Young African American children constructing academic and disciplinary identities in an urban science classroom

Kane, Justine M.

doi:10.1002/sce.20483

Cited by 65 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…When we situate our work within the science identity context, it is conceptualized as an “affinity identity” or the conception that “we are what we are because of the experiences we have had within certain sorts of affinity groups” (p. 101). Other work in science education has framed science identity as a “disciplinary identity” or as a person's understandings of self in relation to a discipline (Kane, ). Our framing of STEM identity is similar to other work in science education in which disciplinary identity is interactive with many other identities a person may ascribe to and is multidimensional in its construction.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity: The importance of talking science

et al. 2019

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In this paper, we examine the relationship between participants’ childhood science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related experiences, their STEM identity (i.e., seeing oneself as a STEM person), and their college career intentions. Whereas some evidence supports the importance of childhood (i.e., K‐4) informal STEM education experiences, like participating in science camps, existing research does not adequately address their relationship to STEM career intention later in life. Grounding our work in identity research, we tested the predictive power of STEM identity on career intention (N = 15,847). We found that for every one‐point higher on our STEM identity scale, participants’ odds of choosing a STEM career in college increased by 85%. We then tested whether a variety of childhood informal experiences predicted participants’ STEM identity. While controlling for home environment, gender, and other relevant factors, only talking with friends and family about science, and consuming science and science‐fiction media (i.e., books and television) were predictive of STEM identity in college.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity: The importance of talking science

et al. 2019

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“…However, as Kane [2009Kane [ , 2012a has argued, in order to understand student IC in classrooms, attention is needed to student identities not only in narrated contexts (the stories, or narratives, they develop about who they are and how they are positioned) but also in performed contexts (the identities-in-practice that they perform in the classroom). Considering the three types of identities that are important in the CLIC framework, we offer three sets of questions as analytical tools for thinking about, and for understanding, construction of identities performed in the science and mathematics classroom ( table 2 ).…”

Section: Recommendations For Practice and Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In another study, analyzing both the ways a class of Black third graders spoke about or narrated their experiences of school and science and the ways they performed themselves in the moment-to-moment happenings of the science class throughout one whole school year, Kane [2009Kane [ , 2012a found that children constructed a consistent sense of who they believed themselves to be as students and science students and scientists and how they acted in the science class, albeit differently from each other (another example related to section 10 of fig. 3 ).…”

Section: Academic Identity and Its Influence On Disciplinary Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Maria Varelas' and Justine Kane's research with students of color (Black and Latino/a) has shown how academic and disciplinary identities become intricately fused as students try to make sense of the disciplinary practices of science in which they engage and of the institutional norms of schools and schooling that they experience [Kane, 2009[Kane, , 2012aTucker-Raymond, Varelas, & Pappas, 2007TuckerRaymond, Varelas, Pappas, & Keblawe-Shamah, 2012;Varelas, Kane, & Wylie, 2011. In one study, Varelas and Kane [Varelas et al, 2011] uncovered how young primary-grade Black children, in almost exclusively Black schools and in classrooms where their teachers attempted to engage them in meaningful scientific practices, were constructing academic and science identities that included conflicting practices, behaviors, ideologies, and habits of mind.…”

Section: Academic Identity and Its Influence On Disciplinary Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Content Learning and Identity Construction: A Framework to Strengthen African American Students’ Mathematics and Science Learning in Urban Elementary Schools

2012

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We present a theoretical framework that views learning as a process involving content learning (CL) and identity construction (IC). We view identities as lenses through which people make sense of, and position themselves, through stories and actions, and as lenses for understanding how they are positioned by others. As people become more (or less) central members of a disciplinary community (e.g., a science or mathematics classroom) and engage (or not) in various cultural practices, changes in identity and knowledge accompany changes in position and status. IC and CL share an important characteristic: they both involve meaning making. For IC, it is the development of reasoned, coordinated, coherent, and meaningful ways of seeing one’s self in relation to communities, and for CL, it centers on the development of disciplinary concepts, processes, tools, language, discourse, and norms within practices. Focusing on Black students in mathematics and science classrooms, we claim that three intersecting identities are particularly important: disciplinary identity (as doers of the discipline, i.e., mathematics and science), racial identity (emerging understandings of what it means to be Black), and academic identity (as participants in academic tasks and classroom practices). In this paper, we elaborate on the CLIC framework as a useful tool for understanding how Black students negotiate participation in, and come to see themselves as doers of science and mathematics in their school classrooms. We synthesize empirical findings from our research with younger and older students, as well as with parents and community members, to illustrate dimensions of this framework.

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“…We also situate this study amidst identity studies literature with our focus on individuals' agency and multi‐level structures that enable and constrain agency (Archer et al, 2012; Elmesky, ; Jackson & Seiler, ; Kane, ; Seiler, ; Tan, Calabrese Barton, Kang, & O'Neill, ; Wood, Erichson, & Anicha, ). If students claim to dislike science in middle school after loving it in elementary school, we must probe more deeply into the cultural (implicit) meanings of science in their school science experiences.…”

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confidence: 99%

Becoming (less) scientific: A longitudinal study of students' identity work from elementary to middle school science

2014

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Students' declining science interest in middle school is often attributed to psychological factors like shifts of motivational values, decrease in self-efficacy, or doubts about the utility of schooling in general. This paper adds to accounts of the middle school science problem through an ethnographic, longitudinal case study of three diverse students' identity work from fourth-to sixth-grade school science. Classroom observations and interviews are used as primary data sources to examine: (1) the cultural and structural aspects of the fourth-and sixth-grade classrooms, including the celebrated subject positions, that enabled and constrained students' identity work as science learners; (2) the nature of students' identity work, including their positioning related to the celebrated subject positions within and across fourth-and sixthgrade science; and (3) the ways race, class, and gender figured into students' identity work and positioning. In fourth-grade, all experienced excellent science pedagogy and performed themselves as scientifically competent and engaged learners who recognized themselves and got recognized by others as scientific. By sixth-grade, their identity work in school science became dramatically less scientific. Celebrated subject positions did not demand scientific thinking or robust engagement in scientific practices and were heavily mediated by race, class, and gender. Our results highlight three insights related to the middle school problem: (1) when students' social identity work was leveraged in service of robust science learning, their affiliation increased; (2) academic success in school science did not equate to affiliation or deep engagement with science; and (3) race, class, and gender figured into students'successes in, threats to, and identity work related to becoming scientific. We end the article by providing a framework and questions that teachers, teacher educators, and researchers might use to design and evaluate the equity of science education learning spaces.

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Young African American children constructing academic and disciplinary identities in an urban science classroom

Cited by 65 publications

References 55 publications

Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity: The importance of talking science

Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity: The importance of talking science

Content Learning and Identity Construction: A Framework to Strengthen African American Students’ Mathematics and Science Learning in Urban Elementary Schools

Becoming (less) scientific: A longitudinal study of students' identity work from elementary to middle school science

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