Weaving in and out of School Experiences to Craft STEM Identities

• In Event: Consequential Arrangements for Becoming: Considering Identity Work in STEM Across Social, Institutional, and Practice Spaces

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
Out-of-school time (OST) experiences suggest promise for providing youth with expanded notions of and avenues for becoming in STEM (Calabrese Barton et al., 2013). Yet, these experiences are often isolated from or in conflict with STEM school experiences that tend to constrain identity work (Authors, 2016) and further marginalize youth underrepresented in STEM fields. In this paper, we examine the ways young women underrepresented in STEM leveraged available identity resources across OST, family, and school to craft STEM identities during high school and into college.

Conceptual Framework
We draw on Holland and colleagues’ scholarship (Holland, et al., 1998; Holland & Lave, 2009), that emphasizes how identity is developed, performed, and contested in local practice and on critical feminist scholarship (Crenshaw, 1989; Haraway, 1994) to consider how identity contestations intersect with patriarchal, racialized, and historicized structures of school and society. When examining youth’s identities in the context of their high school lives, we considered how participation was structured across STEM experiences, who had access to different forms of participation, and what implications these practices had for youth’s figured worlds of STEM and the kinds of identity work they had opportunity to engage in.

Methods
This paper utilized case study methodologies (Yin, 2013) to analyze the ways in which 9 young women authored STEM identities during high school and into college. The analysis draws on student interview, survey, and parent interview data from a 5-year ethnography of identity work and career trajectories of youth from populations underrepresented in STEM. Interviews focused on views of STEM, interests, planned majors, and experiences in STEM activities. Data were coded for STEM learning experiences, views of STEM, views of self with regard to STEM, and OST STEM experiences. Data displays for each youth were developed to identify relationships among youth participation in STEM activities and their forms of self-authoring.

Results
OST STEM experiences played a critical role in disrupting dominant notions of STEM and providing resources for connecting with STEM and weaving together youth’s multiple identities. Naomi, for example, shared how she discovered engineering as a path that she “could do for the rest of her life” after participating in an engineering camp: “At first, I didn’t want to go. I heard the camp was [for nerds]…I mean, I thought an engineer was some white guy with glasses and pants pulled up high.” However, once Naomi met friends “like her,” participated in robotic challenges, and experienced the “hands on” and social aspects of engineering, she came to see connections between her “social,” “athlete” self and engineering. While school practices at times positioned youth negatively with respect to STEM, they leveraged OST experiences to counter patriarchal and racist discourse practices to position themselves favorably with respect to STEM.

Significance
Our findings give further credence to the integral role that students’ OST experiences have for expanding notions of STEM, self, and possible futures; and motivate further work into the designs of coherent ecosystems (Dierking et al., 2021) to support youth learning and participation in STEM that extend beyond the classroom.

Authors

• Carrie D. Allen, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Joanna Weidler-Lewis, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author