Becoming in STEM: Developing a Culture of Criticality in the Space Between Person and Institution

• In Event: Nondominant Students Negotiate Histories, Institutions, Figured Worlds, and Identities to “Become Somebody” in STEM

Abstract

We present an analysis of “Fall’s” story of becoming in STEM as a white girl, growing up in multi-generational poverty in an economically depressed city. Now a rising 11th grader, we have followed Fall since 5th grade through school and afterschool. She has shifted from not having interest in science to wanting to own a green hair salon (8th grade), to considering engineering as a future possible career (10th grade). Fall has struggled with being labeled “a girl in the background” and someone whom her mother described in 7th grade as “if she would just get Ds, I would be happy.” However, over the past 5 years, Fall has also engaged in a wide range of STEM-rich actions, including building a Little Free Green STEM Library, leading workshops on water efficiency, making STEM-rich movies for her community, and keeping a blog about STEM activities in an afterschool program. We are interested in Fall’s engagement in these activities over time, and how they shape her own and her community’s engagement in STEM.

Using Holland & Lave’s (2009) two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles”–we examined seven pivotal events identified by Fall with respect to STEM-rich community actions. In particular, we examined the ways in which Fall’s STEM experiences were carried out in local practice but also enacted against the broader background of cultural/historical narratives. First, we traced Fall’s core commitments in STEM & Community as she sought to take action with her developing science knowledge. Second, we examined how these core commitments led, at times, to conflict (“contentious local practice” or LCP) as these commitments pushed back against particular local, historical/sociocultural contexts.

For example, in the 10th grade, Fall conceptualized, designed and built a Little Free Green STEM Library at the Boys and Girls Club. She felt that access to STEM books would help kids practice reading, an area she struggled with, and would help them to learn aspects of science they were not getting in school. She also included mini-maker kits so that kids could “make the things that they [she] wanted to [in an informal science club].” She added a lighting system powered by a hand crank system, which would be “good for the environment,” “fun for kids,” and “get them curious enough to look at the library.” She described the library as the thing she “worked on the hardest ever.”

Holland & Lave describe how LCP shapes trajectories of both person and institution, and the changing relations among them. However, with Fall’s story, we push on this conceptualization to argue that by examining how LCP takes shape over time, we can also better understand how a culture of criticality develops in the space between person and institution, supporting Fall in collectively forming new and different relationships with/in social networks, communities, activities and timescales. In addition, these activities have provided her community with new resources, spaces and points of entry to STEM, making STEM more accessible and visible in her community.

Authors

• Autumn McDaniel, Boys and Girls Club of Lansing

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Daniel Birmingham, Colorado State University