Paper short abstract:

This Making & Doing session invites participants to model ways that pedagogical practices in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Math) education might reinforce normative models of science education or might allow us to revision and construct new and liberatory practices for the future.

Paper long abstract:

This Making and Doing activity will explore how STEAM education can create possibilities for boundary work that transgresses normative ideas of the epistemic superiority of science and expands our understandings of science learning and science learners. This session is inspired by a collaboration between elementary-aged youth and university students in an after-school STEAM program who worked together to integrate practices of science and art, with the goal of broadening the boundaries of science learning beyond to include youths’ ideas and interests. We will share the story of how a group of 10- and 11-year-old girls led a project with volunteers from undergraduate education and science programs that re-defined their own roles as learners and doers of science by building collaborative and caring relations among their group. Together, the group co-created a physical representation of the university campus using slime and modeling clay, and in so doing re-defined what counted as science to include playful experimentation with slime recipes and engineering of clay structures. However, despite these critical shifts in their participation in STEAM education towards relational practices and a pedagogy of care, the youths’ model reified the university institution as a place where scientific practices are held up as epistemically superior and typically segregated from artistic experimentation or relational learning. In this session, we will encourage attendees to experiment with ideas of what STEAM education might look like, and to then to use modeling clay to co-construct a model that represents science education that is more informal, playful, or collaborative.