Applying Community Cultural Wealth Theory to Informal Learning Youth Programs

• In Event: Informal Science Institutions and Equity: Taking This Moment to Act With Justice

Abstract

Informal science education programming is often positioned as having filling a void that may exist in the lives of youth participants. These programs often do not recognize the assets that youth gain from their lifeworlds and bring to bear in these programs and that contribute to their success and persistence in STEM and academics. The purpose of this study was to problematize prevailing deficit-oriented approaches to STEM enrichment programs for racialized youth who are underrepresented in STEM by drawing from Tara Yosso’s theory of community cultural wealth (CCW) to describe the STEM identity and trajectories of three youth as they navigated a long-term, museum-based, informal science learning program. Using Yosso’s framework, we describe the capital that youth brought into the program and the ways that they leveraged this capital as they moved from middle to high school, and into their postsecondary studies and early careers in the sciences.

Yosso’s (2005) CCW theory outlines six forms of capital, which often go unrecognized, that comprise the CCW framework: aspirational capital, linguistic capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, and resistant capital. She posits that acknowledging and celebrating these forms of capital could transform how learning experiences are structured. CCW theory has largely been overlooked by the ISE community. We integrate a Sewellian (1992) notion of agency/structure to describe how youth used their CCW to access and appropriate a variety of resources to build identities and resiliencies in pursuit of science in the museum and beyond.

We used a case study approach (Creswell 2013) with the goal of better understanding the role of CCW in the trajectories of three youth participant-alumni selected using the following criteria: (a) member of a group underrepresented in STEM; (b) low socioeconomic status; (c) a long-term participant in the program. Data sources included participant interviews over a span of three years; these discussions focused on each participant’s background and trajectory, and on how they accrued and accessed CCW before, during, and after their experience in the program.

Open coding was used to four salient identify themes associated the forms of CCW: 1) participation in the program expanded the realm of possibilities for what STEM is, what doing STEM could be, and the options for careers in the STEM disciplines; 2) creating and sustaining STEM social networks-youth brought strong networks with them as they entered the experience, developed new relationships, and then sustained certain relationships as they persisted with their STEM trajectory; 3) youth demonstrated resiliency while facing significant obstacles, and 4) the continuum of STEM experiences that youth experienced during multiple entry and/or re-entry points that youth experienced during their non-linear STEM trajectories. The poster will elaborate on each of these themes along with representative quotes.

In order for us to move towards authentic spaces of equity, “environments that are deeply responsive to students’ needs and strengths, and rooted in a critical, historical analysis of educational and social inequity” (Vossoughi, et al. 2013) we need to design programs from asset-oriented perspectives, leveraging the capital that youth already have towards persistence and success in science.

Authors

• Robert Habig, American Museum of Natural History

• Preeti Gupta, American Museum of Natural History

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary