Socioscientific Engagement for Critical Data Literacy Development
We are beginning a new initiative to scaffold youth and teens’ AI and social media navigations of socioscientific data (data with scientific and social layers). Our designs center on multimedia curation in a gradual release of responsibility model to support youth and teen autonomy and agency as they become critical AI and social media investigators. Stay tuned for project updates in the next year.
Participatory Design-Based Research at a Children’s Museum
Museum leadership, graduate student partners and I are taking an equity-centered approach to explore the daily work of research-practice partnership development with a metropolitan museum in the Midwest. Using critical participatory co-analysis, we are exploring the relational dimensions of partnership work that framed the co-design of programming and materials to support critical engagement with exhibit content and youth reflection on identity, power, and community change. Stay tuned for publication links.
Designing and Leading Justice‐centered Informal STEM Education
Drawing from a US-UK partnership grant with science museums and community organizations, we have developed a framework to guide educators’ daily work towards equitable and consequential learning in informal STEM settings. We take a justice‐centered social practice stance, to argue that pedagogical practice must confront and respond to unequal power dynamics connected to systemic, structural oppression that impacts individual and collective learning. We refer to this focus on the entanglements between justice and responsibility as the ethical and relational dimensions of teaching and learning. New paper out now.
Crafting a Community: Graduate Student Makerspace Development
My graduate student partners and I co-designed a justice-centered, trauma-informed weekly maker program to support community healing practices through shared crafting. Using online discourse analysis and participatory interview methods, we are developing insights on the behind-the-scenes strategies and processes of community development. Stay tuned for publication links.
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Designing for Making with Youth and Communities
Within two makerspaces we co-designed with youth and community organizations in Michigan, we conducted critical ethnographic and youth collaborative design-based research on middle schoolers’ identity development in afterschool STEM making. Learn about ongoing youth efforts at getcity.org and impression5.org. Book link here.
How People Learn Rapidly: COVID-19 as a Crisis of Socioscientific Understanding and Educational Equity (National Science Foundation)
We documented how youth and families learned the science of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time, how they activated this scientific knowledge towards informed decision making, and how these processes changed over time. Paper link here.
Modeling Young People’s Community-Based Critical Data Practices
Using empirical insights developed with youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, we iteratively constructed a learning model of community-based critical data practices in a social epistemological lens. These practices are what youth do in socially-mediated and culturally embedded ways with data and data infrastructures every day. Paper link here.
The YESTEM Project: A US/UK Partnership (NSF +Wellcome Trust)
We took an ecological view of STEM learning (learning as a sociocultural process of participation and transformation) to document: 1) multiple youth pathways across informal STEM learning (ISL) over time, 2) impacts on learning and development, and 3) influences on ISL organizations. My participatory findings with youth identified how learning environments directly shape youth access, engagement, and development. In partnership with ISL designers, directors, and educators, we are now sharing tools and practices from this project with informal learning organizations globally. Check out the links below to learn more!
Day Greenberg 