Interrogating Context in the Study of Affect and Emotion for Dignity and Justice

264 Pedagogies of Joy ;)
D Keifert, Day Greenberg, Déana Scipio, Sarah Lee
Strand 11: Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues

Joy is a core human experience. We conceptualize Pedagogies of Joy (POY, rhymes with joy)—an approach to learning, design, and implementation that creates opportunities for transformative, dignity-affirming learning (Espinoza et al., 2020). Our exemplar case comes from PROJECT, a critical ethnography within a participatory design-based (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) justice-centered afterschool STEM program for youth in a Midwestern low-income, predominantly Black community. We collectively analyzed a video clip through interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) video watching, highlighting design and implementation choices, and then collaboratively (re)writing our analysis together. We share an exemplar of POYful learning affirming a young person’s dignity from PROJECT as final preparations were underway for an Open House. We examine the return of an on-again/off-again member of PROJECT, his enthusiastic making, the ready support of peers, and the ways he was centered to share what he loved about PROJECT in the Open House. We use this case to highlight features of POYful design including making space for representation, disruption of hierarchical relations, youth leadership, and co-construction of makerspace culture with facilitators and youth. By disrupting unjust hierarchies, creating spaces for relations of caring, and affirming all learners’ dignity, POY highlight transformative possibilities in STEM learning.

275 Exposing and Challenging “Grit” in Physics Education
Amy Robertson, Verónica Vélez, Trà Huynh, W. Hairston
Strand 11: Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues

In STEM education, grit is increasingly the focus of research, with scholars and educators seeking to develop and test interventions that would enhance persistence. In this paper, we use interviews with twelve white physics faculty to show that physics culture has also taken up the narrative that grit is key to success in the discipline. Using affective technology (Zembylas & Leonardo, 2013), habitus (Bourdieu, 1972/1977) and emotional habitus (Gould et. al, 2019) as theoretical anchors, our analysis revealed that grit, as described by faculty participants, is part-and-parcel of a white physics habitus. In other words, grit acts to reproduce systems of dominance through the internalization of a set of structures, symbols, and worldviews that produce embodied, affective responses, drawing dominant actors toward particular embodiments of hard work and away from others. Thus, we argue that power in physics is mediated through affect and embodiment. Employing qualitative case study methods, we theorize how whiteness, in part, is reproduced in the discipline. We end by joining with existing calls to refuse grit, building from the work of STEM Scholars of Color who have called attention to the suffering that is endemic to notions of schooling and school science.

240 Raciolinguistic Hierarchies of Feeling in U.S. Science Education
Kathryn Kirchgasler
Strand 11: Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues

Attending to the affect of racially and linguistically minoritized students now appears crucial to promoting equitable science education; crucially, however, this aim has a history predating equity reforms. This paper examines how U.S. science classrooms became sites of affective intervention aimed especially at Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and Indigenous students. The study asks: How did U.S. science education project affective distinctions onto racially and linguistically marked science learners in the decades between desegregation rulings and the field’s first equity report (1946–1989)? As a raciolinguistic genealogy, the study employed archival and literature analysis to trace how U.S. science education research and curricular reforms mapped affective differences onto racial and linguistic categories of science learners. Analysis outlines how desegregation-era science education reforms created raciolinguistic hierarchies of feeling in three ways. First, by contrasting idealized personality traits of elite scientists (e.g., competitive individualism) with values ascribed to minoritized communities. Second, by attributing science career disparities to individuals’ acquisition of this ‘rational,’ ‘apolitical’ attitude. And third, by reauthorizing separate instructional tiers to elevate target groups’ dignity by helping learners culturally and linguistically approximate that depoliticized scientific self. This analysis extends work toward unsettling disciplinary molds for feeling that inadvertently reinscribe raciolinguistic hierarchies.

440 “Everyone’s Struggling:” Coping with Institutionalized Hierarchies of Competence Through Emotional Resonance
Muxin Zhang, Eric Kuo
Strand 11: Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues

This paper presents a case study of how four university engineering students in an introductory physics course addressed the emotional discomfort that arose when a hierarchy of competence emerged among group members, to demonstrate two points. First, students can cope with the discomfort of local hierarchical positioning by sharing and relating to each other’s negative emotional experiences as engineering majors. This “emotional resonance” can be a resource for helping students locally reposition to find common ground. Second, the local construction of hierarchical positioning among students, and the resulting emotional discomfort, can be supported by larger institutional structures and hierarchies within STEM culture. Although emotional resonance can locally alleviate discomfort and help students avoid hierarchical positionings, the legitimacy of positioning some students as “smarter” than others based on institutional labels and other markers of success can be left unchallenged. Therefore, efforts to support student emotions in STEM education should look beyond local interventions and critically examine pathways through which institutional structures and STEM culture can create hierarchical and competitive relations between students, generate feelings of not being “smart” enough, and increase the socio-emotional risks of learning.

332 Affective Contradictions in Future-Oriented Science and Sustainability Education
Hanna Røkenes, Alfredo Jornet Gil
Strand 11: Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues

Transformation towards sustainability entails the building of collaboration across disciplines and sectors capable of informed, large-scale action. In projects of local and global relevance educational innovations can foster future-oriented learning through collaborations between schools, scientists, and out-of-school actors. In this regard, structural/systemic transformations to traditional schooling are necessary. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities emerging when students and teachers participate in a research program aimed at developing a science education unit on climate action through open schooling science education. By taking a critical cultural-historical perspective, we empirically examine discourses and narratives of change, and how these include affective contradictions connected to sociopolitical realities of designing a lesson with the aim of making visible structural/systemic challenges. The study draws from data collected through a European research project aimed at designing and implementing open schooling innovations for action and engagement towards sustainability and future thinking. The study contributes ways to address the recognized contradictions and develop the disciplinary discourses that better include the perspective of the students' futures when teachers and out of school actors co-design lesson plans in open schooling science education, thus strengthening learning as a collective achievement.