Young African American Girls’ Drawings as Representations of STEM Career Aspirations

• In Event: Developmental Roots and Predictors of Career Aspirations and Disparities

Abstract

It is well-established that children’s career aspirations in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) develop in the early years (Alexander et al., 2012); emanate from early interests in and exposure to science and math (King & Pringle, 2018); and are shaped by identity dimensions, including race and gender (Archer et al., 2015; Lewis Ellison et al., 2020). However, young African American girls’ STEM aspirations are not yet well understood. Historically, studies have obscured African American girls’ unique racialized and gendered experiences in STEM by comparing their aspirations with White girls’ aspirations (Shapiro et al., 2015). Moreover, scholarship on African American girls’ STEM aspirations has been consistently undermined by the incompatibility theory (Joseph, 2017), which posits that Black girls lack the intelligence and motivation necessary for success in STEM fields (Ireland et al., 2018; McGee & Martin, 2011), and the poverty of aspirations theory (Archer et al., 2015), which posits that Black girls have limited career aspirations due to family and/or cultural background.

In this presentation, I challenge these deficit orientations by reframing young African American girls’ STEM aspirations through an intersectional lens. Intersectional frameworks acknowledge how African American girls and women experience oppression and marginalization due to racialized and gendered hierarchies in U.S. society (Collins, 1991; Crenshaw, 1991). Despite their heterogeneity, African American girls’ intersectional epistemologies illuminate core themes of struggle, self-definition, resistance, advocacy, and creativity (Brown, 2013; Collins, 1991; Crenshaw, 1991). Guided by intersectional frameworks, this qualitative investigation addresses the following question: How do young African American girls’ drawings visually represent their STEM career aspirations, illustrate their STEM interests and knowledge, and reflect their intersectional identities?

Data for this presentation were derived from a larger study of 37 African American students and their career aspirations (Author, 2020). I employed an art-based methodology because drawings are useful tools for eliciting children’s career aspirations (Law et al., 2014; McDevitt et al., 2013). Drawing sessions, including the creation of the drawings and audiorecorded interviews with the children, lasted between 45–60 minutes. Our research team typically worked with 3-5 children, prompting them to draw images of their “dream jobs” using markers, crayons, and pencils on white paper (see Figure 1). Drawings featured in this presentation were generated by four girls between 8-10 years enrolled in a 2015 summer reading program (see Table 1). Findings from multiple cycles of visual analyses (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) and interview transcript analyses (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) illustrate how the girls represented their STEM career futures through drawings that (1) privileged their racialized and gendered STEM knowledge and interests; (2) highlighted African American girls’ intersectional identities (e.g., hair, skin color) in imagined STEM workplaces; and (3) revealed their perceptions of STEM work as humanistic and culturally-oriented. Findings suggest that drawings provided visual spaces where young African American girls could envision their humanity as Black women STEM professionals who boldly defined their own professional lives and work and (re)claimed their right to dream freely about science and math futures.

Author

• Jennifer Turner, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author