Critical Moments of Joy in STEM: A Participatory Exploration

• In Event: 51.027 - Pedagogies of Joy :) Joy as Resistance at the Intersection of STEM Learning Pathways

Abstract

Objectives
Researchers link informal STEM learning to expanded opportunities in STEM (NRC, 2015). Yet limited research asks youth to define supportive informal STEM learning, or what aids them in leveraging such informal learning across space and time. Centering youth voice and agency, we push past learning and participation outcomes to ask youth what supports joy in learning, and what that joy can produce.

Perspective
As educators in an afterschool STEM program for low-income youth ages 11-14, we witness “critical moments of joy” in STEM, which youth explain “matters more” and is “deeper” than fleeting fun. Youth-defined “critical moments of joy” in STEM drove a participatory analysis of such moments and what supports them. We co-examined moments with youth and conducted an extended micro-level analysis of cases for a multilevel approach to seeing, centering, and supporting critical moments of joy in STEM. Within a mobilities of criticality framework, we layered participatory critical ethnography research with the intersectional contexts of history and geography across scales (Calabrese Barton, Tan, & Shin, 2017).

Methods
This study began when, at the end of one afterschool STEM program session, two youth mused together on how they “loved” the program and how it made them feel joyful to continue their participation in it. The first author requested permission to “listen in” on that conversation and to record it for their ongoing participatory research efforts, asking questions about what caused them to feel so strongly about the program on that particular day. They insisted that their engagement in the program’s activities of STEM for sustainable communities allowed them a more critically informed connection to their learning lives and to the world around them, enhancing their feelings of agency and ownership over their efforts and allowing their learning to feel “more real.” Following that discussion, we decided to explore such experiences of critically informed joy and where/how they can connect to other STEM learning experiences over time and space. Starting with our participant observations, we elicited descriptive explanations and stories of critical joy in STEM learning and practice. In partnership with youth, we used participatory dialogue to continue our data cogeneration process drawing from youth partner expertise on moments of important feelings in STEM learning and practice. We used follow-up interviews to complete iterative rounds of youth-adult co-analysis of youth-made artifacts using a constant comparative approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Findings & Significance
Youth revealed where/when joy is “allowed” to occur, and what protects and legitimizes such moments of joy (e.g., when they felt positioned by adult educators as partners and co-owners in learning). They also shared how co-constructed/co-designed learning spaces could welcome self-expression, sharing, and embodiment of “realness” that supports the development of critical understandings of and engagement in the world with STEM. Findings push forward the field of critical science education research and practice, expanding understandings of what youth need and desire, in their own words and reflective analysis, for a more connected and empowered relationship with STEM.

Authors

• Day W Greenberg, Michigan State University

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan