Still relevant today, Liz McKinley (2001) questions the ways in which dominance operated in STEM education through calling out how it responds to difference: as a form of “masking power with innocence.” Primarily, McKinley (2001) sheds light on how a lack of knowledge (or a positional stance of “not knowing”) often serves to (re)produce the norms of power; in turn, “we need to challenge the mask of innocence and ask ourselves how relations of domination and subordination regulate encounters in classrooms.” (p. 76). While she speaks of and to pedagogy and curriculum, it offers a useful lens to discuss STEM research methodologies.

The theoretical landscape of educational research methodologies is shifting: the space of “innocence” resulting from a lack of knowledge is not what it was 20 years ago.Footnote 3 Across diverse educational spaces, there are increasing calls to engage in and momentum around practices of disrupting and displacing methodologies: the last decade being particularly momentous along these lines (e.g., special issues in journals such as Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Educational Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education). There are now multiple productive exemplars which critically engage methodological processes to disrupt and displace restrictive norms which linger and lurk with/in educational research and its concepts which left unchecked (re)articulate forms of oppressive power. The space of “innocence” which serves to mask methodological power is perhaps no longer tenable for not addressing taken-for-granted referents to system which (re)produce dominance, inequity, and foreclose the space of responsibility towards one another across lines of difference and power.

Because methodologies (even critical ones) often traffic in Majoritarian articulations, even when we work against them in critical STEM education, we argue that research can and should take a different approach from its very beginning: at the stage of research design. Elsewhere (Higgins et al. 2017), the notion of de/sign is offered to differ and defer that which design comes to signify: design as pre-existing, design as separate or separable from other aspects of research, and design as a means to achieve and justify the ends. Designing research in STEM education has intermittently been and must continue working towards being more than grabbing a “best fit” of the methodological rack or tailoring it to fit: resisting what Gayatri Spivak refers to as the “rage for unity” (Spivak 1976, p. xvi) which comes to mask the ways in which all methodologies consist of loosely assembled partial, situated, and relational meanings. De/sign is a “means of working within, against, and beyond the tailoring of research” (Higgins et al. 2017, p. 36). Further, de/sign is (a) accounting for and being accountable to that which conventional methodologies always already signify; (b) engaging in the creative and critical work of resignifying methodologies. This is why, in the call for papers, we asked the following: “What would it mean to engage in the work of de/signing research which critically disrupts and displaces methodologies in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM) education for eco-social justice?”

In further considering the relationship between design and de/sign, we frame the exploration of the invited question with the dichotomous and relevant metaphors of engineering and tinkering: thinking specifically with Jacques Derrida’s (1976) (mis)reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “La pensée sauvage” in which he both separates and blurs the distinctiveness between the two practices’ metaphoricity. Research design can often prescriptively and prohibitively act as a signifier that sutures over the signified processes of designing and doing research. Similarly, engineering is the movement from the ends to the means, whereby the engineer makes appropriate selections from “the discourses of formal logic, and the pure sciences” (Spivak 1976, p. xix), picking concepts, categories, and constructs already purposed for their process (e.g., research as “best fit” and “best practices”). Consequently, “design” is often employed and understood as a method that exists a priori, instruments that support (rather than produce) research, that also includes and encompasses all of its conceptual apparatus: be it “objectivity,” “cultural neutrality,” “validity,” or other. Because of the aforementioned ways that such constructs and categories often implicitly (re)produce systems of power, this special issue is a call to tinker with/in, rather than engineer, research and educational practices in STEM education.

In contrast to engineering, “the bricoleur [tinkerer] makes do with things that were meant perhaps for other ends” (Spivak 1976, p. xix). Tinkering reverses the ends/means hierarchy by privileging the means over the ends or the process over the product, even if this entails the very possibility of not achieving the specified goals. As Derrida (1976) argues, the ends (i.e., knowledge, truth) and the means of knowledge production (i.e., methodology) never come to coincide. The goal of (fully) achieving knowledge is not only empirically impossible, as Lévi-Strauss posited, but also theoretically so. Thus, for Derrida (1976), “the engineer should always be a sort of bricoleur [tinkerer]” (p. 139) while coming to recognize the very limitation of bricolage:

The only weakness of bricolage [tinkering]—but, seen as a weakness is it not irremediable?—is a total inability to justify itself in its own discourse. The already-there-ness of instruments and of concepts cannot be undone or re-invented (pp. 138–139).

Just as the goals of engineering never come to be, Derrida cautions against treating the tinkerer’s tools as if they themselves always were. Instead, he invites consideration of the tools themselves as the productive enactments of tinkerings past and to-come.

There is always a need for “simultaneously troubling and using the concepts [and conceptual lines] we think we cannot think without … , keeping [them] as both limit and resource” (Lather 2007, p. 167–168). Lastly, because engineering/bricolage is always already a porous binary, this invites a critical consideration of bricolage vis-à-vis its ends, or what it produces: “all [tinkerings] are not equally worthwhile. Bricolage [tinkering] criticizes itself” (Derrida 1976, p. 139). However, because “methodological fabric is also a fabrication—a performative and non-separable enactment of the interconnected space between theory, practice, and ethics” (Higgins et al. 2017, p. 17)—methodological design is always already open to deconstruction, politics, and re (con)figuration.

This special issue collects the work of STEM education scholars doing the work of tinkering with theory,Footnote 4 whether it be interrogating theories intended for STEM, or using theories unintended for that context to enact research in STEM education for social and ecological justice. The manuscripts herein are lived, engaged, and critically rich scholarship that tinkers within, against, and beyond these disciplinary spaces across the various stages of research and/as educational practice: design, delivery, analysis, and dissemination.