Abstract

While issues of (in)justice in K12 STEM learning have garnered increasing attention, limited research has attended to learning as social-spatial transformation. We draw upon a justice-oriented framework of equitably consequential learning to call attention to how learning and engagement in K12 STEM is rooted in the history and geographies of young people’s lives. Without attention to the ways in which learning is an historicized and sociopolitical activity, efforts to address seemingly intractable equity challenges in K12 STEM education across the intersections of racial and class inequality will remain elusive. Using data from middle school classroom studies focused on engineering for sustainable communities, where community ethnography is central to engineering design, we investigate the social-spatial relationalities that minoritized youth bring to engineering design, and how relationalities may support youth in transforming oppressive knowledge and power structures toward equitably consequential learning. Findings reveal that organizing learning engineering design around youths’ rich everyday experiences and community wisdom through community ethnography, addressed hyperlocal, sociopolitical community challenges. As a result, the social-spatial terrain upon which subject-object relations are enacted shifted, expanding the discourses, practices and outcomes of middle school engineering design that were legitimized. Making present this power-mediated terrain makes visible the often hidden, but ever present, unjust school-based relationalities, enabling them to be re-mediated in justice-oriented ways. Paying attention to social-spatial relationalities reveal (1) the multiple scales of activity, (2) inter-scalar mobilities and interactions, and (3) possible resultant impacts of such interactions that further affect activity at each scale. We discuss implications for how theories of equitably consequential learning can be advanced through the frame of social-spatial justice.

摘要

虽然 K12 STEM 学习中的（不）公正问题越来越受到关注，但有限的研究将学习作为社会空间转变. 我们利用公平结果学习的以正义为导向的框架，呼吁人们关注 K12 STEM 的学习和参与如何植根于年轻人生活的历史和地理。如果不关注学习是一种历史化和社会政治活动的方式，那么跨越种族和阶级不平等的交叉点，解决 K12 STEM 教育中看似棘手的公平挑战的努力将仍然难以实现。使用中学课堂研究的数据，重点关注可持续社区的工程，其中社区民族志是工程设计的核心，我们调查了少数青年给工程设计带来的社会空间关系，以及关系如何支持青年将压迫性知识和权力结构转变为公平的结果学习。调查结果表明，通过社区民族志围绕年轻人丰富的日常经验和社区智慧组织学习工程设计，解决了超本地化的社会政治社区挑战。因此，主客体关系所依据的社会空间地形发生了变化，扩大了合法化的中学工程设计的话语、实践和成果。呈现这种以权力为媒介的地形，可以使经常隐藏但始终存在的不公正的学校关系变得可见，从而使它们能够以面向正义的方式得到重新调节。关注社会空间关系揭示（1）活动的多尺度，(2) 标量间流动性和相互作用，以及 (3) 这种相互作用可能产生的影响进一步影响每个尺度的活动。我们讨论了如何通过社会空间正义框架推进公平结果学习理论的意义。