Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance: Examining STEAM Literacies, STEAM Identities, and Self-Concept

• In Event: 64.059 - Embodying STEM: Dance as a Means to Access Science, Math, and Technology

Abstract

It has been documented in the extant literature that African American females are
severely underrepresented in STEAM fields across both educational and career continuums
(Marra, et al., 2009; Pinkard, et al., 2017; Towns, 2010). Meanwhile, dance has been and
continues to be woven into the fabric of African American culture (Malone, 1996). Considering
that dance touches practically every aspect of African American life, unfortunately it (and the
arts in general) is often absent from schools that serve majority African American
students in urban environments. According to the Parsad and Spiegelman (2012), there is a
downward trend in access to arts education and dance instruction specifically. Ninety-five
percent of elementary school and 77% of secondary school children that attend schools where
75% or more of students receive free and reduced lunch do not have access to dance instruction.
Bearing the above-mentioned in mind, Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance was created to
address these pervasive gaps in the underrepresentation of Black girls in STEAM and the lack of
in school access to dance education.
Black Girls STEAMing through Dance is an after school program for 7-12 year old
African American girls in West Philadelphia (a historically tight knit African American
community) that leverages a transdisciplinary partnership amongst four African American
female professors in dance, urban education, product design, and computing. This two-hour
weekly program engages girls in a one-hour concert dance (jazz, modern, ballet) class taught by
Undergraduate Dance Majors, and the second hour integrates various elements of STEAM taught
by the professors. Each week, girls rotate between the coding lab where they learn to code
avatars’ movement (Dailey, et al., 2014) and the “making” lab where they design wearable
technologies for their dance costumes. These weekly activities draw inspiration from and bring
inspiration to their dance instruction. Specifically, the program is purposed to create an ecology
of STEAM experiences through the dance class to inspire STEAM literacies, STEAM identities
(wherein the participants internalize that they are dancers, scientists, artists, designers, etc.), and
the formation of positive self-concept. Another objective of this project is to support dance
educators’ development of self-efficacy, cultural competence, and culturally sustaining
dance pedagogies.
This presentation highlights Black Girls STEAMing through Dance through various
multimedia platforms including the culminating dance performance at a professional theater
where students performed both movement they created in our coding lab as well as their
innovative costumes from the making lab. This presentation also shares qualitative research
findings on the impact of the program on students’ development of STEAM literacies, STEAM
identities, and self-concept. Moreover, we answer critical questions about how our
predominantly White female dance educators developed self-efficacy, cultural competency, and
culturally sustaining dance pedagogies. Our program’s use of dance to integrate STEAM is a
promising platform to encourage engaged STEAM participation amongst underrepresented
Black girls (Daily, et al., 2014, Pinkard, et al., 2017). Moreover, it is significant to the field and
the emerging body of literature about transformative integration of the arts and learning

Author

• Ayana Allen-Handy, Drexel University