Becoming‐STEMM Educator‐With a Unit on Germs Implemented in a Haunted Kindergarten Classroom

ABSTRACT This agential realist narrative inquiry maps the entangled process of becoming‐STEMM educator‐with as it materialized through the implementation of a kindergarten unit on germs in a historically marginalized urban school. Intra‐acting with Barad's theories of agential realism and spectral materialism, the study resists humanist framings of identity as internal or developmental, instead attending to the material and discursive forces (e.g., curriculum materials, institutional mandates, student bodies, affective atmospheres, and hauntings of pandemic‐era schooling) that co‐constituted pedagogical becoming. Rather than locating agency within the teacher, Ms. West, the analysis follows how her enactments emerged through shifting relations with students, tools, classroom routines, and inherited exclusions. Her initial hesitation toward the curriculum is read not as resistance, but as a hauntological re‐turn, an affective‐material residue of past mandates and constrained reforms. Through diffractive analysis of interview data, implementation logs, and student artifacts, the study maps how pedagogical shifts unfolded through emergent relationalities, where care, inquiry, and ethical responsiveness were not applied but materialized within the apparatus itself. Becoming‐STEMM educator‐with, in this account, is not an individual transformation but an ontological reconfiguration shaped by spectral histories, institutional logics, and material‐discursive intra‐actions. This work contributes to science education by troubling teacher identity as a fixed or intentional process and foregrounding the haunted material conditions through which STEMM pedagogies come to matter. It calls for professional learning spaces attuned to the affective, ethical, and infrastructural forces that shape possibilities for teaching, learning, and becoming otherwise.