Learning Civic Engagement Through Intersectional Care

• In Event: Revisioning Care in the Pursuit of Educational Equity

Abstract

Introduction and Purpose
This study explored the intersection of learning, civic engagement, and wellbeing for eight undergraduate students during the 2021-2022 school year, which took place during ongoing racial reckonings, a global pandemic, and online schooling. Our research explored how students narrated their civic engagement and its relationship to their well-being. From this inquiry we found that undergraduates' students expanded their ideas about intersectional care in order to preserve their own wellbeing, support family, and impact the wellbeing of the broader community.

Perspectives
Understanding how students navigate college life, family life (in some cases), and ongoing sociopolitical development offers insight into how students learn to care for one another across contexts during periods of heightened sociopolitical and personal stress. We understand learning to be co-constructed across communities of practice as students negotiate multiple settings and make choices that affect their learning and wellbeing (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). What and how people learn is also deeply affected by people’s sense of well-being (Helou et al., 2019). In order to facilitate their wellbeing, young people make choices that impact their learning and affect their networks of support (Bang, 2020). We utilize intersectional care to see teaching and learning as embodied and political and offers pathways for “being open to the ‘other’” through sensory knowledge that can reunite the “hand, head, and heart” (Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Mckinnie de Royston et al., 2017).

Methods
This study took place within the context of a year-long, mixed methods study. We developed and administered surveys in an entry-level undergraduate education course (n=98) and conducted 3 semi-structured interviews with 8 students chosen from the survey responses. The results of this study are based on the analysis of 24 qualitative interviews.

Data sources
Participants were selected through purposeful sampling to gain an understanding of the lived experiences and associated coping strategies of historically underrepresented students as well as majority white students (Merriam, 2009). Preference was given to students from historically underrepresented communities and those who reported significant changes in their wellbeing during the previous year. Semi-structured interviews focused on students' stories, values, worldviews, and daily experiences (Merriam, 2009).

Results
Students engaged in thoughtful contemplation of their identities and their relations to others during the heightened time of socio-political stress. This individual work was often connected to a shifting understanding of their responsibilities to others. They developed sense of civic engagement in relation to their lives in community including: joining LGBTQ+ forums to contemplate gender identity, “purged” social media to support mental health and wellbeing, and unlearn colorblind stances on race (e.g. TikTok). When considered together the learning that students engaged in to support their wellbeing shifted their sense of relationship to others.

Scholarly Significance
The ways in which students learned to care for themselves and others shifted how they engaged online, at their jobs, and their relationship to school. Activities taking place online and across contexts shifts what and how people learn in classrooms but is less often studied.

Authors

• Molly V. Shea, University of Washington

• Emma Elliott, University of Washington

• Christina Guevara, University of Washington