Beyond the Joyful Inquiry of Feeling like a Scientist: Sitting with the Heart as Arrested, Angry, Wavering, Grieving, Hopeful, and Dreaming in Science Education

In this post-peak-pandemic moment, we note that science education is intensifying its engagement with affect. While a potentially productive site of struggle and evolution, as we recognize that our current catastrophic times need to be felt otherwise, we are noting that it is being leveraged as a site of recodifying science-education-as-usual: feeling like a scientist as a means to uphold the dominant knowing what and how a scientist knows. Working within and against this movement’s willful ignorance towards feeling the futures and futurities being (fore)closed, we ask how we might differently engage this structure of feeling for critical purposes. Inspired by other heart-centered orientations to science education, we offer herein six figurations of the heart to engage this inquiry, the heart as: arrested, angry, wavering, grieving, hopeful, and dreaming. Across these figurations of the heart, we lean into the negative affects that stem from a science education whose consequentiality’s time is out-of-joint as well as the positive affects of potential and preferable futures yet-to-come, futures in which there may be a world of many worlds.