Citizen Science Identity: Becoming Citizen Scientists in a Museum-Based Genetics of Taste Program

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Affect and Constructing Identity in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

A museum genetics lab, following an apprenticeship model, scaffolds volunteers’ participation in laboratory activities via interactions with other lab members. As volunteers interact and complete activities in the lab they begin to assume more knowledge, skills, roles and responsibilities; and as volunteers participate in increasingly cultivated tasks and elevated roles, they connect prior memories and experiences to their present experiences and imagined future experiences. Volunteers are thus positioned based on projected identities which directs how volunteers participate in science. Using a sociocultural analytic framework for trajectories of identification, we describe (1) how volunteers’ participation is scaffolded and (2) how participation directly affects identification by examining elements of participation occurring in the lab moment to moment.

Authors

• Leighanna Hinojosa, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Rebecca Deborah Swanson, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Joseph L. Polman, University of Colorado - Boulder