Thank you for sharing this video with us! To address your last question, I personally do not think that STEM curriculum is enough without political and ideological clarity about the relationship between learning and power. Power plays a very important role in how we exist in this world. For these students language is a part of this power dynamic - one of the students shared how she sometimes doens't know how to express herself in English and serves as a bridge to other students who do not yet have those English skills. This subtly addresses how language is a form of power - those who know the language in use can express themselves, however, this may not be true for those who do not know that language, which may result in a lack of expression, participation, etc. Thus, I believe we need to take into account the backgrounds of our students and acknowledge them as knowledge holders, and as educators be the ones who are bridging them to the curriculum and not using the "lack" of language skills as a reason that our students cannot learn/understand the curriculum. A question I do have is how you incorporate the parents/caregivers into this work? Are relationships extended beyond the camp or just for the two weeks? If so, how are they fostered? Again, thank you for sharing this wonderful video! 

Thank you so much, Sandra, for such a great comment. I agree with you! However, we are also getting a lot of push back that what we are doing is simply "good pedagogy" and providing access to a robust curriculum. However, our findings are showing that without political and ideological clarity about language (and other social markers), there cannot be an inclusive and robust STEM curriculum. We are planning to show our findings using some fuzzy set analysis and by attending to the necessary and sufficient conditions of our study.

This is our second year, and we make phone calls and try to stay in touch with parents (they have been actively communicating with us during the summer and after summer program). We send home letters, photos, and call them. I provide them with my phone number to call me at any time. We hire older siblings as mentors to the program and provide them additional training. We have been hoping to build and foster stronger relationships over the years, including this year, however, with the Covid-19, we are limited in terms of visits and etc. We also recognize that these are important times to connect with them and working very hard to make sure that we will be available if not in person than over the phone or support them with technologies/materials. We have plans for doing some family-college nights and other activities and waiting to hear from the governor and the state to plan our next steps accordingly. Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful and super helpful comments.

Students for whom English is not their first language have difficulty with standardized tests, but in the laboratory their conceptual understanding and motivation is frequently superior.  In our project, we have parental consents in English, Spanish, and Arabic and will provide more if teachers notify us they are needed.

Thank you so much, Joni! We using a mixed-method approach and utilizing some fuzzy-set analysis. Qualitatively, we record classroom interactions and do micro-level moment to moment analysis of students' performances and analyze the change over time using our social positioning framework. We are in close communication with the school districts to figure out either a hybrid or virtual meeting. However, things are changing by the hour where we are located so it has been very difficult to plan anything. Our university is closed until July, similarly to all schools in the area. We are hoping that we will have a better idea and information about summer soon and plan accordingly. Do you have any suggestions? These are very difficult times because we already know that some families have been hit very hard and they are taking care of their sick family members. Some of our community partners believe that asking kids to do virtual programs during these difficult times may not be conducive, while others believe that this would help kids, and by working closely with the school partners we could come up with a program that would not be possible otherwise. One of our school partners suggested doing something around social and emotional support. So we are still talking and trying to keep continuous communication with our partners and community members, and also families, to figure out what would be the most appropriate approach in this situation.  We would welcome your comments and suggestion. Thank you for your thoughtful questions!

Dear Barbara (Dr. Rogoff), 

I have goosebumps right now. My research team is working on a paper related to the patterns of sophisticated and flexible collaboration and cooperation we have been observing in the students in our program. It reflects many of your findings related to this in home and family settings among siblings and family members. However, many of our students did not know each other prior to coming to the program, and they are exhibiting similar cultural competencies that you have observed and documented in your study. We completed over 480  hours of micro-level analysis of these events and found these patterns in all groups. What is fascinating about these findings is that although we did set up our program so children could collaborate, we did not necessarily "teach" these skills. We are actually learning these skills from them. Although it was not our initial intention, we believe that our findings show the implication and extension of your findings in more "formal learning settings." We will be working with these students for the next 3 years. 

It is such an honor!!!! You are and your research work has been such an inspiration for myself, since the doctoral program, and my current research group.  This is such an honor! Thank you for all your work! The education research world is a better place thanks to your decades-long anthropological research!!!!

Dear Mary,

Thank you for watching our video and for your thoughtful questions. 

