FamJam: Fostering Rightful Familial Presence in Middle School STEM

• In Event: Designing for Social Change: Justice-Oriented Interventions in K–12 STEM Settings

Abstract

PURPOSE AND FRAMEWORK
This study investigates instructional practices that support rightful familial presence in STEM to address the continued racial/class inequities in STEM learning. We ask: What practices grounded in research-practice-partnerships support rightful familial presence, and how do these practices facilitate capital movement between families and schools for consequential STEM teaching and learning?

A macro-structural inequality in STEM education for youth of Color is how parents/families are valued in school settings. Most models of parental/familial involvement are rooted in White, middle-class power structures that reproduce racial/class inequalities (Paredes-Scribner & Fernández, 2017), and obscure familial social/cultural capital (Delale-O’Connor, 2019). Studies are needed on how parents of Color are rightfully invited to contribute to STEM learning designs (Stoehr & Civil, 2019).

We ground our work in the Rightful Presence Framework for justice-oriented teaching/learning (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020), and Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth. We define rightful familial presence as a form of authentic family engagement that legitimizes families’ community cultural capital, and fosters capital movement between families and schools, especially when these forms of capital have historically been marginalized within STEM learning.

METHODS AND DATA SOURCES
Drawing upon DBIR with researchers, teachers, parents, and youth in two urban school districts, we enacted the Rightful Familial Presence in STEM project, through four collaborative activities: Exploring familial capital for consequential STEM learning, curricular explorations/adaptations through parental capital, enactments, and dialogues.

We studied 4 classrooms in two settings. In addition to participating in pre-enactment sessions, focal classrooms were visited daily for 6-week enactments of two units: Sustainable Classrooms & Stress. Data sources: Student practical measures; classroom observations; teacher reflections; student work; teacher, parent and student interviews. Analysis involved multiple stages and levels of coding based on constant comparison procedures.

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE
We identify two cross-cutting practices (both settings/units) that created spaces for authoring familial presence in STEM learning, even when parents weren’t physically present during enactments. We discuss tensions in these change-making efforts, in relation to shifting normative practices/perspectives of parental engagement and familial capital in STEM.
1) Rooting/tending to emergent STEM epistemologies in familial values/wisdom
Families centered their experiences, expectations, and aspirations during curricular design. They expanded the definition of sustainable communities to include “loving” and “respecting.” Teachers grappled with how to include “loving” as an engineering criterion and turned to students to operationalize it in their electric art projects and its applications to the sustainable classrooms challenge.
2) Storying myself into STEM
Parents described children’s school-related embodied stress, which became a central phenomenon of study. Students produced school-stress maps, designed a key to indicate where, how, when, and what they experienced/witnessed stress. They conducted community surveys to map their stress school-scape. Teachers were challenged to connect the social environment to teaching long-term stress models on the body.

Parents of Color have been marginalized in school-parent interactions in disciplinary-consequential ways. This study provides insights into how rightful familial presence in STEM might be supported, and how teachers learn to grapple with emergent tensions.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese, University of Michigan

• Wisam Sidawi, University of Michigan

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina - Greensboro