Reclaiming Our Science Center Toward Social Justice (Poster 71)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Seven
  In Poster Session: Youth Teams in Education Research Poster Session

Abstract

Science centers offer young people opportunities and resources not traditionally available within schools. However, inclusion and participation in museum environments are patterned hierarchically, benefiting white, English-speaking, and high-SES families. From curricula to exhibit design, museum experiences elide the lives of marginalized communities.
Since 2016, the Youth Action Council [YAC] at the Impression 5 Science Center, has engaged in participatory design-based research to “reclaim” the Center from colonial, white, heteropatriarchal histories, asking the questions: How does the Center maintain injustices such as racism? What design actions can we take to make our Center more humanizing and just for marginalized communities?

Through a critical race and justice-oriented infrastructuring perspective, we seek to identify normalized unjust structures; and create new conditions to resist and transform systems. The YAC is a racially diverse group of 20 youth who meet monthly to investigate, critically rethink and redesign the Center’s areas/programs, in partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Lansing and the University of Michigan. Using participatory design-based research, we gather and analyze data about the Center and user experience towards design and action-taking.
Our research has uncovered specific, material, historicized, and embodied ways coloniality and whiteness are enacted in/across the Center while also contributing to new justice-oriented infrastructures. In this way, new discourses, practices, and material representations have been developed that give just witness to youth lives and communities, transforming the realities and relationalities of/at the Center, including: a) Youth led-designed spaces at the Center reflecting diversity, inclusion, justice and equity in STEM (e.g., transformation of a main exhibit to reflect the community’s diversity; designing the Katherine Johnson room); b) Transforming the Center’s culture and decision-making process to require youth participation and centering intersectional justice; and c) Youth development (e.g., teamwork/design skills; critical agency; understandings of systemic injustices).

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Wisam Sidawi, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Aliyah Brown, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Maia James, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Amyah Madison, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Grace Rose, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Evan Bohus, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Jack Balzer, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Frankie Calabrese Barton, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author