Youth Enacting Social-Spatial Justice in Middle School STEM: Advancing Justice Work in Hyperlocal and Interscalar Ways

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

Abstract

Without attention to the ways in which learning is an historicized, spatial and sociopolitical activity, efforts to address equity challenges in K12 science education remains elusive. In this study, we investigate the social-spatial relationalities that minoritized youth bring to engineering design. Findings reveal that organizing learning engineering design around youths’ rich everyday experiences and community wisdom through community ethnography is productive in addressing hyperlocal sociopolitical community injustices. Paying attention to social-spatial relationalities reveal 1) the multiple scales of activity, 2) inter-scalar mobilities and interactions, and 3) possible resultant impacts of such interactions that further affect activity at each scale. We discuss implications for how theories of equitably consequential learning can be advanced through the frame of social-spatial justice.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Christina Restrepo Nazar, California State University - Los Angeles