Disruptive STEM Literacy with Multilingual Immigrant Children and Youth

Abstract

This dissertation presents a framework for designing and analyzing learning environments that aim to disrupt oppressive educational settings for students from racially and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The problem, referred to as “business-as-usual,” this dissertation addresses is three-fold: limited identities are welcomed STEM and literacy, disciplines are strictly siloed by subjects, and students often have little agency of what and how they learn. The framework for this dissertation offers three themes of disruption: welcoming more expansive identity resources through multilingualism, multimodality, and multicultural education; transdisciplinary curriculum through culturally relevant, arts, and civics education; and enhancing students’ agency through choice, roles and affect. Video data was collected of two iterations of co-design out-of-school curriculum with a non-profit organization that serves refugee and immigrant children and youth in Summer 2023 and Spring 2024. Iterative content logging, analytical memos, and interaction analysis sessions led to three findings that provide design principles for disruption. First, the transdisciplinary curriculum was responsive to children’s interests, resulting in opportunities for children to shape the learning trajectory of the community. Second, the cameras were repositioned not only as research tools, but also as “princess camera," a disruptive audience for the students who wanted to do something different form the main activity. Princess Camera allowed for students to invent new roles and exercise a new form of agency where they invited adults into their imaginary play. The third design principles focused on the co-construction of a welcoming environment by teachers and students. This environment opened up opportunities for students to shape the overall atmosphere and therefore the learning processes of the knowledge-building community. This dissertation concludes with a call for researchers, educations, and policy makers to consider how the disruptive framework could help with the design of more transformative environments where multilingual students are authorized to shape the knowledge of their learning communities.