Negotiating Narratives of Race in the STEM Classroom

• In Event: A Diffractive Approach to Analyzing Qualitative Data Using Different Theoretical Lenses

Abstract

This presentation addresses the desire to represent the STEM teaching experiences of three female teachers of Afro-diasporic descent as they navigated their first years of teaching in the classroom. As a woman of color who also taught science in public school, I wanted to elucidate the nuances of their respective experiences as situated within the schools that they teach and intersected with the complexities of their identities as women of color. As such, I chose to focus my analysis on how the racialized storylines (Nasir, 2013) emerged for them and how they navigated related structures in their teaching and interactions with students. As such the analytical question that emerged was: In what ways do racial storylines emerge and influence the professional identities of these three teachers of color? In order to examine their experiences, I employed a bricolage of theoretical frameworks in order to understand the complexities (Kincheloe, 2005) of professional and social identities in relation to the processes of learning to teach and teaching. More specifically, I was concerned with the relationship between their notions about and enactments of informal science education and their teacher identities and practices. The overarching theory describe how prevalent narratives (racial storylines) about race, especially for racially marginalized people structure learning and teaching in schools (Nasir et al. 2013). The middle range theory describes the relationship between teacher identity and agency in relation to teacher learning and enactment and explains how teachers negotiate/align with/counter the racial storylines that present in their teaching lived experiences (Author 2016; Avraamidou 2014) and portraiture was employed as an analytic tool to retell the stories of the teacher through the “subjective, empathetic, and critical lens of the researcher” (Dixson, et al., 2005).
Through this reiterative work, the data revealed that racial storylines in public schools produced psychological and emotional labor for teachers of color in terms of negotiating issues of race for themselves and their students in and out of the classroom. For these teachers, their enactments of informal science education, including field trips, “informal” learning structures and interactions in the classroom, were focused on attenuating the inequities in science for students of color. Their narratives included efforts to “tap into” the few students of color in an all white school, exposing students in a predominantly Black school to multiple experiences in science and framing “informal” activities in order to broaden engagement and interactions in the classroom. Dialogues often included talk about “our students” in “our communities” and the need to create experiences that would allow them to imagine different science-related identities than the prevalent narratives about Black and Latinos in science. The teachers’ identities were centered around their roles in creating spaces for Black success in science and agency in being able to access resources--both formal and informal--to engage their students and help them to counter the often negative, deficit-laden stereotypes around Black and Brown students and STEM.

Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary