This article offers a qualitative analysis of infrastructural in/justice in a community‐partnered design intervention focused on developing high‐tech low‐cost Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) projects. We examined the kinds of infrastructural injustices that were present in three afterschool programs and how it shaped STEAM education designs and opportunities for learning with technology to take hold. Combining insights and methods from studies of science and technology with Critical Race Theory, we developed the concept of infrastructural in/justice to illuminate the challenges of organizing STEAM for justice. Infrastructural injustices were identified at the level of dominant narratives that shaped the ideas, resources, and values that undergirded programming and pedagogical practices. We found that community educators were central to creating more just STEAM infrastructures. They drew out unjust infrastructural narratives, created counternarratives that allowed young people of color space to expand their technology and STEAM practices, and connected these practices to their everyday lives, identities, and emerging interests. We detail how working‐class community educators of color are dreaming and enacting new ways to engage with STEAM and STEAM education alongside young people. As we have shown, their ideas and practices combined with the young people's visions for the future challenged neoliberal and racialized narratives of STEAM. Despite community educators' of color critical expertise, their jobs remained precarious within informal STEAM infrastructures. To design for and sustain more just community‐driven STEAM activities we argue that the field must attend not only to how the work of infrastructuring to how community‐driven STEAM is done but also by whom. These activities, organized by community educators of color, must be valued and protected through the classification systems within informal STEAM infrastructures in order to design and sustain more just community‐driven STEAM initiatives.
In this article, it is argued that processes of co‐production can support teachers and students in organizing resources for justice through science learning. Drawing upon a critical justice conceptual framework, critical ethnographic data from one urban middle school classroom during a unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities were analyzed. Findings describe how processes of co‐production yielded new Discourse threads focused on sustainability, whose ideas matter, and empathy, which were embodied in students' engineered artifacts and how students talked about using those artifacts. Such embodiment positioned students as rightfully present and powerful experts in science and engineering. We discuss how processes of co‐production supported justice by supporting new social relationships between the teacher and students that helped to make space for collective engagement of students' political struggles against the oppressive practices of schooling as an integral part of science learning.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10450169
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Research in Science Teaching
- Volume:
- 58
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0022-4308
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1010-1040
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract To promote a justice‐oriented approach to science education, we formed a research‐practice partnership between middle school science teachers, their students, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and experts in social justice to co‐design and test an environmental justice unit for middle school instruction. We examine teacher perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of integrating social justice into their standards‐aligned science teaching as they participate in co‐design and teach the unit. The unit supports students to investigate racially disparate rates of asthma in their community by examining pollution maps and historical redlining maps. We analyze interviews and co‐design artifacts from two teachers who participated in the co‐design and taught the unit in their classrooms. Our findings point to the benefits of a shared pedagogical framework and an initial unit featuring local historical content to structure co‐design. Findings also reveal that teachers can share similar goals for empowering students to use science knowledge for civic action while framing the local socio‐political factors contributing to the injustice differently, due in part to different institutional supports and constraints. Student interviews and a pre/postassessment illustrate how the unit facilitated students' progress in connecting socio‐political and science ideas to explain the impacts of particulate matter pollution and who is impacted most. Analyses illuminate how teachers' pedagogical choices may influence whether and how students discuss the impact of systemic racism in their explanations. The findings inform refinement of the unit and suggest supports needed for co‐design partnerships focused on integrating social justice and science.
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Abstract Science teachers and educators seek to promote equity and inclusion within their classrooms. Yet, many do not examine how their roles could reproduce oppression that continues to exclude certain groups of students. Centering on how oppression interacts with science teaching and learning, this naturalistic study observed Ms. William and her implementation of two STEM units that integrate science and engineering, to understand power, race, and privilege dynamics in her middle school STEM classrooms. Specifically, we focused on understanding oppression at the interpersonal and internalized level in Ms. William's class. We collected and analyzed video recorded lessons from two different classrooms, two STEM curricula Ms. William had co‐developed, and conducted semi‐structured interviews after she taught her two STEM units. We identified themes of oppression perpetuated in the classroom by employing thematic analysis, which when guided by our theoretical framework enabled us to illuminate the complex relationship between science teaching and maintaining whiteness as the dominant discourse in science learning. Our findings suggest that an active and critical role from science teachers and educators are required; we must reflect deeply on our science curriculum and teaching strategies and identify practices that remains to be oppressive if promoting equity and inclusion is at the forefront of our science teaching.
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Objectives We examine the community epistemologies in youth’s iterative refinements of STEM-rich inventions across settings and time. Iteration in STEM-rich engineering/invention work refers to re-thinking ideas/designs within prototyping processes (Cunningham & Kelly, 2017). The objective of this paper is to examine the political dimensions of iteration through a) how iteration involves pre- and post-design “lives” of inventions especially towards new social futures, and b) the intentional incorporation of cultural epistemologies towards advancing new forms of legitimate inventor knowledge/practice (Yosso, 2005). Framing We draw from critical justice and consequential learning studies. Critical justice focuses on recognizing diversity and addressing structural inequalities perpetuated through systemic racism and classism. It seeks re-shifted relations of power and position within multiple scales-of-activity in learning, intersected with historicized injustices in learning environments. Consequential learning examines what matters to people, and how associated values and practices, when coordinated through social activity, allows for imagining new social futures (Gutierrez, 2012). Viewing the iterative process of inventing through a justice-oriented consequential lens calls into question traditional modes of knowing, and challenges/expands who and what areas of expertise are recognized and valued. Methods Our study takes place in two community makerspaces in mid-sized cities. Both center community engagement and support youth in designing/inventing to address problems they and their communities care about. Both also support minoritized youth in inventing through engagement with a wide range of community/STEM stakeholders. In researcher-educator roles, we collaborated with both makerspaces to establish programs supporting youth in sustained engagement in STEM and making/inventing in culturally-sustaining ways. In our two-year, longitudinal critical ethnography, data were generated in weekly community making sessions between 2016-2018. Data include artifacts, youth conversation groups, and videos capturing youth interaction with STEM and community experts at various stages in their design process. Analysis involved multiple stages and levels of coding based on open-coding and constant comparison procedures. Findings We ground our paper in four in-depth longitudinal cases of youth’s iterative design work: Nila’s light-up #stopracism sign; Su’zanne’s massaging slipper, Sharon’s geodesic play dome, and Jazmyn’s portable fan. Across cases, we illustrate three findings. First, youth located broader injustices within local making/inventing discourses with support from community and STEM allies, suggesting youth drew from multiple epistemologies, some grounded in community cultural wealth, others in STEM. For example, Su’Zanne drew from a familial culture of care and resistance in recognizing injustices nested in homelessness while iterating a way to make her slipper “more massaging.” The geodesic dome youth-makers drew from collective solidarity/resistance in making a structure for younger peers due to unjust lack of play infrastructure. Second, iterative engagement involving community wealth afforded further design and inventing experiences and expanded ownership over inventions across many stakeholders. For example, youth turned Nila’s #stopracism sign on during group discussions when they felt that racism needed to be foregrounded. Third, the afterlife of youth invention processes impacted the emergent inventor-maker culture through influencing the iterative process. Significance Iterations expand hybridization of cultural knowledge/practice and STEM-rich inventing, re-shaping whose cultural knowledge matters, and fostering justice-oriented collective outcomes.more » « less
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