Equity and Learning as Episto-Ontological Practice: Diverse Identities, Agencies, and Generative Epistemic Tools in STEM

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

Abstract

In the U.S. public schools, due to accountability and achievement policies, students identified as ELs (English learners) are often excluded from science classes to receive English remediation (Authors, 2015; Stoddart, 2016). Even when these culturally and linguistically diverse learners have access to science learning, the overwhelming emphasis is placed on the academic language development with the assumption that language is the principal mediator of learning (Lee et al, 2013; Authors, 2018). In this paper, we argue that it is only after language is cut off from its emergent origins, it becomes available for the kinds of analyses typifying the current decoding-based approaches to gaining access to academic discourse to which ELs are then presumed to “need.” Positioning Els are “lacking” language skills wrong them “in their ‘capacity as a knower’” (Giladi, 2017, p. 142), implicated in a gap “in our shared tools of social interpretation” as epistemic injustices (Flicker, 2007, p. 6).
The data for this study comes from a design based participatory research study, centered around equity goals, conducted in two seventh 7th grade science classrooms in the state of Massachusetts and later within informal learning settings at a summer science program with over hundred EL students. The study draws upon sociocultural theories and ontological views of learning (Cole, 1995; Holland et al., 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991) science constitutive of epistemic practices, tools, knowledge systems (Berland, 2017), and intertwined with unfolding identities (Carlone, 2016), potentially shaping students’ evolving epistemic, conceptual, and identity trajectories with disciplinary knowledge and practices situated in local fields of action over different timescales (Wortham, 2009). Using design-based approach, qualitative data was systematically collected using video, audio recording of the classroom interactions, observational notes and student interviews to understand the role of bristlebots, as epistemic tools, on students’ unfolding of episto-ontological relations to science knowledge and practices. Grounded on video analysis and coding and categorization methods of interview data, we examined the emergence of students’ everyday cognitive and cultural resources, heterogeneous and (often) tacit epistemologies learners draw upon (Hammer and Enby, 2003), as they conceptually and performatively engage in making of bristlebots, and later utilizing their bots as epistemic tools to model science concepts. The multiple forms of the data showed that epistemic tools, such as bristlebots, became a generative and expressive tool for students’ science meaning making, as they engaged in robust science practices in personally and collectively meaningful ways and expressed their knowledge and ways of knowing in multiple modes and modalities (Jewitt, 2008), and, in return, unfolding their identities and agencies (Authors, 2018). Based on our findings, we argue that the kinds of epistemic practices, tools, and roles afforded to students in science learning (Stroupe, 2016) are chiefly intertwined with students understanding of themselves as “science people,” theirs and others’ perceptions and positioning of their “capacity a knower” and their relations to science discipline (Carlone & Johnson, 2007).

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Walter M. Stroup, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• Charlemya Erasme, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Akira Harper, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth