Using Dark Knowledges to Rethink Family Engagement in STEM

• In Event: 72.019 - Disrupting Intersecting Systems of Oppression in Science Education

Abstract

The United States has a large population of children from diverse ethnic-racial and linguistic backgrounds. Over 5.4 million of these students are emergent bilingual and multilingual children. Many intervention and enrichment programs in science education target family and school engagement programs to introduce families to STEM fields. Using feminist reading of new materialism and drawing from a recent longitudinal study with Latina adolescents and their mothers in bilingual science workshops, I attempt to deconstruct normative notions of family “funds of knowledge” with the construct “dark knowledges,” inscribed on bodies of women of color. These dark knowledges are constituted by oppressive experiences of women and girls, including experiences of poverty, racism, sexism, and violence (mental, physical, and sexual). Much of the well-intended sociocultural research to date on parent involvement positions families and communities as the source of cultural and social capital for children, however in this study I argue that families and family engagement practices are not a commodity to capitalize on for students’ school achievement. Focusing on family, parent, and community engagement for the sake of betterment of children’s education normalizes the gendered, classed, raced, and neoliberal interventions focused on particular non-normative, non-dominant families. Furthermore, it masks unequal social, legal, and economic conditions on which “parenting” is made possible or impossible for many minority/majority families and children.

Feminist theory helps to examine how society, culture, and institutions assign roles to normative categories such as parents, families, mothers, and fathers. It helps to analyze the mechanisms of power inscribed into those assignments through practices, discourses, regimes of meaning that constitute families as gendered, raced, classed subjects. In this regard, Butler’s notion of performativity is a valuable tool for understanding the constitution and re-iteration of identity. According to Butler (1990) identity is “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (p. 25). The body plays a central role to identity –because “identities rely on active process of identification” and recognition, “repeated assumptions of identities in the course of daily life” (p.6-7). However, “the meanings discursively attributed to bodies are never static but rather a constant site of struggle in which meanings can change ” (p.14). Grounded on narrative analysis, my findings demonstrate that for subaltern women of color “production of knowledge begins in the bodies of mothers and grandmothers, in the acknowledgement of the critical practices of women of color.” And “[t]he most profound and liberating politics come from the interrogations of our own social locations, a narrative that works outward from our specific corporeality”(Cruz, 2001, p. 658). Notions of community and family empowerment and transformation must begin from the location, places, and bodies of people instead of imposed upon them. In this study I argue that without first acknowledging and making sense of the multiple and interlocking experiences, knowledges, embodiments, and narratives that families and ourselves (researchers, educators, and members of community) bring to formal educational sites, we cannot talk in sufficiently informed ways about diverse ethno-linguistic family and school engagement.

Author

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth