Abstract
In this chapter, I challenge the functionalist view of informal science education and instead, through “a lens of multiples,” attend to youths’ diverse forms of meaning making of science and self in science; and how these processes are charged by and grounded in placemaking (entanglement of feelings with materials, bodies, and multiple ways of knowing, being, and becoming in STEM). I do so through two case studies, first, a video production project in ArtScience, a club that is part of a Saturday school that reaches out to elementary school level children and families with histories of recent immigration; and second, a joint video project about a girls-only afterschool program by now young women of color who no longer participate in that program. I show how the two projects took for granted the heterogeneity of forms of engagement with science and identities as insiders to science and thereby became critical sites of critique and transformation of informal science education and visions of who can do and be in science, mediated in part also by the researcher who as a collaborator contributed to that transformation. As such, the chapter challenges visions of colored youth as disposable through a discourse on multiples.
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Rahm, J. (2019). Moving Beyond the Singular: A Deconstruction of Educational Opportunity in Science Through the Lens of Multiples in an Era Marked by Globalization and Neoliberalism. In: Sengupta, P., Shanahan, MC., Kim, B. (eds) Critical, Transdisciplinary and Embodied Approaches in STEM Education. Advances in STEM Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29489-2_15
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