Making and Doing STEAM With Marginalized Youth to Improve and Express Community

• In Event: On the Ground Responses to the Anthropocene Context: Civic and STEM Engagement as Global Citizenship

Abstract

This poster discusses a series of projects connecting learning of STEAM literacies to civic engagement to address community issues, guiding youths in grappling with the modern cultural and material landscape as influenced by humans.

Researchers can uncover the local norms for STEM learning (Rahm & Gonsalves, 2012) by studying participants’ construction of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) which can be “sites of possibility” for blending science, social action, and art, thereby creating new ways of being and doing. Using the “as if realm” framing from figured worlds could provide insight into the new territory of community-oriented STEAM-rich programming.

A research-practitioner team of graduate students, two faculty investigators, and undergraduates led program activities as standalone sessions in longer-term projects including: a community science project addressing local noise pollution, an art project involving the planning and creation of an original mural in a local park, programming and robotics projects, and art projects based on repurposing waste materials.

We built from underrepresented groups’ funds of knowledge, broadening the definition and culture of science and engineering (Calabrese Barton et al., 2013). We targeted both maker (Meyers, et al., 2013) and citizen science literacies (NASEM, 2018), through helping participants define problems and design solutions, ask questions, and carry out investigations. We utilized ethnographic case study methods (Green et al., 2012) to analyze activity sessions. Our goal was to understand the construction of collective agency of the participants made possible by the joint teamwork between the site staff, community partners, and our research-practitioner team.

Data were collected over four years at the St. George Youth Center, an afterschool site serving over fifty Latinx immigrant youths (grades 6-12). We took ethnographic notes and analytic memos on design processes and implementation challenges, as well as traced dialogic exchanges and multimodal practices across time (Green et al., 2012).
We collected and transcribed video and audio data from activity sessions (1-2 hours duration) and semi-structured interviews. Our data include a broad range of artifacts jointly created by youth and researchers including data tables, furniture, interactive robots, sketches, and instruments.

The figured world organized by the project activities served as the context for a shift towards the youth viewing themselves as contributing members of the community and as STEAM people. We observed and documented the capacity for students to collaborate with multiple stakeholders to engage in productive work towards community goals in ways that are visible and shareable as evidence of the deep learning skills of participants.

The combination of civic engagement and STEAM education positions youth to develop a capacity for manipulation of tools and environment to improve the overall community. In the context of the Anthropocene era, youth must grapple with products and structure of urbanization in order to do the work of improving material conditions and expressing life. Inextricably, the form that community-oriented STEAM might take is itself shaped through trends of the modern era, for instance, by the increasing accessibility of digital fabrication tools, both in a material sense and in pedagogical approaches.

Authors

• David J Sañosa, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Stephanie Arguera, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Jasmine B. Nation, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Richard P. Duran, University of California - Santa Barbara