"The Yucky and the Beautiful": Complex Social Analysis and Dreaming in a STEAM Storytelling Program

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Co-Designing Educational Justice in Chicago and Evanston: Examining Learning and Change-Making Across Time and Place

Abstract

“Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure” -Saidiya Hartman (2019)

This paper examines how a STEAM and storytelling program serving Black, Latinx and South Asian middle school youth in Evanston, Illinois supported complex social analysis as interwoven with creativity, healing, joy and imagination. We carefully trace the collective development of a phrase “the yucky and the beautiful” across six weeks of programming to consider how an idea offered by educators to address the simultaneous beauty and tensions of slam poetry as an art form became a semiotic tool routinely mobilized by participants to wrestle with the complexities of socio-political critique and imagination.

Valuing complexity is a key disposition for engaging in civic reasoning as interwoven with ethics, identity and cultural-historical experiences (Lee et al., 2021). Recent work on speculative education also emphasizes the need to strengthen our imaginative capacities alongside our critical capacities in order to seed alternate forms of living and relating (Bang, 2020; Kelley, 2003; Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Toliver, 2020; Vossoughi & Booker, 2020). We bring these ideas into conversation with Bakhtinian theories of language (1994) to consider how complex socio-political meanings and imaginaries were built and worked on by educators and students over time.

Authors include educators and researchers who worked side-by-side to co-design, implement and study learning using collaborative, participatory design research (Erickson, 2012; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) rooted in a partnership going into its sixth year. Our data set includes: over 500 pages of co-authored ethnographic field notes, audio-video recordings of 25 days of programming, audio-recorded daily debriefs across educators and researchers, student interviews and artifacts. We combine ethnographic, micro-interactional and aesthetic analyses to situate salient moments within broader trajectories of discourse and meaning (Author et. al., 2021; McDermott & Raley, 2012; Sharpe, 2019).

We explicate the origins of the phrase “the yucky and the beautiful” in an opening storytelling workshop, and trace each moment when this idea was revisited and mobilized by both educators and students. We present a visual map of the life-span of this idea, the meanings the phrase accrued, and what these meanings opened up for student sense-making and artistic activity. Through a systematic analysis of the ways students wove with this phrase (and its relationship to the ways educators were co-teaching and weaving meaning), we illuminate the intellectual and emotional work “the yucky and the beautiful” supported as a way of 1) reaching for complexity and multiplicity, 2) moving beyond binaristic forms of reasoning, and 3) engaging in critical social analysis that nourished young people’s imaginations and well-being.

Our analysis addresses the importance of supporting students to not only name and analyze injustice, but to build capacity for noticing and being nourished by the beauty of the social and natural worlds, and the ways artists and storytellers work to render layers of meaning, complexity, wonder and possibility. We elucidate implications of this work for critical civics pedagogies across disciplinary domains, student reasoning and learning, and teacher education. [499]

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Melita Morales, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Mya Franklin, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Samuel Carroll, YMCA
  Presenting Author

• Onam Lansana, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Djamila Oumarou, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author