretive pedagogical categories, with attention to the rhetorical and framing strategies used (Goffman, 1974), the possible construction of social identities of the subjects these discourses speak of (Fairclough, 1995), as well as their "manifest" and "implicit" meanings (Antelmi, 2006). Findings show the rhetorical construction of STEM education as a social and pedagogical need, within a larger social imaginary fabricated through popular as well as institutional and scientific accounts (Carter, 2017; Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015) becoming part of a set of taken-for-granted "pedagogical certainties" (Caronia, 2014). At an explicit level, by calling into play the role of parents, educators, and society at large, fostering children’s STEM education is profiled as a highly relevant and rather imperative goal. Indeed, reference is made to the importance of guiding children’s education with a future and career-oriented perspective. More subtly, benefits of STEM are enunciated, but no mention is made of any sciences other than those part of the acronym, yet failing to acknowledge the premises behind such a choice. Such an approach ratifies an epistemology according to which when speaking of "sciences" we are referring to a specific and delimited area of knowledge, which focuses only on certain epistemic objects and not others, leaving behind human and social sciences and their contribution, constructed as “less useful” compared to technical-scientific disciplines, in line with a tendency already described by Nussbaum (2011). This work, while proposing a possible lens through which reading the phenomenon, aims to interrogate the implicit assumptions that discourses on children’s STEM education come with, beyond polarized accounts, yet critically acknowledging the social, historical, cultural, and political nature of such discourses.