Care and Emotions in Computing Practices Within the Context of Integrated STEM: A Relational Perspective

• In Event: Centering Care and Affect in Computing Education

Abstract

Introduction and Background: This study situates care and emotions as sociopolitical and cultural acts and practices that constitute “an integral part of the practical activities with which bodies relate to other subjects and objects’’ (Zembylas, 2013, p. 4). We illustrate how teachers' interpretation and “caring” response to students' heterogeneous ways of knowing and emotions, affect the flow of activities and the ongoing disciplinary engagement of historically marginalized students with computational modeling.

Methods: We draw from a longitudinal 2-week long summer program with Black and Brown multilingual youth and STEM teachers. We utilize video and audio data, teacher and student interviews, extensive field notes, and artifacts collected during the summer 2021 implementation of the program. We engaged in moment-to-moment interactional video analysis, attending to the gesture, posture, intonation, and other bodily and affective interactions during classroom relations (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2000). Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993), we juxtapose our findings from video interactions with teachers’ and students’ accounts, to understand the role of care and emotions in sustaining disciplinary engagement.

Findings: Our findings show several key patterns that highlight the dynamic interplay of emotions and care within teacher-student relations.
Finding 1: Attunement to Heterogeneity and Range of Emotions as a Part of Socio-technical and Socio-political: During the disciplinary engagement, a range of emotions emerged among the youth, including apprehension, frustration, relief, and excitement. The emergence of these emotions were closely tied to the socio-materiality and semiotic complexity of the specific task at hand, and students’ emotional responses were associated with teachers’ understanding of caring interactions as part of socio-technical dimensions of such disciplinary engagement. For example, when a young person expressed their apprehension or frustration, the teachers promptly intervened with gentle guidance and subsequent moves of affirmation, e.g., through encouraging them to use their everyday and embodied knowledge, and by attributing the challenge to the socio-technical nature of the task rather than the students’ performance.
Finding 2: Redefining Caring Teacher-Student Relations: The classroom artifacts and interviews revealed that over time, these patterns led to the co-development of definitions of caring teacher-student relations, shaped by the experiences of the youth and the socio-political dimension of the discipline. The validation of students’ diverse ways of knowing and autonomy, coupled with the teachers' willingness to provide support during moments of struggle, emerged as “the most respectful and humanizing aspects of the learning relations,” as defined by the students themselves.

Conclusion & Scholarly Significance: Despite the emerging research in embracing multifaceted understandings of care and affect (Davidson et al., 2020), the sociopolitical and racialized aspects of emotions and care relations, particularly within CS learning, remains unexamined (Lynch et al., 2021). Our study addresses this gap by illustrating the importance of CS teachers’ awareness of power and privilege associated with notions of care and emotions in context of teaching and learning computational modeling in STEM education, and illustrating how this played a significant role in shaping the flow of activities, centering educational dignity and meaningful participation (Espinoza et al., 2020; Kayumova & Sengupta, 2022).

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Akira Harper, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Demi Muyuela, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth