Crossing the Bridge: Tensions in Developing Identities as Mentors Across Dual Activity Systems

• In Event: 66.055 - Suspension Bridges: Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a Tool for Understanding Productive Tensions Across STEM Learning Communities

Abstract

Objective
Broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a pressing interest of educators, policy makers, governmental organizations, communities, professional organizations, and STEM professionals (NSF, 2013). The Chemical Oceanography Outside the Laboratory (COOL) Program was an NSF funded out-of-school time program for middle school students aimed at broadening participation in the geosciences. Our collaboration brought together scientists in a chemical oceanography laboratory, learning sciences researchers, undergraduate scientists learning to be facilitators, and middle school students from schools with high populations of youth from non-dominant communities. COOL was a design-based-research project (Bell, 2004; DBRC, 2012), which leveraged the expertise of all the aforementioned stakeholders to develop a curriculum, train facilitators, and design and enact a learning environment. This paper explores the ways that two undergraduate students redefined STEM participation during a course geared towards developing their expertise as mentors in their work with youth from non-dominant communities in an out-of-school time (OST) environment.

Perspectives
The realms of disciplinary expertise i.e. the university and everyday expertise/community engagement i.e. School OST program (Bang et al., 2015; Bang & Medin, 2010; Bell et al., 2012; Bricker & Bell, 2014) are often positioned as a fraught and false dichotomy (Warren, Ogonowski, Pothier, 2003). I draw upon Engeström (2000) and Edwards (2007) to conceptualize and identify a shared object across these two activity systems.

Methods
The COOL data corpus includes ethnographic fieldnotes, pre & post interviews, cognitive maps, and video of OST and preparatory class sessions (Heath & Street, 2008; Merriam, 2009). For the purposes of this analysis, I have chosen to focus on two mentors. Steve and Marina were chosen as illustrative cases because they highlight different tensions within and between activity systems.

Findings
The COOL preparatory course leveraged the tensions between disciplinary ideas of STEM participation within the different activity systems of the university and the OST environments. Mentorship became the shared object that Steve and Marina explored as students within the university system and as mentors within the OST program. The COOL preparatory course highlighted the interplay between STEM disciplinary practice and mentorship in an OST STEM learning environment. Marina and Steve experienced tensions with rules and division of labor within and across these activity systems. Their developing identity as mentors allowed them to redefine STEM participation, although this differed because of their disciplinary backgrounds, histories as educators, and experiences as science students in their majors. Steve’s tensions were more internal and COOL offered him the opportunity to explore the tensions between his personal definitions of what it meant to be a scientist and disciplinary contexts. Marina’s productive tension existed between her department’s ideas of the ways that Biomedical Engineers participated and her interest in STEM education and communication.

Scholarly significance
Researchers have explored the change laboratory as way to leverage tensions as productive spaces for learning and development within institutions (Daniels et al., 2009). This paper argues that an undergraduate mentor preparatory course served as a similar learning space allowing participants to redefine their STEM participation.

Author

• Deana Scipio, TERC