[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Culture is everywhere in our schools and classrooms, including in places where we least expect it. That influences everything about student learning, including how children see themselves in relation to nature. We've come a long way in the last 40 years when it comes to technology. We have the Internet, smartphones, and GPS at our fingertips, and in that sense we live in a very different world. But elementary school classrooms largely remain recognizable, not only by their child-sized furniture but also by things like displays of the alphabet, typically accompanied by corresponding illustrations of animals, from aardvarks and baboons to yaks and zebras. Presumably the animals are there because children like animals, and they attract attention, but are there other implications? Classrooms also have cultural messages, and these too have remained largely the same in the last 40 years. In fact, nearly all aspects of school reveal particular cultural orientations that tend to reflect European-American orientations. Our work has been focused particularly on science education and reasoning about the natural world. Our studies with Native American and European-American children and adults suggest significant variations in how these different groups see themselves in relation to the rest of nature. These differences are revealed in everyday practices and in cultural artifacts, which serve to reinforce the very cultural differences that they reflect. Our work has been in partnership with the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC) and the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin (see Bang et al., 2010, for a more detailed description.) Much of our focus has been on informal science learning and notions of biology that children may bring to the We've also conducted summer science programs and weekend family science activities with Native youth in Chicago and on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin (Bang & Medin, 2010). This research and these activities have been community and culturally based. A Menominee classroom In early 2012, Medin attended a community meeting on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin that focused on the Menominee Head Start schools. We were discussing what 3- to 5-year-old children should be doing and learning, and a strong consensus emerged that, When people walk into a classroom they should immediately know that it is a Menominee classroom. What did this mean? First and foremost, these community members said, Menominee language should be present. (The first language for most Menominee children these days is English). Second, community members said children should learn about clan animals (bears and cranes, not baboons and camels), Menominee stories, and Menominee history. That was just the beginning, as other priorities and values emerged. At the Indian center in Chicago, a parallel story unfolded in which community members also wanted to focus on tribal histories, stories, and traditions. After site visits to other early childhood programs, community members in Chicago suggested that the programs lacked an emphasis on children's relationship with the land and with each other. They began to think about what this might mean in classroom practice. As a part of this wondering, we focused on the material resources in classrooms--children's books, for example. Books are cultural artifacts Children's books are cultural artifacts. In one line of research, we examined children's books that were written and illustrated by Native Americans and others by non-Native Americans (Medin & Bang, in press). The books were aimed at 4- to 8-year-old children, had to include animals, and could not be special occasion or seasonal (holiday) books. The non-Native books were selected from the best-selling children's books on Amazon.com, and the Native books were drawn from a Native-operated literacy organization, Oyate. …
This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staffmembers, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by engaging Indigenous ways of knowing and being from a sociocultural learning theory perspective. Through analyzing families-in-interaction as they constructed dioramas with robotics that told their family stories, we explore how cultivating consequential learning environments in STEM is intimately intertwined with historicity, knowledge systems, and the agentic positioning of learners to design new technologies. We find that using storywork as the design focus of building dioramas created learning environments where computer programing and robotics became dynamic tools toward family-making, collaboration, and the active presencing of Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices. Living and interrelating with story and its knowledge systems through making were enactments of Indigenous resurgence in everyday ways. From a structure of social practices perspective, this opens up learning spaces for engagement in STEM-Art practices and in relation to other social practices of consequence, such as cultural flourishing and affiliation, collaboration and family-making, and societal repositioning.
In this chapter, we share an edited transcript of a conversation that we, the authors, held about methods for researcher self-care and protection. Working with the transcript, we crafted four ideational composites that are grounded in our life experience and personal stories of engaging in research with youth and communities with whom we have strong relationships. Each of these composites focuses on a set of relational dimensions about researcher self-care. We offer these composites as points of reflection and hope that other researchers may glean meaning from our stories in ways that are personally affirming as well as enriching.
This introduction to the special two-part section of this journal shares the theoretical foundations of FLDC's work and the principles of solidarity-driven codesign that connect efforts across vastly different geographies, racial and ethnic communities, and contexts to reimagine ways forward towards educational justice. We illuminate methodological and theoretical trajectories of intertwined research and practice that seek to reckon with systems that have disregarded, alienated, and disproportionately harmed racially minoritized families and communities – and to envision paths forward centered on the priorities and dreams of those youth, families, and communities.
