Abstract
Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM presents the stories of Black women teachers who resolutely choose to love their students despite a growing offensive against Black students. From curricular bans against Critical Race Theory to explicit restrictions on the use of descriptors like “Black,” “women” and “disability,” policies aimed at denying the humanity of marginalized groups are on the rise. Existing at the intersection of marginalized social identities (Crenshaw, 1989), Black women and girls have distinct experiences in STEM education that should be centered (Ireland et al., 2018). Often unwelcome in these spaces, Black women are trapped in a suffocating paradox of hypervisibility and invisibility, as they face isolation as well as heightened surveillance and criticism (Mowatt et al., 2013). Previously, “Black steminism” has been explored as a feminist practice of healing and care in afro-futuristic sci-fiction (Murphy, 2024). In Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM, editors Aaminah Norris and José Ramón Lizárraga reimagine this term for the field of education as they advance a culturally sustaining pedagogy that centers the experiences, wellbeing, and knowledge of Black girls, a Black STEMinist pedagogy.
Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM is the fifth installment in a six-book series curated and edited by Django Paris, the preeminent scholar on culturally sustaining pedagogy. Paris (2012) describes culturally sustaining pedagogy as an approach that “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling,” in response to the marginalization students of color face in schools (p. 95). Each chapter of Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM centers the personal narrative of one Black woman STEM general or special educator, examining how her intersecting identities and lived experiences inform her culturally sustaining, Black STEMinist teaching practice. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, teachers’ written reflections, the contributing authors explore each teacher’s praxis to build toward the articulation of a Black STEMinist pedagogy. By centering the voices of Black women educators often dismissed in STEM spaces, the book enacts the very practice it promotes. While grounded in the shared positionality of these educators as Black women, the authors highlight the rich diversity of experiences and identities that uniquely inform each teacher’s praxis. Through its loving examination of these educators’ practices, Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM develops the theory, practice, and praxis of a Black STEMinist pedagogy.
Editors Norris and Lizárraga frame the book around the isolation that Black women educators committed to liberatory education face, especially in STEM fields where Black women remain underrepresented. Despite frequently being represented as neutral and objective, STEM disciplines are rife with bias and prejudice. By contrast, this book is openly political in its dedication to demonstrating and advocating for radical love, “the kind of love that is imbued with the fighting spirit of our ancestors, and organizes toward new just futures” (p. 7). From this place of love, this book attempts to “bring girls from the margins to the center” by “build[ing] a bridge for teachers, educators, and researchers, to cross over from the current state of STEM education where girls of Color are underrepresented, invisible, and erased to a new future of inclusive and justice-centered STEM education” (p. 4). Embracing Black women’s experiential knowledge and everyday practices as rich sources of theory development (Hill Collins, 2022), “Black STEMinist pedagogies come directly from examinations of Black STEMinist praxis. . .developed and implemented by Black women STEM teachers” (p. 9). Intentionally written to holistically represent each educator, each narrative reveals key elements of a Black STEMinist praxis.
Advocacy as a response to structural harm anchors the second chapter, in which Nayla Rodriguez shares the story of Rochelle Lompoc, a Black middle school STEM teacher turned administrator. As a student, Lompoc faced the paradoxical trap imposed on Black girls of low academic expectations and high behavioral standards. Experiences like being barred from an advanced science course directly motivated her advocacy when she later taught an honors STEM class with no students of color. Informed by her experiences of marginalization as a student, Lompoc engages in several cultural sustaining practices, like building relationships with students’ families, playing students’ favorite music, welcoming student experiences into the classroom as valuable prior knowledge, and modeling speaking up for oneself.
Chapter 3 focuses on Esther Mari, a Black biracial woman from a predominantly white community, to examine the environments and resources necessary for Black students to flourish. Abigail Cohen utilizes the metaphor of gardening to explore how Mari uses culturally informed practices to “foster knowledge, love, growth, and identity development” (p. 33). Unlike the other educators in the book, Mari teaches in classrooms with few or no students of color. As such, her Black STEMinist praxis takes a different form as she embraces “exposure [as] a powerful tool for self-awareness and realization” (p. 43). Mari promotes her students’ sociopolitical development by introducing them to different cultures and holding space for difficult conversations, while also serving as a key source of representation for the few students of color in her classroom.
