Attending to Time, Equity, and Design in an Informal Science Learning Community (Poster 8)

• In Event: Critically Examining Space and Time in Learning and Design for More Just and Equitable Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This research poster addresses dimensions of time and equity in the design and examination of informal science and technology learning organizations. Specifically, I evaluate an undergraduate student club called the River Team (a pseudonym). The River Team is a citizen science group that monitors water quality and paddles canoes throughout the Southwestern United States.

Theoretical Framework
For this poster, I dive deeper into sociocultural learning theory (Esmonde & Booker, 2017) by considering time, equity, and design. I think about time by using Lave and Wenger’s (1991) ideas on communities of practice and continuity and displacement, and the latter concepts revolve around the idea that newcomers must replace old-timers. For equity, I consider how scientific organizations are uneven in terms of both race, gender, and their intersections (Ong et al., 2018). To address this unevenness, I look at the design and infrastructure (Penuel, 2019) of these organizations, and how this allows certain members into the community.

Methods and Data Sources
I collected data through the ethnographic tradition (Emerson et al., 1995) of participant observation, fieldnotes, and video recordings across four years. I attended and wrote notes at every team meeting, and I would film each time we went on river trips. For this analysis, I primarily used fieldnotes from team meetings to chart out how members made structuring decisions about the organization and future members. My analysis included re-reading the fieldnotes and coding for considerations of time, equity, and design.

Results
The River Team addressed time, design, and equity in a few different ways. First, as a student organization, they knew that members would graduate every academic year, and the River Team would have to be in a constant state of recruitment. Recruitment would ensure continuity, as old-timers were displaced. However, more interesting was how the River Team purposely designed and structured recruitment. In multiple meetings, a predominantly white team discussed both how white science and outdoor river sports were. In what I call a more self-conscious perspective, they were very much aware of how white their own members were but acknowledged at least a gendered balance, especially since much of the team leadership were white women. This led to discussion of intersectionality and more importantly, the design decision to purposely examine both the race and gender of incoming applicants. They hoped that the incoming generations (a term they frequently used) would be more diverse and break at least some barriers in science and outdoor sports. The River Team acknowledged they were currently not meeting their self-conscious (and white-centered) equity goals but made a design decision to address the future.

Scholarly significance
In this research poster, I recommend considering equity, time, and design, in terms of: generations of its members, the time it takes for members to be displaced (and replaced), and how the recruitment of new members addresses goals of equity. However, in communities where the lifecycle of members is far longer, it may be not enough to use recruitment of new members to meet equity goals.

Author

• Kevin A. Nguyen, Sonoma State University
  Presenting Author