Unpacking Youths' Voices, Bodies, and Relational Histories to Understand Consequential Meaning-Making and Identity in STEM

• In Event: 25.059 - Desettling Evidences of Learning in This "Post-Truth" Era Through Informal Learning Environment Research

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical grounding: Video ethnographies have become common practice in studies of meaning making and identity work in science in formal and informal educational settings. Yet, analysis often tends to focus on the individual and the verbal only (deFreitas, 2016), with little attention to students’ embodied learning, the attunement among bodies and materials in interaction (Shotter, 2015; Taylor & Ivinson, 2013), or the manner attunement becomes consequential for future meaning making and identity work in STEM. Taking a relational perspective here, we focus on the “ethical, political, and pedagogical” (Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016, p. 44) and pay specific attention to the work of the video camera in making visible moments of learning and youths’ relational histories (Vossoughi & Jackson, 2018). Guided by that theoretical stance, we explore emergent, transformative practices of rich materially embedded and mediated forms of engagement with STEM in three activities: chess, science, and media production.
Methods: We rely on a video-ethnography of the three activities that were offered by an NGO to students in ethnically diverse schools in underserved communities. We followed each activity in two different classrooms in the academic school year of 2016-2017, resulting in 15 weeks of video data and a total of 20 weeks of ethnographic fieldnotes, supplemented by interviews of teachers, instructors, and students. As a team (authors of this paper), we engaged in interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), attending to the manner the camera, bodies, and materials were entangled, exploring the significance of such entanglement for specific youth over time and across classrooms. We also attended to the performative implications of the camera.
Results: While the research team pointed the camera towards groups to document their forms of participation, teachers re-positioned the camera through their talk as a tool for surveillance. That positioning was challenged by the youth over time, however, with the camera becoming a tool to capture relational dynamics of meaning making and identity in STEM that became consequential for the students. For instance, in chess, Kamila, who was an intermediate level chess player, ended up guiding her adversary’s chess moves in ways that would eventually make her peer win the game. The camera also made evident the complex entanglement of materials of science and bodies. For instance, a girls’ only team performed for both, the camera and a boy’s only group working across the table from them. The girls manipulated with care the materials of science used for the DNA extraction from a strawberry, resulting in the display of much pride and excitement of the red liquid they extracted, positioning themselves clearly as insiders to science. That performance became consequential in that it positioned their peers across the table as struggling with STEM. Hence, the camera made visible rich forms of engagement and pedagogical work in STEM for some, while not others, pushing us to engage with questions about ethics while simultaneously focusing on agency and transformations of group practices with important consequential implications.

Authors

• Jrene Rahm, University of Montreal

• Julie Bergeron, University of Quebec - Outaouais

• Ferdous Touioui

• Maria Grullon

• Fahrni Laurent