The Ingenuity of Everyday Practice: A Framework for Justice-Centered Identity Work in Engineering in the Middle Grades

Inequities in opportunities to learn and become in engineering, especially for minoritized youth, are enduring and systemic. How students experience engineering education, through curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher/student interactions, all shape opportunities for identity development. In this paper we draw upon cultural studies and critical ethnography to explore how and why students engage in engineering for sustainable communities and its relationship to their identity work. We ground our work in a justice-centered asset-based stance that centers how people’s lived lives and community wisdom yield powerful forms of cultural knowledge/practice relevant to learning and engaging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We seek to accentuate students’ ingenuity to leverage their assets for social change making; that is, in transformative and future-oriented ways. We view youths’ everyday ingenuity as powerful assets for learning and participating in authentic engineering design for sustainable communities. Findings suggest that engineering for sustainable communities created opportunities for productive identity work because it created space for youth to authentically engage in engineering design in ways that allowed them to care about each other, their classroom and community, and to use both their everyday ingenuity and technical expertise to make a difference. We also suggest that students’ identity work took shape through the emergence of new local contentious practices of engineering for sustainable communities that both amplified youths’ ingenuity and challenged particular local, historical/sociocultural norms of engineering and schooling. These contentious local practices related to disrupting the authority to name what counts as engineering problems worth solving and disrupting narratives around what it means to persist through iterations in design. We suggest that an engineering for sustainable communities approach supports the production of local and productive contentious practice because it centers community co-ownership in the design, and supports students in leveraging their everyday ingenuity as critical knowhow in engineering design

Designing for Rightful Presence in STEM: The Role of Making Present Practices

Opportunities to learn in consequential ways are shaped by the historicized injustices students encounter in relation to participation in STEM and schooling. In this article, it is argued that the construct of rightful presence, and the coconstructed “making present” practices that give rise to moments of rightful presence, is 1 way to consider how to make sense of the historicized and relational nature of consequential learning. Drawing on theories of consequential learning and critical justice, we analyze ethnographic data from 3 urban middle school classrooms in 2 states during a STEM unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities. Findings describe 2 making present practices students enacted as they engaged in engineering design: modeling ethnographic data and reperforming injustices toward solidarity building. We discuss how these practices supported moments of rightful presence in the STEM classrooms by inscribing youths’ marginalizing school experiences as a part of classroom science discourse and co-opting school science tasks as tools for exposing, critiquing, and addressing these unjust experiences. That which was silent and previously concealed from school authority figures gained a rightful place through the voices and scientific actions of the youth and their allies

A Longitudinal Study of Equity-Oriented STEM-Rich Making Among Youth From Historically Marginalized Communities

The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making programs. Building a conceptual argument for an equity-oriented culture of making, the authors discuss the ways in which making with and in community opened opportunities for youth to project their communities’ rich culture knowledge and wisdom onto their making while also troubling and negotiating the historicized injustices they experience. The authors also discuss how community engagement legitimized a practice of co-making, which supported equity-oriented goals and outcomes

Internalization of Aeromonas hydrophila by fish epithelial cells can be inhibited with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor

Aeromonas hydrophila is a Gram-negative bacterium that is pathogenic in fish, causing motile aeromonad septicaemia. It can enter (invade) fish cells, and survive as an intracellular parasite. The host-pathogen interaction and signal transduction pathway were studied by screening signal transduction inhibitors using carp epithelial cells and a virulent strain of the bacterium, PPD134/91. Genistein, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, postponed internalization of A. hydrophila into host cells, suggesting that tyrosine phosphorylation plays a role in internalization. In contrast, staurosporine, a protein kinase C inhibitor, and sodium orthovanadate, a protein tyrosine phosphatase inhibitor, accelerated internalization of PPD134/91. Other virulent strains of A. hydrophila were also examined and it is likely that all strains, irrespective of serogroup, use the same signalling pathway to facilitate bacterial uptake

