Rethinking Heterogeneity and STEM Learning With Multilingual Black and Brown Young People

• In Event: Critical and Emergent Perspectives on Transdisciplinarity in Learning

Abstract

Objectives

The work of sociologists, anthropologists and historians of science and technology (Kuhn, 1987; Pickering, 1995) suggest that there are human, social, political and material dimensions of disciplinary knowing and that STEM is done with much more ad-hoc, cultural, and performative manner than suggested by formal images of scientists carrying out neat rule-based steps in environments devoid of relations and in situ unexpected events (Latour & Woolgar, 2013). Similarly, studies in learning sciences (Bang, 2017; Rosebery et al., 2010) demonstrate that young people and adults make-meanings of STEM using heterogenous ways of knowing and being in the world with everyday objects and practices. These studies emphasize that design and access to robust forms and practices with technologies are not enough to achieve justice and equity in STEM fields. Reducing justice to a notion of democratizing access to “robust technological tools” might equally perpetuate inequities and marginalization, because materials themselves might be already imbued with different discursive and ideational meanings, implicated in gendered, classed, and raced ways of being and doing things. What is necessary is a radical re-thinking of dominant assumptions about technological tools, not merely reusing and/or repurposing of them.


Modes of Inquiry and Theoretical Framework

In this study, we leverage insights from decades-old research in science and technology studies (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Pickering, 1995), critical transdisciplinarity (Co-Chair 1 et al., 2020), and learning sciences (Bang et al., 2014; Sengupta-Irving & Vossoughi, 2019) and argue for episto-ontological inseparability between known, knower, and value systems. This means insisting on embodied, cultural, and performative nature of knowing and refusing the notions of neutrality, objectivity, or meritocracy. We consider these ideas within the context of our current work with multilingual Black and Brown learners in formal and informal learning settings. Data comes from a longitudinal study with multilingual students in the context of an informal STEM learning and positive identity development project, and a year-long ethnographic study in two eighth-grade science classrooms. In our ongoing research, we position the student participants as our critical research partners (Author 4 et al., 2018) to disrupt the hierarchies and power dynamics present in traditional research designs. Based on the insights of our critical research partners, we question representationalist assumptions inherent in STEM tools and learning, particularly with regard to technology.

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View and Scholarly Significance

We hope to engage in dialogues that consider the complex, transdisciplinary, and co-constitutive nature of learning in STEM in light of questioning the challenging the representationalist historicity present in technologies which become involved in the enabling and constraining of heterogeneity inherent in learning processes. Considering technologies from relational and performative perspectives, might help education researchers to envision the role of technological tools in shifting our knowing, relating, and being/becoming in/with the world. This urges us as educators to re-think the meaning of justice, which is much more than an access and opportunity to robust forms and practices of technological tools, and includes openness to a “mangle of practice,” being/becoming, meaning/mattering in heterogenous ways.

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Martha Allexsaht-Snider, University of Georgia - Athens