Advancing Critical Perspectives and Possibilities in STEM Education

Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together critical voices seeking to examine and address persistent inequities across a wide range of STEM education contexts. While scholarship in STEM education has flourished in recent years, bringing to the fore important insights informing both policy and practice, there remain significant trends of inequalities spanning areas such as gender, sexuality, race, disability, language, and class.

Without dismissing the significant body of work that has documented these issues and proposed pathways forward, we argue that meaningfully disrupting entrenched,  systemic  inequities in STEM education requires a more radical and diverse ensemble of approaches. This necessitates breaking disciplinary orthodoxies, challenging the neoliberal imperatives supporting particular forms of research in STEM education, and expanding our horizons of possibilities for scholarship in this broad field, across theoretical, methodological, and empirical modes.

Advances in the broader fields of critical educational studies, critical theory, ethnomathematics, feminist science education, decolonial theory, and more, have presented promising innovations that help to further uncover and challenge issues of inequity as well as facilitate meaningful reflection on how ‘standard’ or ‘mainstream’ approaches to STEM education research can inadvertently perpetuate inequities.

This Special Issue, therefore, aims to consolidate, extend, and give voice to these diverse perspectives, across multiple levels of education (early childhood to higher education) and across formal and informal contexts (e.g., primary schools and youth work organizations). In doing so, it seeks to advance both critical perspectives and generative possibilities for addressing issues of inequity in STEM.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Empirical research that addresses inequity in STEM Education through critical analyses of educational experiences, practices or structures, drawing on perspectives of teachers, students, parents, policy actors, community organizations, and more.
• Studies which adopt critical theoretical approaches to STEM education research across conceptual, theoretical, empirical, or meta-style research.
• Case studies of innovative pedagogical/policy/practitioner approaches to addressing inequalities in and across formal and informal educational settings.
• Critical policy sociologies in STEM education that seek to address political influences such as neoliberalism, conservatism, gendered, sexed or racialized oppressions, addressing social justice concerns.
• Sociohistorical research that aims to present novel perspectives on the situated (i.e., at national, local, international levels) evolutions of STEM curricula, policy, practices, or discourses.
• Explorations of theory–practice tensions and dilemmas in pursing critical transformations in STEM education, including, for example, teacher education, special educational needs, and beyond.
• Essays, systematic reviews, meta-synthesis, or meta-analysis papers addressing critical issues in STEM education.

Dr. Thomas Delahunty
Dr. Máire Ní Ríordáin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• critical perspectives
• critical possibilities
• inequalities
• social justice
• STEM education