Co-Facilitators' Self-Stories and Experiences: Opportunities to Figure Out New Identities and Leadership

• In Event: Nurturing Leadership in Computer Programming in Middle School Latinx Students: Collaboration and Co-Facilitation

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation explores how co-facilitators perceived themselves in mathematics and computer programming (MCP) as they enacted their new role in [project name]. The analysis provides insight into the challenges, assets, supports, and identities that they socially discovered and co-created.

Theoretical Framework
Identities are complex and important understandings and creations as youth use their self-identifications, for example, with careers, sports or roles as sources for motivation to navigate social realms, like MCP communities (Aguirre et al., 2016; Martin, 2000). We understand identity as always evolving and linked to both cognitive and emotional perspectives on self (Hidalgo, 2009). Presented through stories (Aguirre et al., 2016), identity refers to conceptualizations of self and others and derived actions (Cornell & Hartmann, 1998). Thus, identity includes self-presentation processes of naming the interconnections between the intimate and public venues of social practice that emerged from, and worked and reworked, through social interaction (Holland et al., 2003; Niño-Murcia & Rothman, 2009). We understand that the co-facilitators’ new positions and roles in [project name] gave them new opportunities (a new world) to create new stories about themselves and what they can do. Correspondingly, we used the construct of Figured Worlds, which are “socially and culturally constructed realm[s] of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Holland et al., 2003, p. 52) to analyze how co-facilitators interpreted their experiences in [project name].

Methods
Data related to the 13 focal co-facilitators included videotaped individual and focus group student exit interviews, and co-facilitator pre and post implementation interviews and questionnaires, and MCP self-reported change. Content analysis process of their talk, gestures, and embodied interactions (Erickson, 2004) in the data served to infer co-facilitators’ stories of their roles and challenges with the goal of “objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages” (Holsti, 1969, p. 14). Initial analysis of the interviews described their figured worlds, identities and actions as co-facilitators. Results were contrasted with data as students, and were triangulated with questionnaires and self-reported-change. The analysis yielded numerous aspects of roles named by the co-facilitators while teaching and learning MCP. Through axial coding, a storyline was created to depict co-facilitators’ new self-perceptions.

Results
Co-facilitators’ stories revealed the following sequence of experiences: (a) facing the fear of not knowing enough and social inability, (b) taking up the new responsibilities, (c) relating to and developing new relationships with peers, (d) affirming their MCP knowledge, (e) developing and growing language skills, confidence, and leadership. Further, while their new figured worlds provided new frames of self-reference, these worlds also included power dynamics (Holland & Leander, 2004) related to language and gender, among others. Detailed descriptions will be shared in the presentation.

Scholarly Significance
These stories are both encouraging and challenging on how educational ecologies and shifts in student positioning yield new frames and opportunities to see and rework oneself. Issues of positionality and interactions became apparent through these stories as ‘teachers’ and their new perception of mathematics and teaching.

Authors

• Sylvia Celedon-Pattichis, The University of Texas at Austin

• Carlos Alfonso LopezLeiva, University of New Mexico

• Marios Pattichis, The University of New Mexico