Intergenerational bonds rooted in maternal love inform Sandy Morgan’s teaching practice in Maha Elsinbawi’s analysis of her pedagogy. For Morgan, “the legacy of the women who came before her was not just a backdrop but a guiding force” in her decision to become a middle school special education teacher (p. 60). Initially dismissed as being lazy despite her family’s protestations, Morgan was diagnosed with a learning disability late in her academic journey. Now, she approaches her own praxis as a special education teacher as “a way to honor her ancestors and a means to foster healing and empowerment in her students” (p. 58). Familiar with being an overlooked student with unmet needs, Morgan prioritizes open, accessible communication with students, embraces students’ multidimensionality, and creates a learning environment characterized by love and belonging to build students’ self-esteem. Morgan is another Black STEMinist teacher who “feels a profound responsibility to make her students’ academic experiences more supportive than her own had been” (p. 68).
Black STEMinist teaching as a site of healing anchors the personal narrative of Fana Adawale, a first-generation Ethiopian immigrant and special educator living with a disability. Too often, the classroom is a site of suffering and violence for Black students (Dumas, 2014). In chapter 5, Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton recounts Adawale’s dedication to creating humanizing educational experiences for Black students that counter the racialized fractures of schooling that inflict student suffering. Like Morgan, Adawale is intimately familiar with the marginalization students of color face in schools as a Black female student who was not diagnosed with her learning disability until the 10th grade. Adawale combats this violence by pouring love into her students through practices like leaving her classroom open during lunch, providing snacks, and creating a safe space for student curiosity and confusion. Through these practices, Adawale promotes healing as she “replenish[es] the fractures of her own schooling experience by better meeting the needs of her students” (p. 86).
The editors synthesize the main themes across the narratives to articulate a framework for Black STEMinist pedagogies to conclude. They describe Black STEMinist pedagogies as “culturally sustaining praxis that offer insights into how Black women teachers meet the academic, emotional, and spiritual needs of their students, especially girls of Color” in a manner that is “necessarily humanizing and abolitionist” (p. 96). The editors look across the four personal narratives to identify the key themes of radical love, kinship, intergenerational knowledge, healing, and the critical disruption of traditional schooling structures. The editors see this book as a first step toward actualizing education spaces that reflect these themes and “invite you to cross the bridge we are building to futures that hold space for justice, equity, and hope” (p. 95).
This book is a necessary text for educators, scholars, and researchers dedicated to creating liberatory educational experiences for Black women and girls. While focused on STEM, the lessons on radical love, kinship, intergenerational knowledge, and healing presented in this volume are applicable to all classrooms. In addition to articulating a Black STEMinist pedagogy, one of Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM’s most compelling contributions is its use of personal narratives to demonstrate the transformative power of memory-responsive teaching (Obaizamomwan-Hamilton et al., 2025). Each educator in this volume engages in memory-responsive teaching as they draw from their experiences as students to inform their praxis. By looking backwards to move forward, they imagine new possibilities and counteract the oppressive forces they once faced. This process disrupts patterns of anti-blackness in schools and fosters healing in teachers, pointing to the transformative potential of Black STEMinist pedagogy.
Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM reads as love letter to Black women STEM educators. The editors are explicit that their intent is not to present a comprehensive guidebook on how to enact a Black STEMinist pedagogy. The pedagogical approaches shared are “uniquely developed and practiced by Black women” and are therefore “not replicable and in some ways not entirely scalable” (p. 97). While it does offer some recommendations and possible pathways toward actualizing Black STEMinist pedagogies, the strength of Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM lies in its ability to elevate and celebrate “the Black women STEM teachers in this book [who will] guide us over this bridge to a place where students are loved and advocated for and with them” (p. 98). By engaging with each teacher in all her complexity and celebrating her often-overlooked labor, this book exemplifies the radical love that the editors and authors identify as foundational to Black STEMinist pedagogies. As the editors state, the Black STEMinist narratives presented are “sustainable, and that’s all it truly needs to be” (p. 97). However, the sustainability of such a pedagogy, which depends on the labor of Black female educators, remains unexplored in the text. These stories highlight the perseverance of resilient individuals against systemic challenges. The question of how to cultivate structural supports to ensure the longevity of such transformative practices remains to be explored. Just imagine what these women could do with adequate administrative support and resources. Rooted in love and hope, Cultivating New Futures for Girls in STEM offers a strong foundation for further efforts that center the knowledge and experiences of Black girls in STEM classrooms and beyond.
