"Those Kinds of Students": Designing for Teachers' Sense-Making of Students' STEM Identities

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

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
A growing body of research has emphasized the need for STEM learning ecosystems (Barron, 2006; Falk, Dierking et al., 2016) to support students’ learning, participation, and identity work in STEM. However, much less attention has been given to preK-12 STEM teachers as learners and educators within such ecosystems. In this paper, we consider the learning of middle school science teachers involved in a design-based research project organized around connecting in and out-of-school STEM learning and supporting the co-design of afterschool STEM programs with teachers’ for their schools. Of particular interest in our study was how the designed learning environment could support teachers in deepening their perceptions of students as STEM learners and actors.

Theoretical Framework
Guiding our work is the recognition that teachers’ learning is mediated by the shared values and practices in their work environments, including those related to teaching, learning, STEM, and their students (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Horn, 2007). When teachers make sense of new ideas, they do so as actors situated in complex learning organizations (Spillane & Hopkins, 2013) and inherently consider questions of “fit” between new practices and current expectations (Allen & Penuel, 2015). We anticipated that ideas regarding students’ STEM identity work and viewing this as evidence of learning would feel “new” to teachers. We leveraged constructs from organizational sensemaking (Authors, 2021; Weick, 1995) to design for and understand teachers’ learning processes as participants in our program.

Methods
We used a design-based approach (Barab & Squire, 2004) to inform our work with science teachers within a program aimed at expanding teacher perceptions of students’ learning to include STEM identity development. We focus specifically on science teachers’ sensemaking of students’ engagement in out-of-school STEM learning, guided by representations of student data and researcher facilitation. Participants included six middle school teachers from three schools who worked in teams (two teachers were each from the same school). Data include transcripts of audio recordings during facilitated discussions of students’ STEM identity profiles in relation to students’ participation in STEM activities. Data were coded for conceptions of STEM, student identity, and school connections.

Results/Conclusions
We found that the STEM identity profile supported science teachers to make connections between modes of engagement in STEM activities and the students’ STEM identity profiles. The tool supported teachers to see students’ patterns of engagement in STEM as assets and resources to be leveraged for their STEM learning. However, the tool may have also led teachers to over essentialize students and view their STEM identities as fixed. We present episodes of productive sensemaking supported by project design and explore limitations and future for supporting teachers’ noticing of student identity work.

Scholarly Significance
This paper attends to the need within science education research to understand how we can support science teachers to recognize and support student STEM identity development. Further, most research on science teacher learning in informal contexts is on pre-service teacher education, we provide evidence on the utility of these informal learning spaces for in-service teachers as well.

Authors

• Sara C. Heredia, University of North Carolina - Greensboro
  Presenting Author

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