We report on how one community builds capacity for disrupting injustice and supporting each other during the COVID-19 crisis. We engaged long-term community partners (parents, their youth, and local community center leaders) in on-going conversation on their experiences with the pandemic. We learned with and from community partners about how and what people in communities most vulnerable in this crisis learn about and respond to COVID-19 in highly contextualized ways, individually and through extended family groups and trusted social networks. We report on how they put understandings towards educated, organized, urgent community infrastructuring actions within informal coalition networks. We explore these actions as necessary localized responses to systemic neglect from dominant institutional infrastructures during a global pandemic.
Despite the promise of Informal Science Learning settings (ISLs) in supporting youth science engagement in ways that value their experiences and communities, in practice, such opportunities are limited. While some ISLs promote more culturally relevant approaches to science engagement, many still reflect White supremacist and patriarchal worldviews in discourse and practice. In Research Practice Partnerships, we engaged eight ISL educators from two partner sites-a community center and science center, and youth from across their six programs. Using participatory ethnography we explore how educators' pedagogical practices supported youth in codeveloping more justiceoriented ISL experiences-experiences which disrupt these dominant and oppressive norms. Our analysis pays attention, in particular, to those fraught moments when youth, in interaction with peers and educators, sought to disrupt their ISL experience in ways that centered and amplified their lives, hopes, and desires for being and learning in ISL and humanized the ISL learning community. Two kinds of pedagogical response patterns emerged that we report on
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