Continuing a Conversation With the Field: Building Capacity Toward Justice in Informal STEM (Poster 1)

• In Event: State of the Ever-Changing Field: Understanding Justice-Centered Efforts Across Informal STEM Learning Institutions

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
We sought to build upon and expand how the field of informal STEM is already seeking to engage in justice-oriented work. This included exploring how institutions are already leveraging currently available tools and materials to facilitate justice-oriented program design and enactment. In this study, we examine emergent insights from cross-field dialogue on ideas and tensions around the overarching idea of what is required to build institutional capacity to advance this work. Conversations were structured by our conceptual framework of shifting STEM narratives and sharing authority with youth in informal STEM learning and design. We scaffolded reflective dialogue with conceptual framework components (shift, disrupt, amplify, decenter, and create), leading us to consider new questions about how the broader field might expand opportunities for youth to reclaim, use authority and leverage lived experiences in informal STEM.

Perspective/Frameworks
Informal STEM learning (ISL) settings can help disrupt systemic underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) (Philip & Azevedo, 2017), but they can also foreclose opportunities for meaningful learning (Dawson, 2014; Feinstein, 2017). ISL practitioners play an important role in shifting such power dynamics across scales (short/long-term, individual/institution) (Shea & Sandoval, 2020), helping to transform STEM into a tool for addressing what matters to youth (Bevan et al., 2019). As we seek to shift ISL routines towards just social futures for youth marginalized by dominant power structures, we also seek to continually interrogate our own lenses for guiding informal learning design and teaching towards the disrupting injustices in learning and development.

Methods and Data
Data were co-generated from collective reflection sessions following three large Zoom conference sessions we hosted in May 2022. We reflected on our own insights and wonderings developed during the conference, those shared by conference participants from more than a dozen ISL institutions across the US, and ways in which these collective ideas and questions pushed and challenged our own prior work on this topic. The four co-authors co-analyzed data using critical grounded theory to consider emergent themes.

Results
The findings explore patterns of practice and tension we witnessed the broader ISL field grapple with building capacity for justice-centered programming, and how this grappling is pushing our inquiry and structural design efforts in productive ways. We organize these pushes in five heuristic areas: institutional goals, community collaboration, educator practice, professional learning, and ideas about outcomes. Findings also highlight how capacity-building towards justice calls for scalar commitments to contentious practice (tension-filled/flecked desires/questions/decisions/actions, negotiated with others, and complicated by power and privilege) (Holland & Lave, 2001). For this reason, we turn towards understanding non-neutrality as a purposeful project towards capacity building, and we consider how such a project could advance the field.

Significance
Building capacity for justice-centered program design and enactment in ISL is a large-scale and complex undertaking. Developing knowledge together as a growing field necessitates attendance to contentious dimensions and lingering wonderings across institutional, community, and regional contexts. Implications for advancing the ISL field are discussed.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Day W. Greenberg, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Wisam Sedawi, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Gabriela Reznik
  Presenting Author

• Sinead C. Brien, University of South Carolina - Upstate
  Presenting Author

• Carmen Turner, Boys & Girls Club of Lansing
  Presenting Author