Reconfiguring Race Through the Lens of Working Differences During a Climate Change Lesson
Fri, April 12, 3:05 to 4:35pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 118AAbstract
Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to re-configure race as accounts of working differences during a climate change lesson in an urban high school context. We consider ways in which students’ active participation in shaping climate change curriculum through storytelling of their lived experiences might foster advocacy for racial justice.
Perspectives: We draw on the work of Author & Author (2005) that offers a reading of Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. We re-configure the concept of race and examine how the notion of “‘situated working’ of ‘multiple and fluid’ identities” and difference can become useful in science education (p. 181). Reflecting on the climate change lesson from our prior work compelled us to re-think students’ multiple and fluid racial identities as a concept that was “constructed in and through the dynamics of our engagement with each other over time” (Butler, 1993, as cited in Author & Author, 2005, p. 181).
Modes of Inquiry: We engaged in dialogic reflexivity (Author et al., 2021) to work the differences by slip-sliding against the text of student work from the climate change lesson. We desired to work identities and differences with our students through their lived stories and wanted to connect with “the living of a life to the processes of theorizing and analyzing ‘difference,’ to the processes of ‘reconfiguring what will count as the world’ (Butler, 1993, as cited in Author & Author, 2005, p. 193).
Materials: We used the artifact of our prior empirical work and reflected on what we noticed after implementing a climate change lesson.
Warrants for Arguments: The community is located on the near west side of a large city. The eastern edge of the community is nicknamed for its historical propensity for flooding making it an undesirable place to live. We found that the students’ understanding about how climate change affected their community was deeply rooted in the context of their lived experiences through the “urban renewal”. We spent many hours in conversation discussing all of the ways we were surprised by the way the students we observed articulated their understandings of their community and world and embracing their passionate and contextual knowledge as far superior to our own, supposedly expert and decidedly outsider, knowledge. In our presentation, we will share our findings.
Significance: The idea that knowledge is raced is not new. What we learned from the students is that if we were going to be successful in our hope of instigating change, we had to let them lead. Their knowledge, in their classroom, is more important than ours and our ability to teach with impact is dependent on our ability to learn as much from them as we expect them to learn from us because who they are, where they are, and how they understand their experiences should guide how we enter our classrooms every day.