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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limits of big data to guide decision-making in times of crisis. As people navigated daily life, they were confronted with the reality that data were often not yet material but rather in-the-making. Drawing upon critical and feminist lenses and participatory methodologies, this study investigates the data stories of nine people of Asian descent living in the United States. Findings illustrate how participants navigated within and across time, space, activity, media, epistemology, race, and politics to produce lively data assemblages. These data stories guided social-distancing and mask-wearing weeks before official US policy even as participants lived in constant fear of dehumanizing racist and xenophobic violence. This study advances theorizing about data practices for human knowing and learning with media, racial and epistemic (in)justice, and community action. It also advances participatory research as a site of epistemic resistance and activism. 

Agency has been used as a lens to focus on how educators learn through pedagogical risk-taking, advocacy for curricular reform, and resisting policies that are not focused on the needs of students. We explored the role of agency as 65 preservice science teachers created learning opportunities for themselves during their clinical placements. Specifically, we investigated whether the types of agentive episodes varied by the level of congruence novices perceived between the vision of science teaching supported in their university coursework and the prevailing practices and culture of their host classrooms. Interview and survey data of participants from three preparation programs indicate that those in highly congruent placements experienced earlier and more mentor-scaffolded opportunities to take on active roles in teaching, and exercised agency to extend research-informed practices or tools they observed their mentors using. This resulted in participants seeing the richness of students' thinking and how capable they were of challenging work, given strategic supports. Those in low congruence placements had fewer chances to play active roles in teaching, were more likely to draw upon agency to make minor adjustments as they emulated their mentors' instructionally conservative lessons, and expressed concern they were “getting better” at aspects of teaching they viewed as inequitable or less responsive to students. Regardless of congruence, however, even simple acts of agency such as asking mentors to explain their instructional decisions were remarkably rare. 

In this study, we document pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) opportunities to learn about planning for equitable and ambitious instruction during clinical placements. We also test whether these opportunities vary by the level of participants’ perceived congruence between the vision of science teaching supported in their university coursework and the instructional practices and learning culture of their host classrooms. We analyzed interview and survey responses of 65 science PSTs from three preparation programs which required their novices to learn about planning and teaching that was consistent with research-based reforms. In placements where novices could participate in planning practices that were perceived as congruent with these reform-based visions, they were more likely than peers in low-congruence classrooms to engage in educative co-planning with a mentor, to take up responsibilities for planning lessons earlier in the school year and for longer periods of time, and to receive useful feedback from mentors. 

This study investigates how youth from two cities in the United States engage in critical data practices as they learn about and take action in their lives and communities in relation to COVID-19 and its intersections with justice-related concerns. Guided by theories of critical data literacies and data justice, a historicized and future-oriented participatory methodological approach is used to center the lived lives and communities of participants through dialogic interviews and experience sampling method. Data were co-analyzed with participants using critical grounded theory. Findings illustrate how youth not only aimed to reveal the dynamic and human aspects of and relationships with data as they engage with/in the world as people who matter but also offered alternative infrastructures for counter data production and aggregation toward justice in the here and now and desired possible futures. Implications for studies of learning with/through data practices in everyday life in relation to issues of justice are discussed. 

We report on how one community builds capacity for disrupting injustice and supporting each other during the COVID-19 crisis. We engaged long-term community partners (parents, their youth, and local community center leaders) in on-going conversation on their experiences with the pandemic. We learned with and from community partners about how and what people in communities most vulnerable in this crisis learn about and respond to COVID-19 in highly contextualized ways, individually and through extended family groups and trusted social networks. We report on how they put understandings towards educated, organized, urgent community infrastructuring actions within informal coalition networks. We explore these actions as necessary localized responses to systemic neglect from dominant institutional infrastructures during a global pandemic.