Disrupting Neutrality and Reinventing Pedagogy: Asset-Based Practices in Science Education With Black and Brown Multilingual Youth (Poster 5)

• In Event: Justice-Centered Pedagogy: Context-Specific Adjustments and Cross-Cutting Constants

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
Given the growing body of research establishing the inherent sociopolitical dimensions of teaching, learning, and curriculum development, science education cannot continue with business as usual (Curnow & Vea, 2020). The dangers of neutrality are no longer matters of imagination; they are empirical realities, harming youth from racialized communities through deficit-based accounts, surveillance, oppression, exclusion, and incarceration (Love, 2019). In our ongoing longitudinal research, we have documented how Black and Brown multilingual youth and their practices are positioned in deficit-terms (Authors, 2022). Attributing deficits to youth not only undermine their authority as legitimate epistemic agents (Miller et al., 2018) but also harms their developing identities, as “they are also constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world” (Norton, 1997, p. 410).
Theory and Methods
Drawing on positioning theory and literature on asset-based pedagogies, we present cases of science teachers who exhibit political clarity about their practices. One is in the context of sensemaking activity related to osmosis, and another is during design activity related to fluid dynamics. The selected cases are derived from a longitudinal study, including video and audio data, teacher and student interviews collected during the implementation of the two-week STEM program co-designed with and for multilingual youth. We utilize interactional microanalysis (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2002) as well as critical discourse analysis to examine teachers’ discourses and their positioning of the youth (Fairclough, 2013).
Findings
Our findings show how teachers’ positioning of the youth’s cultural knowledge and diverse repertoires of practice as assets, transformed the traditional understanding of osmosis from an isolated, linear, and objective process into a dynamic interaction, illustrating exchange and reciprocity, showcasing the agency and intelligence of living beings. In a fluid-dynamics design activity, traditional testing methods were creatively reimagined. Instead of the conventional practice of securing an object within a moving stream of fluid to study its behavior, youth employed an approach where embodied actions were used to move the object through a stationary body of fluid. The methodology the youth came up with prioritized the validity of the data over its magnitude, thus challenging and reshaping traditional knowledge-making practices in fluid dynamics. The teachers practices marked with a change in teachers' discourse and pedagogical shifts, evidenced through the evolution of directive, objective-focused statements to collective and participatory practices, which nurtured a heterogeneous sensemaking process that emphasized the relational, interconnected, and situated perspectives of the youth based on their unique repertoires of practice.
Conclusion
In conclusion, our study emphasizes the importance of shifting our perspectives in science education from neutrality and deficit-based ideologies to asset-based, justice-oriented pedagogy that values the heterogeneity of student knowledge and practices. This change in the science teaching and learning landscape, though complex, is a necessary stride towards justice and equity in education.

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Jared Fredette

• Esma Nur Kahveci, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Akira Harper, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth