"Flipping the Switch": Engaging Radical Practices to Realize the Full Potential of Lab Communities

• In Event: Humanizing Research Labs: How Faculty Use Their Labs to Dismantle, Redesign, and Reconstruct Oppressive Systems

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to share reflections on what the directors/members have learned about the role of humanizing research in cultivating equitable education. It centers the experiences of students who are members across three different research labs that focus on issues of equity in mathematics education contexts--K-12, teacher learning, and higher education. Using critical theories, we learned that these labs employ practices and engage in discourses that are radical in that they push back against the status quo to disrupt hegemonic narratives about research and communities. What this looks like consists of, for example, teaching lab members to approach their work with research participants in ways that listen to teachers and learn alongside them through deep collaboration. Radical practices also include looking through an intersectional lens that reveals dilemmas and oversights that multiply marginalized individuals' experience in STEM at the juncture of antiblack racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other systems of power. The papers will also address the radical practice of lab members from minoritized backgrounds taking up space to leverage the unique ways they possess power in traditionally inaccessible spaces of learning. Across the labs, there is a core emphasis on centering agency to illuminate and disrupt multidimensional oppression in mathematics and STEM broadly. There is also a focal point on intergenerational mentoring that is deeply collaborative rejecting all manner of within group competition, strife, and other negative dispositions students can experience in research labs. What is most significant about this study and work is the intentional decisions to reject dominance, even while at elite institutions.

Authors

• Nicole Michelle Joseph, Vanderbilt University

• Luis Antonio Leyva, Vanderbilt University

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University