Storying with data: Towards gender-expansive attunements and nature-culture relations

• In Event: Storywork as a Generative Model for Educator Attunement and Learning Toward Justice and Well-Being

Abstract

This paper will explore the mediational possibilities of data for supporting storywork in and about STEM in preservice and in-service teacher education. Here we describe how we designed undergraduate STEM courses and teacher professional development opportunities that leveraged data and data visualizations in order to support epistemic plurality, complexity, and values-based approaches to research in order to expand the edges of STEM disciplines in educator and undergraduate STEM teaching and learning. We expand on notions of storywork in ways that include multimodal representations of stories to support justice-centered sensemaking across disciplinary and everyday contexts. We draw on the work of Philip & Azavedo (2017) who conceptualized equity and justice in STEM as broadening what counts as disciplinary knowledge to include cultural stories, ways of knowing, and personal experiences as foundational for creating STEM learning contexts that promote justice in learner’s own communities.

In this work we share the frameworks and findings of a gender-affirming biology module that was iteratively and concurrently taught in an undergraduate STEM course for pre-service teachers and online professional development workshops for in-service educators. Our gender-affirming biology module is undergirded by conceptions of nature-cultural relations that reject human dominant models of socio-ecological relations and recognizes humans as a part of natural systems. In our design work, we positioned dominant biological and ecological knowledge as a form of powered storywork that has restricted access to the full range and diversity of sex, gender, and sexuality in the human and more-than-human world in ways that perpetuated false notions of gender and sex binaries in disciplinary, social, and political contexts.

Story work in this context was first grounded in case study and data analysis from a broad range of studies showing the full range, diversity and prevalence of same-sex behaviors and non-binary sex developmental patterns across plant and animal species (Roughgarden. 2013; Schrefer, 2022). Explorations of these data engaged participants in a re-storying of disciplinary knowledge that not only expanded the edges of disciplines and conceptualized more inclusive social framings of sex, gender, and sexuality, but also represented more scientifically accurate representations of the diversity of sex, gender, and sexuality in humans and the more-than-human world. Participants in both undergraduate and professional learning contexts shared reflections such as:

What we used to think:
Same-sex relationships were not common in nature.
Binary sex is the dominant model of sexual development.
That detailed language around sex and sexuality was inappropriate.

Now I’m starting to think:
Same-sex sex and non-binary development are common among plants and animals.
There is sexual complexity in all populations.
Detailed language about sex and sexuality is equitable and easy to adopt.
The criminalization of queerness was connected to colonialism.

Storying and re-storying science disciplines through data ultimately allowed learners to re-story more just and equitable conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality in their everyday lives and teaching practice. As one educator wrote, “We must start early in gender inclusive education to try and teach young children that gender diversity is part of expected human variation.”

Authors

• Veronica Cassone McGowan, University of Washington - Bothell

• Bryan White, University of Washington - Bothell

• Symone Gyles, University of California - Irvine

• Elizabeth Starks, University of Washington - Bothell

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University

• Carrie T. Tzou, University of Washington - Bothell