Desettling Epistemic Agency: Youth Experiencing Inclusive and Transformative Epistemic Agency in a Chemical Oceanography After-School Program

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

Abstract

Objectives
The practice turn in education has the potential to shift focus onto youth learning in ways that create more opportunities for enacting epistemic agency. Critical STEM education scholars have built upon and questioned assimilative narratives of disciplinary participation (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), and questioned the burden that narratives of participation based in resilience place upon students from non-dominant communities (Ko et al., 2014; McGee & Bentley, 2017). This is particularly important for youth from non-dominant communities who frequently experience school science spaces as places where settled expectations of disciplinary participation are in conflict with their lived experiences and interests (Bang, Warren, Rosebery & Medin, 2012; Bricker & Bell, 2014; Calabrese Barton, Tan & Rivet, 2008).
Learning environments designed with epistemic agency in mind have the potential to disrupt hierarchical relationships to disciplinary knowledge and between knowers and learners (Warren & Rosebery, 2011). Therefore, developing a more nuanced understanding of epistemic agency has implications for the design of learning environments that are geared towards broadening participation for youth from non-dominant communities who have been historically underrepresented in STEM fields.

Methods
I leveraged data from a six-year chemical oceanography program (SCSA) to inform this analysis. I analyzed fieldnotes, interviews with youth participants, and participant generated artifacts from nine-month of programming in order to explore the ways in which youth described their experiences of epistemic agency (Merriam, 2009).

Results
Youth’s responses to interview questions about their participation in SCSA showed the ways that they were developing expertise and taking on roles within disciplinary learning environments i.e. demonstrating inclusive epistemic agency. An exploration of fieldnotes from the latter part of the SCSA program as well as an analysis of the artifacts that they created for the final community-based sharing of their findings showed what I am calling transformative epistemic agency where youth changed the disciplinary spaces they were working in and authored transformative science communication artifacts.
Moments of inclusive epistemic agency contributed to the development of youths’ disciplinary expertise suggesting that inclusive epistemic agency can play a role in youth’s personal broadening participation narratives. Moments of transformative epistemic agency not only contributed to youth developing disciplinary expertise but additionally shifted scientists’ practice and their notions of what counted as disciplinary practice. The experiences that contributed to these transformative epistemic agency narratives were rich learning opportunities for youth, adults, and communities.

Significance
Analyses of epistemic agency in learning environments can focus our attention on systems of oppression that disproportionately affect participants from non-dominant communities (Calabrese Barton, Tan & Rivet, 2008; Espinosa, 2011; Nasir, 2011; Ong, 2005; Ong et al., 2011). A focus on science teaching and learning that engages inclusive and transformative epistemic agency has the power to expand the ways the field thinks about broadening participation (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; O'Neill & Calabrese Barton, 2005).

Author

• Déana Scipio, IslandWood