Building Toward Equity Through Critical Love

• In Event: 52.047 - Critical Intersections of Pedagogies and Research Methodologies to Value Youths' Whole Lives in STEM Engagement

Abstract

This paper explores how one community technology program for high school students focuses on ways in which people build loving, caring, and equitable communities together as part of their engineering learning environment. Our theoretical framework positions critical love as the cornerstone of effective learning environments for students from historically and currently marginalized groups (Bartolomé, 2008; Darder, 2002; Freire, 2005; Valenzuela, 1999). Data from our study also positions critical love as the cornerstone of effecting change toward equity (Author 4).

We observed over 200 hours across nine months at the South End Technology Center’s (SETC) Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn (L2TT2L) program. Data sources include fieldnotes, recordings, interviews, and artifacts. Participants include 40 youth, 14-22yo, who worked as college and high school “youth teachers” as well as the program’s education organizer and the center’s director and founder.

The founder of SETC, Mel King, frames the work of the center as technologies of the heart (author 4). To encourage the development of technologies of the heart all projects completed by youth must benefit a community need in some way. Youth teachers also engage in artistic expressions--writing poems or raps about technology—and participate in team building activities.

Equity through critical love means attention to dismantling institutional obstacles as well as the ways in which people push for social change through building community, caring for one another, and highlighting strengths. As an example, youth often use official work time to discuss social issues important to them. “Some of the [youth] were talking about what they were up against in school. And Sonia, [her school] saw her as aggressive and ghetto...And she saw herself as definitely not that way and so when you’re bucking [expectations]--the youth teachers were [saying]-there’s something else that you need besides STEM skills to keep you going forward and they identified a set of things that were really about relationships with each other and relationships as learners” (Interview, education organizer). Sonia, in danger of failing her technology class senior year because she had not been challenged and so had not completed the work, got a letter from Mr. King detailing her extensive work at the center. SETC, in a way school did not, cared for her, treated her as a whole person, and affirmed her considerable intellectual strengths.

Lessons learned from our work with SETC include: a) attention to relationships between people, not people and objects; b) affirming students as whole persons worth listening to; c) developing youth’s academic and expressive abilities together; and d) questioning and disrupting oppression and discrimination based on difference by producing powerful communities.

Contexts for learning engineering often focus on the engineering design process and learning to use various technologies. SETC integrates critical love into the design process, broadening resources for youth of color to draw on as they participate in learning settings. We highlight the need for attention to relationships between people in learning settings and the ways in which young people can connect to the larger community through engineering.

Authors

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, TERC

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University

• Aditi Wagh, Tufts University

• Susan Klimczak, Harvard University