Reasoning as Rivers: More-Than-Human Empathizing in Science Identity Work

• In Event: Connection With More-Than-Human Participants in Science Learning

Abstract

Objective
Equitable, just and dignifying science learning involves reasoning about inherent value not only in humans, but also the nonhuman world (Haraway, 2016). Here we examine empathy as a specific process of identity work that contributes to this kind of science learning.

Theoretical Framework
While empathy has many meanings (Bateson, 2009), we operationalize empathizing as a complex sociocultural process of self/other perspective taking along cognitive, affective, and physiological dimensions of experience. Empathizing involves imagining the mental and affective “states” of others (local and distal, human and nonhuman), and sometimes (but not necessarily) coming to experience or embody these states. Critically, we recognize empathizing as an emotional process of identity work (Authors, 2022; Varelas et al., 2012) that involves positioning (Tabak &Radinsky, 2015).

Methods/Data
This case study draws from four iterations of a larger program of design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004) on a science ethics course designed to develop “socially and ethically articulate science identities.” The course engaged 43 graduate and undergraduate STEM students across the four cohorts. Our data corpus consisted of weekly discussion forum posts, recordings of in-class discussions, and fieldnotes taken by the first author (instructor, participant observer). Particularly interactive or productive discussions were flagged in fieldnotes and shared with the full research team for interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Emergent themes in early rounds of analysis informed subsequent identification of more specific episodes of empathetic and emotional reasoning for fine-grained comparative analysis as cases.

Findings
We will present two cases from different cohorts of students reasoning empathetically about different rivers. In the first case, a student shares an article about the Supreme Court of Bangladesh granting the same legal rights to rivers as humans, leading her peers to grapple with the notion of “environmental personhood.” Their interactions highlight how “uncomfortable” it can be for humans to relate to nonhumans, and how confusing it can be for students to see empathy as important in science. In this case, empathizing looks like a difficult, trepidatious kind of identity work that plays out slowly.
In the second case, different students discuss a local urban creek that they know well, simultaneously signaling a shared affection for it while also describing it as “so gross” and “disgusting.” By loosely anthropomorphizing the creek as a mutual friend-in-need, the students work through a laughter-filled process of collective empathizing that helps them elaborate new relational possibilities for scientists. The students specifically articulate a position of “care” for the creek as salient to scientific identity and practice, and they link this position with a specific disciplinary identity: “you could be an urban hydrologist.”

Significance
In these cases, we see empathizing as a highly interactional and emotionally laborious reasoning process of positioning the self and both human and nonhuman others. The social and ethical possibilities and solidarities that emerged through these relations helped students make progress in understanding scientific goals and practices. We see empathizing as a critically important “mediating process” (Sandoval, 2014) in designing for better, more just and dignifying STEM learning.

Authors

• Adam Papendieck, University of New Mexico

• Flavio S. Azevedo, Southern Methodist University

• Hakeoung Hannah Lee, University of Virginia