Supporting Expansive Learning for Youth at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Society

• In Event: Layers of Learning: Working Toward Mediated Praxis by Positioning Researchers, Practitioners, and Students as Learners

Abstract

Objectives
With the National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts mandate (National Science Foundation, 2008) and the adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards, educators in both formal and informal settings are increasingly asked to engage youth from communities historically underrepresented in the STEM fields. Within the context of out-of-school (OST) settings that prioritize youth development goals, we consider how the arts can be integrated to broaden the frame of who participates and to re-imagine what counts as STEM learning.

This study examines the learning experiences of adults and youth as they participate in a long-term (up to 10 years) arts, science, and technology OST program called XTech at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. XTech supports a cohort model and mentorship approach whereby returning students (teen facilitators) teach and assist new students (middle school students), contributing to deepening “layers” of learning (Gutierréz & Vossoughi, 2010). We ask: What pedagogical approaches and participation structures support facilitators’ reflective practice in an art/science OST setting?

Theoretical framework
We consider the arts and notions of creativity from a sociocultural paradigm, which draws attention to the complex orchestration of ideas, values, and institutional arrangements (Gadsen, 2008). We understand youths’ personal, political, and communal ties—their trajectories through life—as integral to how we conceive of and design for their learning. The arts, then, play a crucial role in expanding the goals and purposes for youths’ participation.

In designing for equity-oriented pedagogical practices, we consider new ways of conducting and designing collaborative research with communities and educators. To this end, we conceive of learning in terms of sociocultural aspects of becoming through practice (Holland & Lave, 2009), focusing on issues of identity, positioning, affect, and existing inequities. In the tradition of social design experiments (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), this study seeks to include researchers and practitioners as learners, with multiple and intentional points of pedagogical reflection with embedded opportunities to shift practices toward the unification of theory and practice.

Data sources and methods
The focal participants include adult program staff and teen facilitators (ages 15-19), as they design and implement a two-week long program for the new cohort of middle school participants. Data sources include ethnographic field notes, interviews, audio and video recordings, student and facilitator artifacts and notebooks, which are further described in Table 1. Embedded opportunities for reflection include researcher-practitioner co-design of pedagogical tools such as activity and program debrief discussion guide(s).

Results
Preliminary data suggest that facilitators take up and extend a multidisciplinary pedagogical lens in XTech. Through daily program debriefs and written reflections, facilitators demonstrate an increasing fluency in noticing and interpreting aspects of their teaching and learning, including attending to the distribution of facilitator expertise and engaging in youths’ personal interests.

Scholarly significance
Supporting teen facilitators to collaborate with youth involves ensuring that they learn how to listen to each other and to notice shifts in participation among youth. This paper contributes to scholarship on expansive learning (Engeström & Sannino, 2010) by studying learning within a collaborative, multidisciplinary, educational design setting.

Authors

• Fan Kong, University of Washington

• Meg Elena Escudé, Exploratorium

• Shelley Stromholt, University of Washington

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington