Designing for Infrastructural Justice in After-School Science

• In Event: Power, Politics, and Ideology in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines how a community-partnered design intervention valued and centered community educators of color and their expertise in the development of high-tech low-cost STEAM projects and practices. As community educators' expertise was developing and expanding within the project, it was not valued by the infrastructures of local institutions: museums, city governments, and school districts. We examined how educators developed new design expertise while pushing up against systemic precarities (Butler, 2009). We found that co-developing new practices within the project created new expansive possibilities for working with working class youth of color, but did not translate into greater visibility within the formal labor infrastructure of the education system (especially for women of color).

Authors

• Molly V. Shea, University of Washington

• Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder