Planning for Affective Pedagogical Goals: Teacher Experiences and Student Emotions During Community Science Data Talks

• In Event: Identifying, Understanding, and Addressing Elementary Students' Negative STEM Emotions and Beliefs

Abstract

Objectives & Perspective
Recent work by Kokka (2022) has pushed the field of math education, and broader STEM education, forward by expanding pedagogical goals for classroom instruction that attends to social justice from dominant (i.e., math content) and critical (i.e., social justice) goals to also include affective pedagogical goals (APGs). This is important for instruction grounded in social justice, but also more broadly as a plethora of research demonstrates that emotions significantly impact student learning outcomes (e.g., Pekrun & Stephens, 2012; Sinatra et al., 2014). Additionally, students often have feelings of fear and hopelessness about larger justice-related issues (e.g., Öhman & Östman, 2008; Sobel, 1999) which may lead to cognitive disengagement by limiting students’ reasoning, evaluation, and knowledge construction (Muis et al., 2018; Vogl et al., 2019). As such, teachers must carefully acknowledge any negative emotions to construct hope and optimism productively (Ecker et al., 2014; Moser, 2007; Ojala, 2012). Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand teacher experiences and student emotions when teachers are tasked to explicitly plan and attend to APGs during a Community Science Data Talk (CSDT).
CSDTs are instructional tasks that marry justice-centered STEM (e.g., Gustein, 2006; Morales Doyle, 2017), critical place-based education (Gruenewald, 2003), and transformative experience (Pugh, 2012), and are designed by using local data and planning for dominant, critical, and affective pedagogical goals (Kokka, 2022). The framework of a CSDT guides this study which is also informed by constructive hope (Ojala, 2012).

Methods
To explore the study purpose, we used a multiple case study design (Merriam, 2009) with qualitative coding and thematic analyses (Saldaña, 2021), along with descriptive statistics. Participants included five cases of elementary classrooms (teacher and their students). Teacher data (pre/post-interviews, focus groups, CSDT lesson plans) were developed using the TRU framework (Schoenfeld, 2014) and CSDT framework, and student data (open-response questions, emotion survey) were developed using constructive hope (Ojala, 2012).

Results
Preliminary findings suggest: (1) Students overwhelmingly indicated they felt excited, curious, and surprised while engaging in CSDTs, while feeling less confused, bored, and frustrated. (2) Students who indicated worrying about the justice-related issues represented in the CSDTs also described specific actions they could take that helped them regulate that worry and construct hope. (3) Teachers described planning for APGs and using localized data as novel and significant for facilitating learning about justice-related issues in math and science. (4) Teachers found attending to APGs during CSDTs as meaningful for student engagement, particularly for students who are typically disengaged.

Significance
Overall, this study provides empirical evidence that the teachers' implementation of CSDTs were supportive in shifting students' emotions and constructing hope (Ojala, 2012). Additionally, teachers' experiences with planning and implementing APGs resulted in them finding value in intentionally supporting students' emotions during learning. Furthermore, we found that when teachers attended to emotion it supported more interactive (student-to-student) dialogue, which demonstrated deeper student knowledge constructions about STEM content (Chi & Wylie, 2014).

Authors

• Imogen Herrick, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author

• Michael A. Lawson, Kansas State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ananya Matewos, Amherst H. Wilder Foundation
  Non-Presenting Author