Embodying Physics: Utilizing the Physical and Cultural Resources of Dance for STEM Learning and Engagement (Poster 6)

• In Event: Designing for Dignity Affirming Experiences: Leveraging Embodied Learning Toward Equity in Interaction

Abstract

Objectives.
This poster explores how dance and dance-making practices can create spaces and opportunities for Black girls to bring their cultural and embodied resources to physics sense-making. For Black girls, issues with access to physics often begin early, in learning environments where their resources and contributions are dismissed or excluded and their vocally and physically expressive cultural practices are seen as behaviors to be policed than as resources for science learning (Hartman, 1997; Morris, 2016). Studying the situated, embodied cultural practices of Black girls in physics learning environments provides a window into the range of resources available for physics exploration, allowing for a shift from dominant conceptual framings of physics as acultural and disembodied to a physics that is personal, filled with affect and emotion, and grounded in cultural experiences and relational histories.

Theoretical framework.
In this study, we utilized an expanded Funds of Knowledge framework (Moll et al., 2001) to understand how ideational, cultural, and embodied aspects of dance served as resources for physics learning and engagement and created new pathways of access to physics.

Methods and data.
As part of an exploratory study, we designed and examined an Embodied Physics Learning Lab, a dance learning environment that offered 15 Black teen girls opportunities to connect to physics concepts and ideas through embodied imagining, re-presentation and kinesthetic experiences (Author1, 2018). In each session, the girls explored forces like gravity, laws of motion, repulsion and attraction of charged objects, atoms, and elements by learning and improvising dance phrases, sharing weight with partners, and practicing and analyzing technical dance feats such as jumping and turning. Using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), we analyzed video of activities specifically focused on moments when the girls worked collaboratively in small or large groups to make sense of physics ideas.

Results and significance.
Embodied exploration of physics through dance supported sustained engagement, invited the girls to engage in inquiry using multiple movement vocabularies, and offered them opportunities to connect personally and culturally to physics concepts and ideas. For example, the girls brought their cultural dance resources into an exploration of the properties of the elements, utilizing movements from ballet to represent the lightness of hydrogen (Figure 1), and krumping and stepping to represent the dense heaviness of iron (Figure 2).

The opportunity to explore and express physics understanding through socially and personally meaningful cultural practices caused shifts in their relationships to physics content, their ideas about what parts of themselves belong in the physics learning space, and in their experience of epistemic power.

Conclusion.
This work proposes a new way of seeing physics and a new lens for engaging in physics inquiry. Positioning dance as a form of inquiry allows room for youth to bring in their own creative ways of moving. Examining the situated, embodied cultural practices of Black girls in these spaces helps us understand the value of centering youth as vital to their own science learning experiences. It also pushes us methodologically to centralize the meaning-making of black girls outside of the oppressive, white, masculine norms of schooling.

Authors

• Dionne N. Champion, University of Florida

• Folashade Cromwell Solomon