Youth's "Slowed-Down" Pedagogy and Politicized Care Toward New Relationalities in STEM Learning Environments

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Culturally Sustaining Approaches to STEM Education

Abstract

We discuss “slowed down” youth-led pedagogy, which arose from youths’ politicized care for one another in an informal STEM learning environment. Adult mentors, through moments of slowing down, were given an opportunity to rethink how to listen to youth’s desired ways of doing STEM. We feature a Black youth who “slowed down” a session to share a powerful video about climate change, and illustrate the points where politicized care and slowed down pedagogy appear in their moves to make space for STEM engagement by and for the other youth. This has implications for how educators think about co-designing programs with youth and how to enact politicized care in the face of rapid social, environmental, and political change.

Authors

• Melissa Renae Perez, University of Michigan

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Devon Riter, University of Michigan

• Chandler Turner