Critical Witnessing Through Middle School Engineering: Investigating How Youth Negotiate Collective Social Movement in Everyday School Science Practices

• In Event: Attending to the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning

Abstract

Objectives. Challenges faced by refugee youth in schools are often elided through disciplinary/schooling structures; their complex histories rarely considered as integral to individual/collective learning. Such complex power-dynamics result in cumulative vulnerabilities impacting youths’ social-futures.

We investigate how social movement takes shape in classroom practice towards justice-oriented learning with refugee youth – in “the daily, (extra)ordinary, and intentional pedagogical work of creating spaces and conditions for critical witnessing and social change” (Villenas, 2019, p. 153), and made manifest in altered relationalities in time/place, including the attendant discourses/practices (Dutro, 2011).

Framework. We use a critical justice framework of consequential learning (Jurow & Shea, 2015) to investigate how, why and to what ends, Mrs. B., co-designed and enacted with students in a refugee-serving school, collective social movement during a 6th-grade 6-week engineering unit. This effort built on how Mrs. B, throughout her teaching, incorporated her own Latinx and her students’ multiple cultures. We examine how the complex histories of refugee youth became integral to engineering design, how such movement unfolded across social-spatial scales, and the pedagogies that supported critical witnessing and social change.

Methods. Using community-engaged, participatory design-based research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we foreground being with: building relationships across settings/time; positioning youth, community members and teachers as experts towards re-distributing power; situating design work in community; and sharing decision-making on how stories are cultivated and communicated. Data include: audio/video of classroom interactions, teacher/student interviews, teacher/student work, and reflective dialogues. Data were co-analyzed using a critical witnessing and social change framework.

Findings. We trace the engineering design process and project afterlives social-spatially, noting how the object of engineering transformed/transferred from artifacts to new social futures hoped for, through forms of critical witnessing. We unpack evidence of new discourses and practices fostered by Ms. B’s pedagogical work, which legitimized and further revealed the complex histories of refugee children, taken up initially by small groups, then spreading to classroom/school communities. We discuss how, when previously unacknowledged relationalities gained legitimacy, systemic oppressive practices become salient to why/how/what students engineered, giving critical witness to oppression in tangible ways, opening up spaces for collective change. We consider how discourses/practices shifted relationalities among people and technologies (Teeters & Jurow, 2018) by supporting new alliances breaking down immaterial walls of whiteness/citizenship, and the emergent tensions, politicizing learning towards justice.

Consider “Kchad’s Clock.” While analyzing community survey results that indicated low-student morale, Henry highlighted a comment about Trump to his groupmates. He opined frustration with the treatment of refugees, relaying experiences emigrating from Chad. The boys located Chad on the tablet, noting it “was so far away.” One suggested they design a classroom clock that told the time in Chad, to honor Henry’s and refugee classmates’ experiences. Another suggested adding LED-lights for increased visibility. When the group decided to hack their STEM lab’s clock, Ms. B. stepped in to explain the significance of this project to the school community.

Significance. Implications towards advancing justice-oriented learning and the importance of social movement in school STEM, and the pedagogies which support it, are discussed.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Christina Restrepo Nazar, California State University - Los Angeles

• Kathleen Schenkel, San Diego State University