Care Emergent in Children’s Schoolyard Studies: Instances of Resistance and Reimagination (Poster 2)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Introduction
Young people’s learning about ecology is often rooted in local spaces to center the affective, social, and political dimensions inherent to complex systems (Carlone et al., 2016). But what kinds of relationships are sustained or thwarted can vary substantially, shaped by the nature-culture relationships inherent to the design (Lees & Bang, 2022; Bang & Marin, 2015). In this study, I seek to understand how children elevated and advocated an ethic of care into a design that did not deliberately support these relationships, and in some ways countered this.

Frameworks and Methodologies
Drawing on methodologies that counter adult and neoliberal gazes of childhood (Yoon & Templeton 2019), I focus on children’s emergent expressions of care as they engaged in selecting sampling sites in the schoolyard, recording observations and measurements, and visualizing their data collaboratively with participatory digital maps. Analyzing children’s photographs, sketches and text notes (Templeton & Vellanki, 2022), as well as their conversation in interviews and group activities, I ask: How did children resist practices of capture and quantification, instead infusing care and concern for multiple organisms, their classmates, and the schoolyard?

Context and Design
Findings draw from a larger multi-year design based research project that strived to support expansive science and data science, where children’s expertise about the rhythms and routines of schoolyard life (social, ecological, built, historic) were to be integral to their sensemaking about complex soil socio-ecosystems underfoot (Author, 2022). Children’s collaborative modeling pursuits centered around participatory digital mapping technologies and methodologies, supporting children authoring and annotating maps using data—drawings, photographs, text, and numbers. I focus on the most recent iteration where I worked as a co-teacher and researcher with a 5th grade class (27 children) and two teachers. I focus on six focal children (ages 10 and 11) across the 9 week curriculum, attuning to children’s emergent multi-modal expression of care for multi-species thriving (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

Findings
Across the two cycles of question posing, sampling and data visualization, children repeatedly elevated care, resisting objective and unemotional depictions of data collection and aggregation. For instance, many children argued for spreading out their sampling sites to minimize harm to underground organisms unearthed, avoid injury to their peers with related tools and instruments, and reduce the impact of their wonderings on the schoolyard’s concrete, grass and soil. As they sketched and recorded notes about who they were finding underground, children regularly sought to ensure the unearthed organisms’ comfort by building homes and gathering food for them. In constructing and discussing their participatory digital maps, children often recounted stories about their connections with particular plants, insects and humans as they made sense of multivariate patterns. Throughout the modeling activities supported in the curriculum, children elevated alternative relationships with schoolyard organisms, their classmates and the places they were seeking to learn more about.

Significance
In light of calls to imagine and enact science learning that elevates the brilliance of young learners (NASEM, 2021), this work contributes insights into how children can lead repertoires of care across their modeling practices.

Author

• Kathryn Lanouette, College of William & Mary