Our work draws on social positioning framework, and our training involves applying this framework to the content (we with on the curriculum based on anti-deficit and asset-based communicative and epistemic approach to science inquiry and sense-making in the context of integrated STEM) and pedagogy (with focus on interactional and relational aspects of teachers’ work in the classroom). Practically, we ask questions such as what roles and positions we give students so they can be epistemic agents and recruit their diverse communicative repertoires to engage in culturally and communally relevant STEM projects. Once we invite teachers and instructors to work with us the work, we start with helping teachers to make practical sense of STEM content and sense-making and inquiry practices, at the same time about anti-deficit notions of identity, culture, and positioning. For example, we focus on curriculum examples and video vignettes from the project (beginning from our pilot year, and each year we add new ones), where students from their district schools engaged in a variety of rich science activities as a basis for discussing what teachers notice, how positioning of students as advantaged or not changes interactions, how we can see students’ competencies as they work in projects, and other related topics. Much of this work draws from successful models such as video clubs in mathematics (Sherin et al, 20014; Sherin et al 2005; Van Es & Sherin, 2010) and cultural anthropological work about competencies of (Gutierrez et al, 2019; Rogoff, 2016) cultural and linguistic diversity that promote reflection on practice. The key feature of this PD is to allow local area science teachers and instructors to observe and notice emergent bilingual-multilingual students in engaging and performing STEM practices using varieties of communicative and cultural repertoires. Research shows when these students struggle in the content areas, teachers are likely to adopt a deficit assumption about students’ family backgrounds, cultural, language, cognitive, and academic skills (Lawson, 2003). Allowing teachers to observe students engaging in advance STEM practices and content is an initial step in debunking deficit notions. While observing, teachers also have an opportunity to build on their content and pedagogic knowledge related science and STEM practices and how to support students’ learning and identity development. We provide instructors and teachers with concrete examples of a variety of teaching and learning strategies relevant to social positioning, identity development, and science content and practices. As a part of their work with us, teachers are asked to design a curriculum with highlighting sense-making, epistemic heterogeneity, identity development, and social positioning. Then they teach in. the program and we meet and reflect on the practices at the end of each day. A graduate student or high-school volunteers (we introduce this research mentorship program this year) works with teachers who volunteer to capture these efforts on video and bring daily observations for our reflection. Thank you so much for visiting our page and for watching our video. Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Katie - thank you for watching our video and sharing your insights.  We appreciate you taking the time to comment as well and we'll be back in touch with you to address your ideas.

Wow, Katie. Yes!!!!!! I want to copy and paste your comments everywhere!!! I would love to get in touch with you and see if we can collaborate together. I am already in love with your work. Your work and scholarship on PD and teacher learning/enactment multiplicities and complexities continue to inform us. I would love to pick your brain about issues related to "learning." 

Thank you Sarah for watching our video and commenting.  We also hope we are able to contribute to systemic changes in education. Our PI will be able to address your question about the tools we use to position students in our summer programs in the near future.

Thank you so much Sarah. We are working on a couple research publications. I will be happy to share them with you!

Thank you Lynda for your insightful comments and questions.  We will be able to provide answers to your questions shortly!

Dear Lynda, 

This is such a great question. When we have designed the program, we relied on extensive research from learning sciences and cultural-historical studies about social, cultural, linguistic, and cognitive resources and strengths of emergent bilingual/multilingual children from Latinx, Portuguese, and Cape-Verdean backgrounds. We also engaged in the communities these children live and go to schools. So, we knew about some of their social, cultural, and linguistic strengths, such as code-switching, translanguaging, cultural competencies and cognitive processes required to accomplish joint activities and complex, competencies with multi-modal representations, as well as social skills such as assisting and helping their peers and their instructors with understanding directions and etc. While these strengths and various forms of relational knowing were constitutive of our design, we were also cognizant not to essentialize them and attune ourselves as well as our activities so that we can attend to their strengths as they emerge. Therefore, one main feature of our activities is that many of them are inquiry-based and open-ended. They allow multiple approaches and ways of engagement. Second, all of or activities require a join activity. That way we know that students can utilize their strengths to accomplish complex tasks and bring their various strengths (cultural and linguistic) while working on different parts of projects, communicating, planning, and designing. Third, an important feature is that we utilize topics and issues that are currently relevant to their communities. This way they can bring their everyday epistemologies to attend to the issues and combine that with epistemic practices of the discipline. Here is one concrete example, this year we wanted to engage students in thermodynamics and concepts of energy. We decide to go with environmental and food justice issues in the community. Students had opportunities to investigate these issues from their community's perspective, they asked questions from their families, collected data about sources of food, their ecological and climate footprints. They looked at the grocery ads to collect data and make calculations. They grew their own seeds from the fruits and vegetables they consumed. They were provided Ipads and notebooks so they record their data and observations in various modalities. They were part of diverse linguistic groups and helped each other with translations and translanguaging. We collected qualitative data such as video, audio data from classroom enactments (and do moment-by-moment data analysis of students’ engagement), we also collect fieldnotes, use observation protocol, and interviews with students. In terms of quantitative data, there is also a pre-post social positioning survey. We analyze these data sets qualitatively, quantitatively, as well as a combination of two in fuzzy set analysis.

Thank you so much Mia :). I look forward to our collaboration!

Dear Renee, Thank you so much for watching and your thoughtful inquiries. This past summer was the first year of implementation. We are stepping into our second year. We have finished our preliminary data analysis and findings and submitting them to a couple journals. I will be happy to share with you these peer-reviewed articles. We have also presented our findings in AERA, NARST and ESERA conferences. We will be happy to share with you those presentations as well. I will upload them to our website. 

When it comes to structures we used to help teachers as they position students as competent scientists and engineers, I would say one of the most effective and important ones were daily debriefings, our observational protocol was very helpful to take some notes daily and share what we saw as noteworthy with them every day before and after the daily program. Those moments were very important for us to reflect about our practices and improve upon them. We were also very privileged to have high school mentor group and students who came to work with us (siblings of the program participants), they shared with teachers their own observations and insider knowledge as well. Another most important thing explicitly talked about reminding ourselves about issues related to power, as well as openly interrogate how our epistemic and identity perspectives in science education have been shaped by dominant discourses and narratives related to science, ability, innateness, and intelligence. 

Thank you so much for watching our video Holly & I'm happy to hear that you are seeing similarities to what you're doing within your project, to what we're doing in our video! You hit the nail on the head! Our kids are extremely smart, deserving, and they all brought various forms of scientific knowledge into the camp with them. It blew us away at times because of how smart our students are and how well they succeeded. I think programs like STEAM Your Way 2 College & the Northwest Passage Project, are both important because the work that we do allows our students to have access to these STEM identities, and eventually access to STEM-related careers. 

Yes! It's been really interesting with many of our other Northwest Passage Project undergrads, who are first generation college students in their families, watch their career/future education paths morph after this experience.  We partnered with 5 minority serving institutions on the project, and many of these students are now looking to incorporating oceanography or environmental science into their future, things that weren't on their radar prior to the project and their expedition experience. For example, students on a pre-med path, are maintaining that, but now looking at climate impacts on health, or environmental impacts on genetics- not only are they thinking about these new (to them) areas of science and how to continue with these topics in the future, but they are doing it in really innovative ways!

Thank you Holly for your comments. I really enjoyed watching your video as well. It's so important that people realize the interconnectedness of issues (nothing is in its own bubble) and how decisions/actions/consequences are not isolated to just their issue or geographic area. I'm really thankful for the work you and your team are doing and look forward to hearing more about the success of your project in the future!

Holly, thank you so much! Your project is so exciting. Where are you located?

Thank you Jamie for taking the time to watch our video and for your comments and questions.  I'd like to address your first question. We actually took time before the camp started to train not only the instructors but also the HS interns/mentors and other camp staff on social positioning theory so they would all understand where we were coming from and be able to implement it themselves while interacting with our students. I'll defer to my colleagues for your second question as they have more intimate knowledge to be able to answer that one.

Dear Jamie,

We have been so privileged with educators and instructors who work with us in this project. We are continually working and learning from them. Let me give you one concrete and recent example. Our educators help us to understand/analyze video data that we collect in the classrooms. We were watching one of the classroom interactions, and suddenly our teacher says, did you see that? She was pointing at the group of boys, and how once of one they in the group got hold of the activity he started helping others in the group. This was something that we would not be able to understand or see just from just watching the video or was not fully captured in the observational notes, but she broke that whole event of interaction into the moment-by-moment sequence of learning. We have been learning from our educators every day during the program and we continue learning from them. Now they teach us about the strengths the students enact. Instead of us guiding them they are guiding our understanding. 

Thank you so much, Michael. Embodied learning in mathematics education has been informing our approach as well. If you do not mind, we will look up your work and read about it. Yes, ELL students have so much embodied knowledge and they are so good at deploying various bodily, semiotic, and cultural resources to make and express meaning, it is just fascinating and such a privilege to be witnessing their ingenuities and capabilities. 

Aww!! Thank you, Heidi! It means so much for me (us) to hear this coming from you. You and your work created a pathway in science education to "talk" about identity issues and continues to inform generations of scholars and scholarships. You are our intellectual leader and inspiration. Thank you for all your support, advice, mentorship, and help! 

Thank you Emmanuel for your thoughtful reflections and sharing your experiences with us. We really appreciate reading them!

Dear Emmanuel,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments and for sharing with us your experiences. I am excited to hear that you are using ethnomathematics, as you said, there are so much mathematics and STEM in everyday cultural practices, yet we tend to overlook them for the service of formal and procedural ones. I am excited for you and the wonderful things you are doing within the mathematics education and research community.  

Thank you so much Adriano for sharing your personal experiences & reflections.  We are honored that you felt comfortable enough to share them with us.

Thank you so much Adriano for sharing your experiences and reflections. You are a great role model and doing an amazing job yourself!  We will be definitely reaching out to you :). Thank you!