Supporting African American Girls' STEAM Identities and Positive Self-Concept Through Dance, Design, and Coding

• In Event: Dis/Connecting With Computing: Designing for Critical Identities and Equitable Inquiry in K–12 Computer Science Education

Abstract

Objectives and Conceptual Framework: This poster presentation highlights a transdisciplinary collaboration between Dance, Education, Design, and Computer Science that integrates dance with computational and design making. Specifically, the program is purposed to create an ecology of STEAM experiences for African American girls through dance to inspire STEAM literacies, STEAM identities, the formation of positive self-concept, and to support dance educators’ development of self-efficacy, cultural competence, and culturally sustaining dance pedagogies. The use of dance as a platform to introduce STEM is an early candidate to encourage STEM participation (Daily, et al., 2014; Parmar, et al., 2016; Pinkard, 2005).

Methods: The project operates across several contexts including an after-school program, a co-curricular mini course program at a local middle school, and a professional development course for teachers. The after-school program takes place during the school year for girls ages 7-12. This two-hour weekly program engages girls in a one-hour dance class taught by Undergraduate Dance Majors, and the second hour integrates various elements of STEAM taught by faculty. The middle school mini-course program is a 9 week course with 5th and 6th grade girls. The students participate in a weekly 80 minute program that combines instruction on choreography, design, and coding through the use of Chibitronics Make-code application and a blend of Technokio and Chibitronics hardware. The teacher professional development workshop supports 2nd-8th grade teachers from a local federally-funded program including a hands-on, day-long workshop, with standards driven STEAM activities and lesson plans. Data from all three programs is captured by our research team through a mixed method research approach.

Findings: The findings of our study demonstrate that African American girls develop positive STEAM identities and positive self-concept through the interdisciplinary nature (dance, design, making, CS) of the project. Through the design and making components, the girls are able to participate in the application of the CS content. The CS component supports and reinforces computational concepts observed in the dance and making. Specifically, students showed increase knowledge as they learned to correlate topics such as loops and conditional statements in coding language to their dance moves. Advances to this work look to understand how the girls envision creating together as a group to produce desired outcomes.

Significance: Our program’s use of dance to investigate STEAM identities is a promising platform to encourage engaged STEAM participation amongst underrepresented Black girls (Daily, et al., 2014, Pinkard, et al., 2017). Moreover, our findings are significant to our various fields and the emerging body of literature about the transformative integration of the arts and learning. Our project is significant to the conference theme because of our various partnerships and the many stakeholders that are involved in making the program a success. Underrepresented Black girls gain skills in multiple disciplines while using their bodies for creative expression and as a source of embodied reflection. University students gain a deeper understanding of culturally sustaining pedagogy. This work also illuminates the need for representation and culturally sustaining pedagogy in all four disciplines.

Authors

• Raja Schaar, Drexel University

• Ayana Allen-Handy, Drexel University

• Michelle Rogers, Drexel University

• Valerie Ifill, Drexel University