Hacking a Path into and through STEM: Exploring how Youth Build Connecting Pathways between STEM-Related Landscapes

Abstract

Background/Context

Minoritized youth from historically marginalized backgrounds continue to face systemic inequities in STEM. Existing strategies aimed at increasing diversity in STEM, which are guided by the STEM “pipeline” metaphor and are deficit-oriented, have yielded lackluster results.

Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study

This paper investigates how mi-noritized youth attempted to build connecting pathways between STEM-related worlds, how such attempts unfolded, and the resultant outcomes pertaining to their developing STEM expertise and subsequent STEM engagement. We introduce the idea of pathhacking, where youth had to create their own pathways into STEM, often with improvised tools and in treacherous territory, because there were no pre-laid paths.

Research Design/Data Collection and Analysis

Data were drawn from longitudinal critical ethnography of 48 youths across STEM-engagement spaces, in both community and formal school spaces. Attention is paid to the particular resources, both relational and material, and the barriers that affect youths’ efforts to hack pathways toward deeper and more connected engagement in STEM. Spaces included school classrooms, school settings, after-school STEM programs held in community clubs, other spaces in communities such as residential neighborhoods, and local universities.

Findings/Results

Three broad claims are presented: (a) Pathhacking involves youth engaging in practices that challenge and expand ways of being in STEM-related spaces; (b) Pathhacking practices, when coordinated through social activity, reorganize social worlds for both individuals and collectives, expanding future pathhacking possibilities; (c) To aid in pathhacking, youth utilize tools including critical STEM-mobility artifacts and allies as brokers across scales of activity.

Conclusions

The current U.S. education-policy climate focuses attention on student achievement in individual subject areas, highlighting the achievement gap. We illustrate the challenges minoritized youth face as they seek more consequential STEM engagement through hacking connecting pathways. Institutions, people, tools, and practices—all imbued with and embedded in histories—have structured these youths’ opportunities to hack connecting pathways and have also provided points of access and resistance for the youth to resist mar-ginalization during the process.

References

Archer

, & DeWitt

(2016). Understanding young people's science aspirations: How students form ideas about “becoming a scientist”. London, U.K.: Routledge.

Archer

DeWitt

Osborne

Dillon

Willis

, & Wong

(2012). “Balancing acts”: Elementary school girls’ negotiations of femininity, achievement, and science. Science Education, 96 6, 967—989.

Bang

, & Medin

(2010). Cultural processes in science education: Supporting the navigation of multiple epistemologies. Science Education, 94 6, 1008—1026.

Boal

(1979). Theatre of the oppressed (C. A. McBride & M. O. Leal McBride, Trans.). New York, NY: Urizen. (Translated from Teatro del oprimido, 1974.)

Bright

N. G.

Manchester

, & Allendyke

(2013). Space, place, and social justice in education growing a bigger entanglement: Editors’ introduction. Qualitative Inquiry, 19 10, 747—755.

Calabrese Barton

(1998). Reframing “science for all” through the politics of poverty. Educational Policy, 12 5, 525—541.

Calabrese Barton

Birmingham

Sato

Tan

, & Calabrese Barton

(2013). Supporting youth in becoming community science experts. Afterschool Matters, Fall 2013, 26—32.

Cannady

M. A.

Greenwald

, & Harris

K. N.

(2014). Problematizing the STEM pipeline metaphor: Is the STEM pipeline metaphor serving our students and the STEM workforce? Science Education, 98 3, 443—460.

Cresswell

(1996). In place/out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

10.

Dawson

(2014). “Not designed for us”: How science museums and science centers socially exclude low-income, minority ethnic groups. Science Education, 98 6, 981—1008.

11.

Donovan

(2017). Learned inequality: Racial labels in the biology curriculum can affect the development of racial prejudice. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 54 3, 379—411.

12.

Ehret

, & Hollett

(2013). (Re)placing school: Middle school students’ countermobilities while composing with iPods. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57 2, 110—119.

13.

Eisenhart

M. A.

, & Finkel

(1998). Women's science: Learning and succeeding from the margins. University of Chicago Press.

14.

Engeström

(2009). Wildfire activities: New patterns of mobility and learning. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL), 1 2, 1—18.

15.

Engeström

, & Sannino

(2010). Studies of expansive learning: Foundations, findings and future challenges. Educational Research Review, 5 1, 1—24.

16.

Gauthier

G. R.

Hill

P. W.

McQuillan

Spiegel

A. N.

, & Diamond

(2017). The potential scientist's dilemma: How the masculine framing of science shapes friendships and science job aspirations. Social Sciences, 6 1, 14.

17.

Gee

J. P.

(2011). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (4th ed.). London, U.K.: Taylor and Francis.

18.

GET City Blog site. http://getcity.org.

19.

Gillborn

(2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20 4, 485—505.

20.

Gutiérrez

(2012). Re-mediating current activity for the future. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19, 17—21.

21.

Hill

Corbett

, & St Rose

(2010). Why so few? Women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. American Association of University Women. 1111 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.

22.

Himanen

(2001). The hacker ethic: A radical approach to the philosophy of business. New York, NY: Random House.

23.

Ito

Gutiérrez

Livingstone

Penuel

Rhodes

Salen

… Watkins

S. C.

(2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

24.

Ito

Soep

Kligler-Vilenchik

Shresthova

Gamber-Thompson

, & Zimmerman

(2015). Learning connected civics: Narratives, practices, infrastructures. Curriculum Inquiry, 45 1, 10—29.

25.

Jayakumar

Vue

, & Allen

(2013). Pathways to college for Young Black Scholars: A community cultural wealth perspective. Harvard Educational Review, 83 4, 551—579.

26.

Kumpulainen

, & Sefton-Green

(2014). What is connected learning and how to research it? International Journal of Learning and Media, 4 2, 7—18.

27.

Ladson-Billings

(2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35 7, 3—12.

28.

Leander

K. M.

(2002). Locating Latanya: “The situated production of identity artifacts in classroom interaction”. Research in the Teaching of English, 37 2, 198—250.

29.

Leander

K. M.

Phillips

N. C.

, & Taylor

K. H.

(2010). The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities. Review of Research in Education, 34 1, 329—394.

30.

Lee

(1999). Equity implications based on the conceptions of science achievement in major reform documents. Review of Educational Research, 69 1, 83—115.

31.

Lyon

G. H.

Jafri

, & St. Louis

(2012). Beyond the pipeline: STEM pathways for youth development. Afterschool Matters, 16, 48—57.

32.

Madison

D. S.

(2012). Critical ethnography: Method, performance, and ethics (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

33.

McGregor

(2004). Spatiality and the place of the material in schools. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 12, 347—372.

34.

Metcalf

(2010). Stuck in the pipeline: A critical review of STEM workforce literature. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6 2. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zf09176

35.

Morgan

P. L.

Farkas

Hillemeier

M. M.

, & Maczuga

(2016). Science achievement gaps begin very early, persist, and are largely explained by modifiable factors. Educational Researcher, 45 1, 18—35.

36.

National Academy of Engineering. (2010). Engineering, social justice, and sustainable community development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

37.

National Science Board. (2014). Science and engineering indicators 2014. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. Retrieved from National Science Foundation website: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/etc/nsb1401.pdf

38.

National Science Foundation, Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science & Engineering. (2017). 2015–2016 biennial report to Congress: Broadening participation in America's STEM workforce. Retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/activities/ceose/CEOSE%202015-2016%20Biennial%20Report%20(Final).pdf

39.

Philip

T. M.

, & Azevedo

F. S.

(2017). Everyday science learning and equity: Mapping the contested terrain. Science Education, 101 4, 526—532.

40.

Project 2061: Science for All Americans. AAAS. Retrieved from http://www.project2061.org/publications/sfaa/

41.

Rodriguez

A. J.

(2015). What about a dimension of engagement, equity, and diversity practices? A critique of the next generation science standards. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52 7, 1031—1051.

42.

Strauss

, & Corbin

(1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

43.

Tan

Calabrese Barton

Kang

, & O'Neil

(2013). Desiring a career in STEM fields: Girls’ narrated and embodied identities-in-practice. Journal of Research in Science Education, 50 10, 1143—1179.

44.

Taylor

, & Hall

(2013). Counter-mapping the neighborhood on bicycles: Mobilizing youth to reimagine the neighborhood. Technology, Knowledge, and Learning, 18, 65—93.

45.

Trueba

H. T.

(1999). Latinos unidos: From cultural diversity to the politics of solidarity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

46.

U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). Science 2011: National assessment of educational progress at grade 8. Retrieved from http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/science_2011/

47.

Warren

Ogonowski

, & Pothier

(2005). “Everyday” and “scientific”: Rethinking dichotomies in modes of thinking in science learning. In Nemirovsky

Rosebery

Solomon

, & Warren

(Eds.), Everyday matters in mathematics and science: Studies of complex classroom events (pp. 119—148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence

48.

Yoder

(2014). Engineering by the numbers (Technical report). Washington, DC: American Society for Engineering Education. Retrieved from https://www.asee.org/documents/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2017-Engineering-by-Numbers-Engineering-Statistics.pdf