Toward Relational Justice: Understanding Assets-Based Science Pedagogies for Multilingual Youth Through Micro-Analysis of Positioning Events

• In Event: Critical Orientations to Language in STEM Education: Praxis Beyond Replacement of Labels

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes

In this paper, we present a micro-analysis from a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) summer program with multilingual Black and Brown youth that illustrates the moment-to-moment negotiations in three “positioning events,” which helps us understand how assets-based pedagogies are enacted.

Perspectives

We draw on positioning theory (Harré & Van Langenhove 1999), read theory from a critical, complex, and relational perspective (Author 4, 2020) to show the importance of being attuned to moves that involve multiple shared agencies and encompass positioning interactions simultaneously involving bodies, space, discourse, and epistemologies. In classrooms, histories of the oppressive relations between teachers and students become implicit relational knowledges that feed into cycles that reproduce hierarchical relations (Gallagher, 2010; Vossoughi, et al., 2019). To pursue relational justice, teachers must understand and learn to negotiate with multiple agencies of students, ideas, power relations, and space in ways that legitimize students’ knowledges, ways of being, and authority. Over time, these repeated interactions can build new relational knowledges that are oriented toward justice (Gallaher, 2010; Vossoughi, et al., 2020).

Methods and Data Sources

This research was drawn from a larger longitudinal study, which examines a robust STEAM program involving both teacher development and youth activities. Representative data was drawn from an extensive data set that consisted of fieldnotes, observations, artifacts, and video data (240 hrs). Participants included multilingual middle school students recruited from local school districts. We transcribed all video data and turned them into narrative descriptions, and coded for verbal and nonverbal moves, identity positions, and identification events. We then categorized by noting patterns that emerged from coding the positioning events, and finally, we identified cases of focal students, teachers, and interactions as representative of the patterns in larger findings.

Results

Our micro-analysis of interactions show that the asset-based events entailed multiple discursive, epistemic, and bodily-spatial moves that collectively positioned youth-collaborators in affirmative ways that legitimized and valued their multiplicities of knowing and identities. For example, Lucia, one of the participants, asked Debra, the facilitator, a question: “Are we comparing them to how they were yesterday, or together?” Debra turned to the class and repeated the question verbatim, while moving to the side to center Lucia and adding, “And I say—go for it, scientist!” Her exact use of Lucia’s words without rephrasing positioned her a legitimate science knower and effective scientific communicator in English, significant for an emergent bilingual young person. Lucia was then affirmed as a part of the science community when Debra said, “Go for it, scientist!” Because Debra didn’t answer the question, Lucia was positioned as an agent with authority to self-determine her learning trajectory, and opened the possibility for other youth-collaborators to explore a multitude of inquiry pathways.

Significance

Researchers have called for “asset-oriented framing” of multilingual learners in science education (e.g., Lee, 2021; Author 3, 2021). We argue that asset-based moves, when reconstructed over time, can dismantle oppressive relational knowledges that marginalize Black and Brown multilingual youth within science settings.

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Kathryn J. Strom, California State University - East Bay

• Miwa Takeuchi, University of Calgary