How does Nora’s trajectory of becoming matter to our collective futures? Science is under threat from powerful economic and political actors who find its recent findings on issues like climate change disruptive to their profits and who have launched campaigns to discredit science and scientists. In the face of these threats, scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the March for Science are fighting back—working to educate publics and build alliances. However, does it matter if initiatives and investments to promote science education and open up STEM fields to a more diverse and representative range of our populations are grounded in what I have called tales of learning in four modes instead of in the kind of trajectories of semiotic becoming displayed in Nora’s case (as well as those of Ben and Matt that I have not reported on here)? I believe it does.

The National Research Council (NRC) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a series of reports between 2007 and 2013, culminating in the publication of the two-volume Next Generation Science Standards. However, one report in this series hit a radically different note that aligned more with a semiotics of becoming. The fate of that report is depressingly instructive.

Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits, which was published by the National Research Council in 2009, described science as activity that occurs and is learned in the home, community organizations, and public museums as well as in school; that involves people of all ages, abilities, and cultural identities; and that includes activities that are unmarked (like having pets, fishing, watching the sunset, collecting stuffed animals) as well as marked (like interacting with an exhibit in a science museum or participating in a local astronomy club).

Here are the four strands that appeared in the 2007 Taking Science to School, also by the National Research Council (first on page 2 and then referenced and repeated multiple times throughout the document) and that reappeared unchanged in their 2012 publication, Framework for K–12 Science Education (254):

1. Knowing, using, and interpreting scientific explanations of the natural world.
2. Generating and evaluating scientific evidence and explanations.
3. Understanding the nature and development of scientific knowledge.
4. Participating productively in scientific practices and discourse.

Between those two reports Learning Science in Informal Environments proposed expanding and revising the strands to a six-strand framework:

1. Experience excitement, interest, and motivation to learn about phenomena in the natural and physical world.
2. Come to generate, understand, remember, and use concepts, explanations, arguments, models, and facts related to science.
3. Manipulate, test, explore, predict, question, observe, and make sense of the natural and physical world.
4. Reflect on science as a way of knowing; on processes, concepts, and institutions of science; and on their own process of learning about phenomena.
5. Participate in scientific activities and learning practices with others, using scientific language and tools.
6. Think about themselves as science learners and develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science. (p. 4)

The first and sixth strands that Learning Science proposed are new; they highlight issues of affect and identity, sandwiching the four derived from Taking Science to School. However, the middle four strands were also significantly revised. Compare for example strand 3 of the original four with the corresponding strand 4 of the revised six, and you can see greater elaboration, the shift between "scientific knowledge" and "science as a way of knowing," and a focus on learner reflection.

Subsequent reports basically ignored Learning Science’s core arguments for what they labeled "the affective domain" or limited the affective domain to issues of cultural diversity. The erasure of home, community, and institutions (other than school) and of the personal is both striking and predictable. I say predictable in part because disciplinarity, especially science, has long been discursively constructed and engendered in opposition to the everyday worlds of home and community. However, it is also predictable because the Next Gen Science Standards are so ideologically grounded in what I have been calling tales of learning.

Let me illustrate what I think is at stake with another story. After Nora completed her BA, she joined a zoology/psychology lab at the University of British Columbia to pursue her PhD. The principal investigator of the lab focused on the neuroendocrine systems of zebra finches and did groundbreaking work on fast, local synthesis of hormones in the brain. When Nora got to Vancouver, Nora, Julie, and I were talking on the phone one night about books we might buy for her as she got up to speed in the lab's work. She mentioned wanting, for example, a comprehensive book on zebra finches. In the conversation, Julie and I realized that Nora really didn't understand the basic physiology of neurons. We were surprised and a bit worried. It seemed like basic knowledge to be missing a few weeks into graduate work in a neuroscience lab.

Nora got books and read up. The next year she won a three-year National Science Foundation Fellowship that supported her graduate study and research. She completed her PhD in four years, got a one-year post-doc in France, and is now in a second post-doc at the University of Maryland, College Park. As of May 2018, she has 22 publications (12 as first author, including her dissertation).

I may sound like a proud parent (and I am), but that really isn't my point. My question is: Would anyone rationally design a curriculum leading to graduate work in neuroscience that would not include a basic knowledge of neurons? If acceptance to graduate school were dependent on a test, would questions on neuron physiology not have been on the test and would Nora have been likely to have fared poorly on such questions? In the dominant tale of learning, of testable, graded knowledge needed to advance to next steps in a domain, I suspect Nora does not succeed. In the world of becoming, she did.

Contrary to the NextGen description of learning to argue from evidence, a trajectories-of-semiotic-becoming perspective suggests people don't get into science to make claims, they make claims because they're being scientists. Where the Next Gen standards claim that the affective domain is "of course important" but not relevant for guiding school performance expectations, I am arguing that what they labeled the affective domain is critical and the 500 pages of performance expectations are an empty shell in comparison. I'm arguing that emerging identity and emerging affective orientations lead learning, that Nora's becoming a biologist has been woven out of her love of animals and time spent with pets, her walking and kayaking in nature, our family bird watching, our family dinner table talk, her time in labs, her field work experiences in Uganda and Australia, her budding relationship and marriage to Ben, her friendship and collaboration with Matt, her experiences with music, her early engagements with children’s science books and nature programs on TV, and much more.

"Becoming," here, aligns with Karen Barad's argument for the notion of intra-activity—a terminological twist to emphasize that everything is always becoming, intra-acting, not already made and just inter-acting. Intra-actions, Barad explains, do not happen in space and time, but instead are "the dynamics in which spatiality and temporality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions" (179, italics in original). Contrasting Barad's theories with the Common Core Standards image of a step-wise progression through fixed stages along set paths toward a given and predictable future, Nordquist identifies two conceits of Common Core ideology:

the first conceit imagines a student's academic literacy development can be separated from their daily travel to and from school, their part-time jobs, their educational history and desires for the future. And the second figures locations of education—classrooms, school buildings, districts, grade levels, and so on—as predetermined and bounded containers of educational activity. (11)

Nordquist’s mention of part-time jobs is particularly striking in relation to Ben’s pathways into biology. Ben took a job in a pet store in high school and quickly became fascinated with salt-water fish and aquariums. He bought one with his earnings, then another, and soon became the workplace expert on managing the complex ecology of salt-water tanks. He read intensely and attended pet store conferences where he went to sessions led by PhD biologists and chemists about managing salt water tanks. Ben came from a non-academic family (his father, a policeman; his mother, an office manager), but one very involved in outdoor activities (camping, sailing). In interviews, he said he decided to become a biologist because of his high school experiences working in the pet store and its extensions into his daily life. In his first years as an undergraduate in biology, Ben was floundering some until he got into a fish lab (and quickly reorganized their fish tanks) and began attending, with Nora, graduate seminars in biology.

Barad argues that "what we need is something like an ethico-onto-epistemology—an appreciation for the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter" (185). As she opens her book reflecting on its writing and the implications of entanglement, Barad observes:

entanglements are not isolated binary co-productions as the example of an author-book pair might suggest. Friends, colleagues, students and family members, multiple academic institutions, departments and disciplines, the forests, streams, and beaches of the eastern and western coasts, the awesome peace and clarity of early morning hours and much more were a part of what helped constitute both this "book" and its "author." (x)

Becoming is entangled complexly, materially, historically: it calls on us to abandon narrow notions that seek to fit people into narrow curricular imaginings and instead find ways to nurture diverse developmental pathways. As Melanie Yergeau highlights in her argument for rhizomatic neuroqueering, it calls on us to recognize neurodiversity as a resource for becoming. The final video notes some ways Nora has managed the affordances of her own forms of neurodiverse being in the world.

I noted at the end of "Research Methods" that some questions about the implications of this research have focused on “privilege.” Dominant ideologies of individualism have been so powerful that a story following an individual can, I think, be read as implicitly articulating that ideology. Having steeped myself for so long in cultural-historical activity, dialogic, and actor-network theories that emphasize the fundamentally mediated, distributed, and emergent character of people and their lifeworlds, I have to confess it never occurred to me to read Nora’s trajectory of becoming as a story of how smart she was or what good parents we were (responses I have heard), or conversely to pose the counter story as one where her privilege and academic connections account for the paths she has been able to take. Nora and Ben often complain when they hear people debating “nature vs. nurture;” for them, biologists have long concluded that question is just confused and unproductive. Because I see becoming and practice as sociohistorically mediated and emergent, I do not see an individual vs. society debate as useful in accounting for Nora’s becoming. I’m also worried that embedded in the notion of privilege is an implicit endorsement of the very value systems it seeks to criticize. Does anyone say the child of a mechanic is privileged (e.g., in learning about how to repair cars) or the child of a baker privileged (e.g., in learning how to bake)? To me, these are all examples of mediated becoming, but I also imagine multiple, even chaotic trajectories (not simple reproductions) are possible and likely in any particular trajectory. In the following video, I highlight four points that unpack this claim: that networks and resources matter and we need to not mystify success, that intersectionality and neurodiversity complicate any single story of positionality, that public resources (e.g., libraries, museums, educational media) are critical to becoming, and that becoming always involves entangled and interactive agency of the person. I stress, in short, that the questions I want to pose involve how to understand the mediated pathways and resources that support diverse pathways of becoming.

Transcript

In short, I am arguing that the two visions of development matter because when we ask what people need to know in order to advance inside a graded domain instead of how people might become advanced in a life, we are likely to create obstacles rather than pathways to becoming. It is here that theoretical stances turn out to be profoundly ethical and political matters.

* Note: The final video refers to the problems of sexism in society and science. See the following small sample of articles that suggest the challenges women in science continue to face:

• http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/222
• https://www.americanscientist.org/article/taking-the-long-view-on-sexism-in-science
• https://www.nature.com/news/science-and-sexism-in-the-eye-of-the-twitterstorm-1.18767
• https://www.nature.com/articles/495043a

Acknowledgements:  I want to thank Mary P. Sheridan, whose invitation, support, and feedback throughout this project have been amazing; my fellow pre-conference co-presenters (particularly Laurie Gries, who served as respondent to my draft, and Melanie Yergeau, whose draft I responded to and whose arguments have particularly informed my revision); the graduate students and faculty at Louisville who participated so thoughtfully in the pre-conference, making it a really rich workshopping of ideas; and Rick Wysocki for skilled web design and patient support in all matters digital. I also want to thank Nora, Ben, and Matt for their long-term participation in this research, and particularly, for this publication, special thanks to Nora for writing out her reflections on becoming a biologist so cogently, Nora and Ben for selecting images from their global stock of photographs and videos, and Ben for so skillfully producing and editing the video. Finally, thanks as always to Julie Hengst for years of conversations, writing, research, and life that I have learned so much from and that are especially central to the research reported here.