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Competing Robots: Cultures of Competition in Pre-K–12 U.S. STEM Education

Mon, April 8, 4:10 to 6:10pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine, Chestnut East

Abstract

To create a more just and inclusive world it is not enough to only make science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields more diverse, we must also aim to change whose interests are aligned with the work of these fields. The 2017 March for Science in Washington D.C. was both a flurry of resistance to the Trump Administration and a display of optimism in the democratic promise of scientific institutions. This march, and many like it around the nation, took on a science fair-like atmosphere of show-and-tell. Amongst the crowd a grade school student showed off a weaponized robot that she made for an upcoming competition. This should come as no surprise since robotics competitions, from FIRST to Botball, have become a dominant mode of P-12 STEM education in the United States. Yet, the juxtaposition of political resistance to the celebration of a weaponized robot reveals an unsettling reality about the “pipeline” model of STEM education: while there are many efforts to increase the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of those entering STEM fields, the outputs continue to reinforce US militarism and environmental destruction. Indeed, the pipeline model does little to address the role of STEM itself in (re)producing underrepresentation (Eglash et al. 2017). For example, robotics competitions provide young people with hands-on learning experiences unlike traditional school, but I also find that there is an emphasis on direct and indirect competition that may be alienating to some youth.
To make this case, I detail an ethnographic study of educational robotics across six Upstate New York elementary and middle schools during the 2014-2015 school year. Through interviews and field notes, I show that there is a basin of attraction toward framing educational robotics in terms of competition either directly through sports-like robotics programs or indirectly through highlighting their application for military expansion and workplace automation. I find that enthusiasm for competition is one possible motivation for why teachers and students use educational robotics in their classrooms. However, I also show that it is not necessarily the only one as students find pleasure in creating social robots and teachers prioritize discovery over competition. Still, little attention is paid in these programs to the role that STEM outputs, from educational robotics to environmental sensors, can play in supporting environmental sustainability and social justice at a local community level (Jeremijenko 2002; Scott et al. 2015). As an alternative to the extractive pipeline model, I use literature on “culturally responsive computing” to show how STEM knowledges can be redirected from a focus on corporate and military interests to that of brokering school-community connections that have the potential to support social movement building for economic access and educational equity in low-income communities (Lachney 2016). Instead of continuing the extractive pipeline model of STEM, I end by proposing a “generative” approach to education that prioritizes community building by keeping the value students and teachers produce in their local contexts (Bennett 2016; Eglash 2016).

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