Animating the Periodic Table: Creating Space for Identity and Engagement in STEM

• In Event: Black Girls' Learning, Identity, and Engagement in STEM Through Dance

Abstract

The purpose of the presentation is to examine the nature of the learning and identity for Black girls in dance and STEM. We use a dance studio as a site for learning. In order to take a stance to be strength based and affirm the whole student we collaborated with community based dance schools. Our paper describes instances where the students bring themselves to the embodied physics task in ways that affirm their identities.

This presentation focuses on project findings that have been characterized as design principles gleaned from what we learned from observing our girls in their community based dance sites and how we worked to build our Embodied Physics Learning Lab with those principles in mind. The paper analysis features examples where our dancers have opportunities and restraints to engaging in the Embodied Tasks. For example, during one of the classes our physicist and choreographer unwrapped a huge poster of the periodic table. The students reacted with “oh no’s” and “not that” and even “Put it away!” The teachers emphasized that the activity would be fun. The students then developed an understanding of some of the elements in the periodic table through a physics lens by exploring qualities of the elements in order to show their differences. They physically enacted their behaviors and personalities. Students were asked to imagine the scientific ideas. They had to show through movement how hydrogen is light. Teachers then asked the students to show iron qualities as opposed to hydrogen. The students represented iron as heavy and strong and densely packed with electrons. We found students bringing in krumping and stepping, genres of dance they are very comfortable with which bring out groundedness. After representing other elements,the data shows how this exploration made the flat 2d Periodic Table representation come alive for students, and their attitude towards the Elements changed so much that one group of students chose to engage in this topic for the final Performance in which they choreographed their own Physics Dances.
By sharing video of how the girls engaged in these design principles and showing their reactions to the embodied tasks we asked the students to engage in, we show the opportunities and challenges to engaging in ways where girls can be their whole selves. Understanding how and why certain in and out of school learning environments has the potential to more effectively harness the assets of Black girls may provide insights into how their harnessed power may play a transformative role in STEM teaching and learning. Importantly, it can also help to create needed counter narratives to the deficit characterizations of Black girls in the arts and in school contexts. As a result we will identify a more robust knowledge base that is reflective of the complexities of gendered, racial and ethnic social identities of Black girls and their interactional relationships to learning in the STEM fields.

Authors

• Folashade Cromwell Solomon, Framingham State University

• Tracey Wright, TERC