(Re)Conceptualizing STEM Education as Community Building: A Connective Ethnography

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: “Making Communities”: Reimagining Cohort-Based Education Through Participatory and Community-Engaged Research in STEM (Table 24)

Abstract

Although researchers and educators have committed to efforts to broaden participation in STEM education and careers, what counts as STEM and who defines the boundaries of STEM are often less discussed. Dominant educational discourse often assumes STEM as a-cultural and ignores the cultural, historical, and political roots of science, while Indigenous knowledge systems offer a competing worldview that values interconnectedness. This epistemological conflict creates difficulty for Indigenous learners to be meaningfully engaged in STEM activities (Bang & Marin, 2015). As a response, we join scholars who argue for the need of critical perspective toward STEM and recognize the broad and diverse roots of science and technology (Bevan, Calabrese Barton, & Garibay, 2018) in our work. In particular, as a multicultural and interdisciplinary postdoc cohort, we ask, “How do we (re)conceptualize STEM education in our training for community-engaged STEM education research?”
Methods
We focus on our online interactions as a remote postdoc cohort as a key layer of lived reality during the initial 9-10 months of postdoc training and community building since summer 2023. This approach allows us to trace the interrelated aspects of our lived and academic experiences across online and offline modes. As a newly initiated postdoc cohort who started connection with each other primarily through online spaces, we consider our “literacy, social spaces, and identity as social practices” (Leander & McKim, 2003, p. 237). We focused on our online space as a site that not only connects our prior experiences engaging but also the space for knowledge construction on reconceptualizing STEM education in our current online and offline practices alongside (Hine, 2000).
Data Sources
Guided by the connective ethnography approach and the collective nature of our experience, we combined multiple data sources: (1) online interactions. We collected emails, transcripts of weekly postdoc meetings, and chat logs from Zoom and Teams. (2) community artifacts. We drew from co-created artifacts including our team logo, brainstorming whiteboards, and value mapping visuals. (3) personal reflections. We also included our reflections on in-person events such as conference presentations and gatherings. In our analysis, we traced how our collective vision and conceptualization of community engaged STEM education took shape over time and across spaces.
Findings
In our finding, we share a conceptual model of community engaged STEM education to illustrate our knowledge building process as a postdoc cohort with diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. In this model, we demonstrate culture, relationality, and interdisciplinary learning as key pillars of this model to reimagine futures for STEM education. We also highlight the process of sharing (e.g., lived experiences, academic articles) across spaces that particularly contribute to our shared re-imagining of STEM education and diverse futures.
Significance
This paper offers important significance toward engaging in connected ethnographies as a legitimate way to learn, understand, and form new knowledge. Furthermore, the use of this methodology challenges normative approaches to STEM education research, thereby opening avenues for increased epistemic justice (Dotson, 2012) in STEM education.

Authors

• Lili Yan, Michigan State University

• Kriya Issa Anguluan Velasco, Michigan State University

• Carolin Michel, CGC Geoscience Department