Teachers' Protection of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Students in K–8 STEAM Classrooms: Pedagogical Practices for Transformational Learning

• In Event: Science Teaching and Learning Toward Collaborative Social Transformation and Justice

Abstract

Purpose: PK-12 students encounter anti-Indigenous, antiBlack, and authoritarian science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) classrooms where teachers’ deficit thinking limits students’ engagement in robust learning (Bang et al., 2017). STEAM learning environments are often claimed as white property (Bullock, 2017), making discussions of anti-racist teaching practices rare or nonexistent in reform documents (e.g., NGSS, CCSS-M ; Authors, 2019a). In contrast, critical scholars advocate for anti-racist, anti-colonial pedagogical approaches decentering dominant narratives about minoritized students (Authors, 2019a/b; Bang et al., 2017). As such, we highlight educators’ equity-focused work with Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) students. In this poster session, we will provide examples of educators’ successes and challenges as they aim to facilitate humanizing educational experiences and transform learning environments. We present cases of exemplary science teaching practices from two research projects grounded in epistemologies of Indigenous presencing.

Theoretical Frameworks: Humanizing approaches foster authentic caring relationships, demonstrate dignity, and develop students’ critical consciousness to transform our world (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Souto-Manning & Winn, 2019; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014). We see two, related theoretical constructs within humanizing approaches relevant for our work: desettling (Bang et al., 2012) and teachers’ protection (Authors, 2020). Desettling requires teachers’ “explicit rejection of deficit-driven discourses” and valuing minoritized students’ ways of scientific knowing/doing to support development of deep knowledge of and expansive relationships with science (Bang et al., 2012, p. 314). Teachers’ protection of BIPOC students (Authors, 2020) highlights teachers’ relational, structural, and physical protection mechanisms, unveiling the complexities of humanizing approaches to disrupting antiBlackness in schooling. We ground our work within these frameworks to make visible possibilities for anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogies in STEAM teaching and learning.

Methods: Case one is a two-year participatory ethnography of Indigenous Summer Camp (ISC), a week-long camp for children facilitated by Indigenous elders in urban Central Texas (ICI, 2018). Data collection occurred in Summers 2018, 2019 and data sources include: 1) observations of ISC activities with 30 children and 2) student work (multimodal water stories and cartographies based on Traditional Ecological Knowledges). Case two is a multi-year comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2018) of K-8 schools in Northern California examining an equity-focused initiative for Black students. Data sources for case two were collected 2013-2015, including: 1) classroom observations and 2) semi-structured interviews with students, families, and educators. We categorized data using thematic analyses and subsequent analysis using qualitative software (Dedoose®, NVivo®) to complete a hybrid coding approach for both cases.

Findings and significance: Educators across both settings 1) structured the learning environment in ways that positioned students as competent learners; 2) encouraged collaborative sensemaking that built upon students’ ideas; and 3) emphasized radical relationality and reciprocity with place and more-than-human worlds. Findings demonstrate how minoritized students’ knowledges, practices, and identities are desettled when educators protect their students from antiBlackness and anti-Indigenous erasure. This work contributes to understandings of how educators can disrupt the status quo in STEAM education.

Authors

• Tia C. Madkins, The University of Texas at Austin

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto