Becoming a Critical Agentic Bricoleur: Teaching Science While Black

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

Abstract

Objectives
“If we cannot bring our students outside of the classroom, why not bring informal science learning into the classroom?” This paraphrases a teacher participant in a research group focused on teacher identity vis-à-vis informal science learning. Situated in a large, diverse urban public school district, this paper highlights the experiences of three female Afro-Diasporic teachers as they navigate their identities and subjectivities around racialized storylines they encounter in school and science education. I forward a notion of Critical Agentic Bricoleur (CAB) to describe their identity in relation to how they adapted meanings and resources of informal science learning in response to the storylines.

Theoretical framework
Racial storylines are the pervasive narratives about race in ours social discourse that gets enacted in schools and other social settings (Nasir etal. 2012). These storylines influence the identities that are made available to learners (and teachers) in learning contexts. With learning, goals and identity evolving together in social practice, racial storylines present spaces where learners could resist and articulate new goals and take up new identities. Teachers are subjected to the racial storylines while they also shape learning experiences for students. Agency allows teachers to access and appropriate resources at hand to meet goals, (Author, 2017), and provides a salient construct for examining how teachers use informal science, as physical and conceptual resources, to enact teaching to counter negative and persistent storylines about students/people of colour and schooling.

Methodological approach
Over 3 years, a group of secondary school science teachers met monthly and engaged in cogenerative dialogues, structured dialogues around shared events or practices with the aim of co-generating new meanings/practices (Martin, 2006). The teachers engaged in informal science learning-focused courses and experiences in their pre-service learning. Three teachers are the focus of this paper because of their identities as Afro-diasporic women coupled with their enactments of teaching. Identities and subjectivities are made and remade through discourses, or recurrent themes (i.e. storylines) (Luke, 1995) thus, I looked for a) what storylines emerged, b) how they viewed themselves vis-à-vis these storylines and c) they ways that these storylines influence their becomings/identities as teachers.

Findings
Teachers’ goals for creating STEM learning experiences were shaped and enacted around STEM futures that they imagined for their students and to counter the prevailing deficit discourses around students of colour and STEM, therefore allowing them to become CAB. I will present specific data points to confirm these findings. As CAB, teachers challenged and resisted storylines by developing structures that allowed their students to create alternative narratives and imagine a broader range of futures for themselves, for example weekend science-related field trips, interactions with graduate students and scientists of color, creating new activities and out-of-classroom learning spaces, etc.



Scholarly significance
In moving towards authentic notions of equity, it is important to consider the experiences of racialized teachers in teaching and learning to teach in order to truly desettle the structures that continue to perpetuate the damaging notions that shape learning, both formal and informal, for racially and economically marginalized peoples.

Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary