Bio4Community: Supporting Middle Schoolers’ Advocacy Efforts Through a Community-Based Biology Unit

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

Abstract

PURPOSE AND FRAMEWORKS
The Bio4Community project aimed to support students in using science to advocate for social change in their local context. We designed a biology unit in which students investigated chronic stress (a concern in their community), its causes, and possible solutions. Our efforts were informed by two frameworks. The Rightful Presence (RP) framework (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) posits that equitable participation entails the right and agency to change the rules and expectations of a learning environment. RP manifests in ongoing struggle to make visible and address injustice, and requires political allyship between those with and without power. The Critical Science Agency (CSA) framework (Basu et al., 2009), posits that youth enact this agency when they combine science knowledge with other forms of expertise (e.g., community knowledge) to examine injustices in their lives and seek ways to redress them. In our design we employed CSA as a means to support students’ RP. Our goals were to: a) engage students in scientific inquiry about the physiology of stress; b) help them develop socio-political awareness of how systemic racism creates and maintains inequities such as higher stress burden on marginalized communities; and c) support student advocacy for changing local rules/structures that they identified as causing them stress (“proposals-for-change”).

METHODS AND DATA COLLECTION
The eight-week unit was implemented in two schools by four collaborating teachers and their 7th grade students (n=73) in a district serving an economically and racially marginalized community in an urban center on the East Coast. We analyzed classroom video, student artifacts, and student/teacher interviews. Here we report on students’ development of and advocacy for their proposals-for-change.

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE
In both schools, students successfully developed proposals-for-change. For example, one group identified unfair bathroom policies as a stressor. They developed a new universal bathroom policy that took into account teachers’ concerns about “abuse” of bathroom breaks, minimized disruption to instruction, and effectuated students’ right to use the bathroom when needed. Despite being compelling and bolstered by allied support of teachers, these proposals did not result in any actual change, but for different reasons in each school. Two key tensions mediated this shortfall.
1) Solidarity tension
Building politicized trust (Vakil et al., 2016) with groups in a hierarchical system can result in tensions when the interests of groups conflict. In one of the schools administration doubled down on a new initiative that students found very stressful (locking of phones); negotiating this space as political allies was challenging for the researchers and risky for the teachers.
2) Persistence tension
Advocacy is a lengthy allied political struggle (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) that is difficult to keep up when key allies leave and relationships are in flux. In the other school an initial strong commitment to change by administrators faded when the principal was moved to another school and teachers left the district, making it difficult to maintain the momentum needed for change.
Reflections from our work suggest ways to navigate these challenging tensions in ways that can support sustainable change-making.

Authors

• Sugat Dabholkar, Tufts University

• Rishi Krishnamoorthy, University of Toronto - OISE

• Ravit Golan Duncan, Rutgers University

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Megumi Asada, Rutgers University