“How do these data make you feel?”: Emotional Pathways During Data Talks about Climate Justice (Poster 4)

• In Event: Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education

Abstract

Objectives
Climate change is an existential issue that raises critical questions about human survival and future quality of life (Ojala, 2016). In classrooms, addressing climate change involves supporting students' emotions arising from climate justice concerns (Bouman et al., 2020). This requires teachers to engage in justice-oriented high-leverage practices (Calabrese Barton et al., 2020) that center learner emotions and integrate traditional disciplinary lenses with historical, sociopolitical, and geopolitical lenses during learning (Morales-Doyle, 2024). This study investigates how emotion is processed in the classroom when teachers specifically attend to emotion during a justice-centered discourse routine.

Theoretical Framework
Reflecting on developing critical data literacies (Phillip et al., 2016) and critical emotional awareness (Ojala, 2023) for teachers and students, this study is framed around a justice-centered discourse routine—specifically the theoretical aspects of guided emotion participation and affective pedagogical goals (APGs). Vea (2020) describes guided emotion participation as "a genre of practice in which emotion [becomes] a target for teaching and learning" (p. 338). Kokka (2022) describes APGs as having three aims during social justice teaching and learning: ensuring students feel cared for, processing emotions related to dominant mathematics, and using emotions to take action.

Methods
This study was a collective effort, transpiring in three design-based iterations (Sandoval & Bell, 2004) across two years and countries, involving fifteen K-12 teachers and their students. We iteratively and collaboratively analyzed 58 classroom videos using the tenets of interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) where we attempted to capture general patterns of emotional processing (Erickson, 2006). We also captured instances when teachers engaged in healing-informed practices by noting their presence and implications for students' emotional processing. To contextualize the findings, data source triangulation (Stake, 1995) was employed using teachers' lesson plans, pre/post-semi-structured teacher interviews, and researcher reflexive memos.

Results
Teachers' attention to APGs opened access points for emotional pathways. Emotional pathways are instances of dialogic exchange in a learning environment where students' funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and funds of feeling (Levine, 2021) are publicly shared and complexified. Emotional pathways emerged in two analytic ways: student-led and teacher-led emotional pathways. Student-led emotional pathways were representative of when students served as experts and guided the flow of emotional processing. Teacher-led emotional pathways were representative of when teachers used their personal experiences and understanding of their and their students' social location to guide the flow of emotional processing.

Significance
Emotional configurations in learning occur whether teachers attend to them or not (Vea, 2020). By attending to emotions, teachers can disrupt dominant practices in STEM that suppress emotions and privilege cognition (Kahn et al., 2022). Through teacher- and student-led pathways, we observed students working constructively to find purpose, (dis)agreement, and even consensus with one another. These pathways demonstrate that emotions were crucial for connecting students with their privilege and pushing them to re-examine these privileges through lenses of power and privilege concerning climate justice. This study highlights how attending to guided emotion participation and APGs enhances understanding and reorients discourse toward dynamic and inclusive learning opportunities for climate justice.

Authors

• Imogen Herrick, University of Kansas

• Michael A. Lawson, Kansas State University

• Ananya Matewos, Amherst H. Wilder Foundation