Critical Relationality: Desettling Teacher-Student Relationships to Knowledge in STEM by Designing for Intellectual Humility

• In Event: Attending to the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning

Abstract

Purpose. We present critical relationality (CR) as a theoretical framework for disrupting settled expectations (Harris, 1995) regarding roles and relationships across students, teachers, and knowledge in STEM classrooms (Bang, Rosebery, Warren, & Medin, 2012). We argue that teacher-student interactions can prove transformational within contexts designed from a critically relational perspective that supports teachers in orienting to youth from a stance of intellectual humility (IH). We examine how designing for IH created openings for teachers to renegotiate their relationships to STEM disciplinary practices, tools, and students through making.

Grounding Framework. This work advances the theory of critical relationality, which sits at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT), STEM identity development, and relational epistemologies. It involves 1) the examination of agency, structure, and connections to others as relational mediators of STEM learning shaped by a variety of factors; and 2) active attendance to those factors through disruption of conditions that function to oppress students of color through disregard for their experiential and out-of-school knowledge.

In this poster, we explore how designing from a perspective of critical relationality can support teachers’ in disrupting settled expectations for disciplinary knowledge and knowing in STEM by inviting and building on the knowledge, practices, interests and concerns of youth.

Method and Data. Data for this paper consist of audio and visual records drawn from the first two phases of a two-year design-based research project (Brown, 1992), involving the design of a teacher professional development model aimed at supporting teachers to reconceptualize student engagement and scientific inquiry. Activity structures were designed to systematically immerse teachers in disciplinary and pedagogical uncertainty to democratize “expertise” as they worked alongside middle school youth in an out-of-school makerspace. Episodes wherein teachers took an inquiry stance, engaged youth as co-learners, and expressed uncertainty (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2001; Dana & Yendol-Silva, 2003) were identified using grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 1990).

Findings. This poster highlights three findings:
1. Critically relational design creates openings for teachers to view students as agential contributors to scientific knowledge
2. Teaching with IH enables teaching and learning in experimental and exploratory ways that reframe the unknown as opportunities for rich scientific exploration and experimentation with new ways of STEM-doing
3. A commitment to teaching and learning in this way calls upon educators to engage in agentive vulnerability, defined here as making a conscious commitment to achieving the promise of socially just and equitable teaching and learning despite guaranteed feelings of frustration and uncertainty that accompany processes of transformation

Significance. Teachers’ lived intellectual humility in the STEM classroom has implications for broadening participation in STEM as it expands ways of STEM teaching and sense-making for teachers and students as co-learners, fostering students’ ability to exercise conceptual agency (Cobb et al, 2009) and establish meaningful student identification with STEM-doing. In this way, designing for teacher education through a frame of critical relationality invites teachers to orient to learners in socially just and humanistic ways by creating contexts that encourage and support teachers’ reconceptualization of their students, disciplines, and tools.

Authors

• Maria C Olivares, Boston University

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, Boston University

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University

• Ezra Gouvea, Tufts University