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Creators/Authors contains: "Tan, Edna"

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  1. Abstract

    This article looks at how a Black informal STEM educator supported two Black boys' learning opportunities in coding, specifically investigating how the establishment of politicized trust between the informal STEM educator and youth supported their development of critical agency. Using the dual lenses of socio‐spatial relationality and politicized trust, we explore how the socio‐spatial relationality of place, materials, and educator–youth interactions allowed for the shifting of power dynamics that were foundational to supporting youth in navigating a coding process that centered who they were and their interests, in the moment. We employ participatory design research aimed at reducing power dynamics by remediating who has power within a setting, grounded in dismantling and disrupting traditional power hierarchies through actively involving the community in the design process. We present two case studies that map the learning trajectories of Donovan and Jabria, two middle‐school aged Black boys. Their learning trajectories include the following phases: tensions related to coding with Scratch, pivotal interaction with the educator, and development of critical agency. We unpack how the socially produced space supported Donovan, Jabria, and Worsley to critically read the world of coding, rewrite coding through political action, and establish politicized trust. Throughout this process, we see through Donovan and Jabria's interactions they were constantly editing and producing their interactions with coding which led to newly created learning opportunities by developing their critical agency in coding. Four main points were identified: continuous access to materials, sustained engagement to reimagine possibilities, understanding that all disengagement is not equal, and being explicit in communicating expectations followed by concrete action. Across these points, the salience of relational politicized trust between educator and youth was a cross cutting thread.

     
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  2. This study investigates research and instructional practices that support rightful familial presence in STEM to address the continued racial/class inequities in STEM learning. We ask: What practices grounded in research-practice-partnerships support rightful familial presence, and how do these practices facilitate capital movement between families and schools for STEM teaching and learning? 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 25, 2025
  3. This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various ways — as individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborations — to construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society. Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other. 
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  4. Since spring of 2020, our ‘new normal’ world pivoted towards online spaces. This changed where formal teaching and learning interactions unfolded, and also shifted the conditions for participation in teaching, learning and research activities calling into question how and where inequitable power dynamics are (re)produced in these ‘new’ spaces. In this paper, we reflect on the affordances and constraints of community-engaged research with middle school youth in online virtual design meeting ‘rooms.’ Drawing on critical postmodern and queer feminist constructions of space, the university researchers explicitly worked towards Rightful Presence when structuring and facilitating the online design meeting room. We argue that virtual spaces are not neutral and are shaped through settled power dynamics that can further (re)produce inequitable conditions for participating and/or open new possibilities for disrupting settled adult-youth powered relations by both youth and adults. 
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  5. Current discourses of equity in teaching and learning are framed around calls for inclusion, grounded in the extension of a set of static rights for high-quality learning opportunities for all students. This essay presents a rightful presence framework to guide the study of teaching and learning in justice-oriented ways. This framework highlights the limitations of equity as inclusion, which does not adequately address the ways in which systemic injustices manifest in local classroom practice. Rightful presence orients the field towards the importance of political struggles to make present the lives of those made missing by schooling and discipline-specific norms. Three tenets for guiding the use of this framework in teaching and learning are offered. Two contrasting vignettes from STEM classrooms illustrate tenets and emergent tensions.

     
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  6. Abstract

    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.

     
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