Negotiating Authority and Agency Through Enacting Critical Science Agency in Middle School Engineering

• In Event: Understanding the Transformative Power of Teacher and Student Agency in Changing Educational Contexts

Abstract

Objectives & Significance
To seriously consider equity concerns in the teaching and learning of STEM, we suggest that a focus on interactional practices which support students in developing and enacting critical science agency, is essential. Such a stance can more systemically address the historicized and relational ways in which inequality plays out in STEM classrooms and how students may struggle for a rightful presence (Squire, 2009). Research questions are:
1. What interactional practices support new relationalities in the classroom?
2. How do these relationalities challenge traditional knowledge and power structures, working towards a critical science agency among youth from non-dominant communities?
Our paper is grounded in the stance that the long-standing education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) has produced patterns of participation in STEM classrooms that are oppressive for youth from non-dominant communities (e.g., Who has power in classrooms, how, why). While supportive of good teaching, current reforms fail in addressing seemingly intractable equity challenges in STEM education across the intersections of racial and class inequality. Until these concerns are addressed, equity remains elusive (Philip & Azevedo, 2017).

Framework
We draw from a critical justice view of equity and a social practice view of learning. Critical justice focuses attention on recognizing diversity and addressing structural inequalities perpetuated through systemic racism and classism. A central focus is in re-shifting relations of power and position within multiple scales of activity in education, and their intersections with historicized injustice that play out in classrooms. Juxtaposing social practice theory on critical justice, we make sense of how two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles” (Holland & Lave, 2009) – yield interactional practices, and how the micro-dynamics at play, create (and foreclose) opportunities for critical science agency.

Methods
We engaged in critical ethnography, a methodology rooted in the belief that exposing, critiquing, and transforming inequalities associated with social structures and labeling devices are consequential and fundamental dimensions of research and analysis. Data generated during the implementation of the "How can I make my classroom more sustainable" unit in 6 middle-middle school classrooms across seven weeks included fieldnotes, video-recordings of class sessions, student and teacher interviews and student artifacts. Data were analyzed in the grounded theory tradition, using a constant comparative approach (Straus & Corbin, 1998).

Findings
Our study shows how integrating an equity-oriented design approach – community ethnography as pedagogy – as part of teaching and learning STEM, support the emergences of three interactional practices reflexive of critical science agency: modeling ethnographic data, re-performing injustices towards understanding and solidarity, and making change dynamic and visible through engineering practices. These practices reflect the on-going struggle youth face in their lives, write these injustices onto a longer history of struggle in school/classrooms, and allow for the refusal to be victimized by them. We discuss how these practices took shape among students, teachers and community members as well as how they foregrounded productive tensions around agency/authority in learning STEM and the risks inherent for youth in establishing a rightful presence that demands a collective response towards historicized oppressions.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro