Centering Women’s Educational Experiences to Understand North American, Normative Physics and Astronomy Post-Secondary Curriculum

In this chapter, I engage with critical research about women’s educational experiences in physics and astronomy. I developed a way to understand what North American normative physics and astronomy curriculum entails as I explore how to describe normative post-secondary physics and astronomy curriculum. I believe that mobilizing the experiences of women in education and research can provide a critical starting point for such an endeavor. To start, I discuss what it means to problematize how educators and researchers think about what is taught in classrooms, particularly in post-secondary institutions. I use findings of critical curricularists to scaffold the assertion that we must consider lived curriculum as a lynchpin in curricular theorizing. I then narrow my focus to critical curriculum in science education research and present literature that connects both lived experiences and curriculum to learning. Next, I use perspectives of Black women, women of color, and White women to describe normative physics and astronomy curriculum. Finally, I outline the areas of normative physics and astronomy curriculum, detail the normative curricular components, and connect normative physics and astronomy curriculum to critical perspectives on thinking and learning in science education. Within this final segment, I build on personal, post-secondary educational experiences to illuminate how physics and astronomy curriculum is lived and identify work that takes place when actively living curriculum.