Noticing Emotions as an Indicator of Racism and Status Hierarchies in Science Learning Spaces

• In Event: Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing in Research on Teaching and Teacher Learning

Abstract

Objectives
We examine student interactions and teacher responses in the context of "off-task" science learning episodes to understand the role that emotion and teacher noticing can play in facilitating equitable learning experiences.
Theoretical Framework
We see science classrooms as microcosms of the power relations that shape society and science (Nasir & Hand, 2006; Sheth, 2019). Thus, everyday experiences of science teaching and learning are imbued with racialized gendered relations (Barton et. al., 2013) that have implications for science learning.
The role of emotions as central to science teaching and learning is underexplored. We conceptualize emotions as socially and politically constructed in classroom contexts (rather than individual, psychological traits) and as mutually constitutive of knowledge construction practices (rather than as counterproductive to knowledge construction) (Zembylas, 2002). We consider emotions as sites for mediating science learning. Noticing for equity and the ways emotions may be indicators of moments of distress and marginalization is essential for sustaining youth in science.
Methods
This cross-case analysis examines data from two larger studies: One in a high school serving lower income communities of color in California’s Silicon Valley and includes data from classroom videos and teacher and student interviews. The other in a midwestern urban district serving a socioeconomically diverse population of students includes data from ethnographic classroom field notes and teacher interviews. Based on the analysis of data, we present narrative vignettes to provide vivid portrayal of everyday life (Erickson, 1986).
Findings
The vignettes featured highlight the emotionality of student interactions, teachers’ responses, and potential outcomes of those responses on learning opportunities. In each vignette, we see power relations unfolding across academic and social status and shaping students' experiences in the classroom. Rather than engaging with the complexity of students’ emotions, teachers’ responses to these interactions were similar despite their differing positionalities and contexts: They redirected students to the academic tasks. These teachers espoused beliefs in equity-oriented instruction, yet they did not, in the context of science teaching, engage with the emotionality that arose from status hierarchies. We posit that, in large part, the teachers' compartmentalization of how to interpret and what to attend to in these interactions is a function of socialization into the science disciplines that conceive of science and scientists as unemotional.
Significance
When it comes to developing emotional skills, teachers can start by noticing what students are and are not doing that highlight their emotional well-being (Author, in press). Noticing for equity includes teachers attending to issues around race, gender, and class. It is beneficial, then, for teachers to engage issues of inequity around race and gender when they arise, as these behaviors marginalize and silence students. Additionally, research highlights the racialized nature of emotions and teachers attempts to avoid topics of race and erase emotion in the classroom (Milner, 2010; Hoffman, 2009). Despite these apprehensions, it is imperative teachers attend to the emotional behavior of students as indicative of when students may choose to disengage from learning.

Authors

• Alexis Patterson Williams, University of California - Davis

• Manali J. Sheth, Connecticut College