Designing Anticolonial, Land-Based, and Culturally Sustaining STEM Learning (Poster 7)

• In Event: Reengaging (With) Care in Equity-Based STEM Research

Abstract

Purpose: Formal STEM curriculum often overlooks culturally embedded STEM literacy among historically colonized communities (Avraamidou, 2020; Kayumova et al., 2019). Particularly, many refugee families from rural regions have extensive knowledge of farming and associated STEM literacy, yet their movement to urban settings has distanced them from their connection to this land-based knowledge (Authors, forthcoming). Drawing on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Alim, Paris & Wong, 2020), we co-designed the summer program, Soil Camp, with community partners that aims to (1) foster pedagogical actions towards food and environmental justice, and (2) amplify STEM learning opportunities that are relevant and connected to intergenerational and community knowledge of refugee and Indigenous communities. Here we present our endeavor to design an anti-colonial and anti-oppressive STEM educational space.

Methodological Design: We draw from participatory social design research methodology (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) that centers historicity, diversity, equity, and ecological resilience as design principles and aims to co-design just practices and futures in partnership with a range of communities. The soil camp design and facilitation team was composed of 27 teachers and teacher candidates who are mainly racialized multilinguals. Our positionalities and experiences were employed as tools for design as each of us held intersectional identities and experiences of being othered within educational spaces as both teachers and learners. Building on last year’s Soil Camp (Authors et al., 2021), the pedagogical design was collectively done over regular meetings in May, June and July of 2022.
Data Sources: Over two years, we collected video data (with Go Pro and handycams), fieldnotes, and artifacts to document participants’ engagement with land-based STEM learning. Our participants include teacher participants (n=27), 75 refugee youth and children from Syria, Northern Iraq, and Nepal who had resettled in Canada within the last five years.

Results: The Soil Camp design provided learners with opportunities to reconnect with the land and each other. During the poster presentation, we will share how the learners spontaneously engaged in STEM exploration, hypothesis making and storytelling on their own terms (Alim, Paris & Wong, 2020) and the associated challenges. Building on these spontaneous land-based STEM exploration along with the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of our partners, teachers, and teacher candidates, transdisciplinary learning opportunities were created. Our findings suggest that anti-colonial STEM pedagogy manifested as teachers’ honouring of children’s reconnection with land through acts of autonomous grounding and reclamation such as play, collective healing and reciprocity (Author 1 et al., forthcoming). Teachers also flexibly adapted their pedagogy to provide choice-based opportunities that were responsive to children’s positioning as experts of their learning.

Significance: Design of anti-colonial STEM learning spaces should leverage Othered (Said, 1978) voices and ways of knowing, while honoring learners' autonomous grounding and reclamation. This moves beyond our own work by acting as a guide for community-based organizations, educators and researchers trained in mainstream educational spaces who want to expand their views of creating anti-colonial and anti-oppressive STEM learning opportunities and embodied enaction possibilities.

Authors

• Mahati Kopparla, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Sophia Thraya, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Miwa Takeuchi, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Anika Haroon
  Presenting Author

• Anita Chowdhury, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

• Ruth Panaguiton
  Presenting Author