Transforming Science Learning and Student Participation in Sixth Grade Science: A Case Study of a Low-Income, Urban, Racial Minority Classroom

Recent criticisms of the goal of “science for all” with regard to minority students have alluded to the onerous culture of school science characterized by white, middle-class values that eschew personal everyday science experiences and nontraditional funds of knowledge, in addition to alienating science instruction. Using critically-oriented, sociocultural perspectives, this article explores the sixth grade classroom of a male, white, science teacher in an urban school that serves only minority students. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain's (2001) notion of figured worlds, we look at what learning science looks like in Mr. M's classroom and how he provides the structural support to increase student participation by creating different figured worlds of sixth grade science. In these different figured worlds, we discuss the pedagogical strategies Mr. M uses to purposefully recruit nontraditional funds of knowledge of racial minority and low-income students, thereby positioning them with more authority for participation. Through this case study of Mr. M and the racial minority and low-income students he teaches, we discuss the role science teachers play in urban school science education and the agency and achievement racial minority and low-income students are capable of with appropriate support

“It Changed Our Lives”: Activism, Science, and Greening the Community

Drawing upon critically oriented studies of science literacy and environmental justice, we posit a framework for activism in science education. To make our case, we share a set of narratives on how the River City Youth Club acquired a new green roof. Using these narratives we argue that the ways in which youth describe their accomplishments with respect to the roof reflects a range of subject positions that they carve out and take up over time. These subject positions reveal how activism is a generative process linked to “knowing” and “being” in ways that juxtapose everyday practices with those of science. Résumé Fondant notre approche sur des études critiques dans le domaine de l'alphabétisation scientifique et de l’équité environnementale, nous postulons un cadre visant à promouvoir l'activisme en enseignement des sciences. Comme arguments, nous présentons une série de récits qui racontent comment la Maison de jeunes de River City a pu se doter d'un nouveau toit écologique. Ces récits nous permettent de montrer que les façons dont les jeunes décrivent leur rôle dans la réalisation de ce projet reflètent une gamme de positions que les sujets adoptent et modifient au fur et à mesure que progresse la réalisation du toit. Ces différentes positions indiquent que l'activisme est un processus génératif lié à la ‘connaissance’ et au ‘savoir’, processus qui juxtapose les pratiques quotidiennes et celles des sciences

Creating hybrid spaces for engaging school science among urban middle school girls

The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up to do so. The authors argue that such merging science practices are generative both in terms of how they develop over time and in how they impact the science learning community of practice. They discuss the implications these findings have for current policy and practice surrounding gender equity in science education

Unpacking science for all through the lens of identities-in-practice: The stories of Amelia & Ginny

This manuscript reports on an ethnographic study of two Latina students who attended an urban middle school in a low-income community, and how they exhibit agency by purposefully authoring identities-in-practice that value nontraditional ways of knowing and resources. Drawing from both global feminism and sociocultural theory, we argue that by paying careful attention to how and why urban girls author identities-in-practice we can gain deep insight into the noncommodified forms of knowledge, relationships and activities that make up their engagement in science and that girls often employ to participate in science related communities in ways that are culturally and socially just and sustainable

Critically engaging engineering in place by localizing counternarratives in engineering design

In this manuscript, we use the construct of critical epistemologies of place to frame our exploration of how to support engineering design among youth who have historically been marginalized from the domain, and its implications for educational settings. We present an in-depth longitudinal case study of one 12-year-old African American boy to raise questions of what it means for this youth to engage in engineering design in collaboration with the people around in him—experts and knowledgeable others in his community space and how this engagement supports his work in science and engineering. This study suggests that engaging engineering design through a critical epistemology of place involves an iterative and generative process of layering community wisdom and knowledge onto STEM toward (a) how epistemologies of place—and their layers—challenge dominant master narratives, (b) reimagining practices in place, and (c) transforming the dangerous territory of STEM. Our study expands upon current understandings of supporting youth in engaging engineering through highlighting the vital role of sociohistorically constructed understandings of STEM and community in determining when, how, and why engineering takes place