About
35
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532
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Introduction
My research draws on sociocultural theories of identity and learning to explore students' engagement with science in formal and informal learning spaces.
Publications
Publications (35)
This perspective article draws on conversations with a program coordinator in a community organization that guided the development of an after school Convoclub for girls, which focused on understanding the role of science in their lives. We examine our conversations with the program coordinator to understand how affective placemaking, brought about...
The purpose of this manuscript is to explore how students perceive that online practices have enabled their participation in university physics programmes. In order to conceptualise how students bridge their science participation across physical and online spaces, we make use of the learning ecology perspective. This perspective is complemented wit...
This Chapter describes a program to engage non-dominant girls in science conversations during an out of school time (OST) “ConvoClub” for teen girls. We present qualitative data collected over 16 weeks in the form of interviews, group conversations and artifacts like digital stories and youth-led documentary-making to explore the identity performan...
For young women, inbound identity trajectories into physics are generally regarded as exceptional. In this study, we investigated the experiences that young women have which may support their sustained interest and achievement in physics, and their ongoing inbound trajectories into post-secondary physics education. To understand these experiences,...
Background
To attend to the social production of girls of color in science through the lens of history in person and local contentious practice, we propose a relational and nonrepresentational reading of STEM pathways. We invoke the conceptual lenses of wayfaring, knots, and meshwork to highlight the infinite ways of figuring science and becoming a...
In this chapter, we present outcomes from a study that brought undergraduate science majors (USMs) into contact with disadvantaged youth through science outreach lessons offered in an after-school context. This chapter reports on three USMs’ identity work in relation to science and science teaching. We examine how science capital emerges as a salie...
This article explores how female university students’ abilities to present themselves as ‘authentic’ engineers are imbricated with discursive constructions of gender and gender equality. The empirical data comes from interviews and video diaries collected with three female engineering students. The analysis demonstrates the power of the Swedish gen...
The COVID-19 pandemic has required educators at all levels to pivot instruction online. In this article, we consider methods we adopted to engage novice science teachers in approximations of teaching, online. We describe the principles of our science teacher education program and provide a rationale for the core feature of our science teaching meth...
This article reports on research investigating the experiences and resources that make science thinkable for undergraduate science majors as they engage in postsecondary science contexts. We regard these experiences and resources as contributing to science majors' science capital, and we suggest that science capital accumulates over time across ide...
Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind and rationality (over body/nature/emotions) in these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions of masculinity as transcendental and disem...
In this paper, I engage with arguments put forth by Anna Günther-Hanssen in her article “A swing and a child: How scientific phenomena can come to matter for preschool children’s emergent science identities.” Günther-Hanssen argues that new materialism can help us see how scientific phenomena can create affordances in becoming scientific and can al...
This paper dialogues with Lucy Avraamidou’s theoretical contribution Science Identity as a Landscape of Becoming: Rethinking Recognition and Emotionality through an Intersectionality Lens. Avraamidou discusses the centrality of recognition for science identities, and presents an argument for taking up intersectionality as an analytical lens for rec...
Despite decades of research into the gender disparity in physics education and physics practice, the underrepresentation of women in physics persists today. In physics education research, this gender disparity has been constructed as problematic, and numerous approaches from a variety of perspectives have been taken to both research and address it....
There is recent evidence suggesting that formal and informal support networks for minoritized students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can contribute to their persistence in the field. These counterspaces can serve as “safe spaces” where deficit notions of minoritized students can be challenged and where a positive colle...
Over several decades, studies have documented differences between men and women’s achievement and participation in physics, or have sought social or psychological explanations for differences in physics engagement. This dualistic understanding of gender and its consequences for physics learning has long been challenged theoretically, but only recen...
This Edited Volume engages with concepts of gender and identity as they are mobilized in research to understand the experiences of learners, teachers and practitioners of physics. The focus of this collection is on extending theoretical understandings of identity as a means to explore the construction of gender in physics education research.
This c...
In this article, we explore the identity work done by four male, working-class students who participate in a Swedish mechanical engineering program, with a focus on their participation in project work. A focus on how individuals negotiate their participation in science and technology disciplines has proven to be a valuable way to study inclusion an...
Background
Research in engineering education has pointed to the need for new engineers to develop a broader skill-set with an emphasis on “softer” social skills. However, there remains strong tensions in the identity work that engineers must engage in to balance the technical demands of the discipline with the new emphasis on heterogeneous skills (...
[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research.] This paper presents the cases of two doctoral students in observational astrophysics whose circumstances and experiences led them on a career trajectory out of academic research. In this article, I employ a sociocultural lens that provides insight into the dynamics of s...
Research indicates that learning about teaching methods is not the same as learning to enact teaching methods. In our mathematics and science teacher education programs, we employ a practice-based pedagogy approach requiring novice teachers to learn, practice, enact, and reflect on their teaching. This approach draws on work highlighting core instr...
[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Gender in Physics.] This article analyzes masculinity and experimental practices within three different physics communities. This work is premised on the understanding that the discipline of physics is not only dominated by men, but also is laden with masculine connotations on a symbolical level, and...
In her article, Karin Due presents us with a contradiction in physics: the construction of physics as a symbolically masculine discipline alongside a simultaneous discourse of the “gender-neutrality” of the discipline. Due’s article makes an important contribution to the study of the gendering of physics practices, particularly in group dynamics, a...
Doctoral physics students have stories about what kinds of actions, behaviours and ways of doing physics allow individuals to be recognized as physicists. Viewing a physics department as a case study, and individual participants as embedded cases, this study used a sociocultural approach to examine the ways doctoral students construct these stories...
In this article, I explore what happens when digital media activities designed to stimulate science conversations are introduced to an out-of-school-time (OST) space usually reserved for talks about girls' issues. The goals of this study were to provide a space that values youth voice and creates positive emotional energy around science-related sub...
Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study explores how the figured world of science is reworked through a series of multi‐media activities that were introduced into a girls‐only conversation club in an after school program for Teens. The study is part of a multi‐sited ethnography in which we explored youths' engagement with science within three...
This article examines the stories of 24 social sciences doctoral students in three universities, one in Canada and two in the UK, who experienced challenging roads to completion. While their stories confirm earlier findings, they also provide insight into how students' agency and personal networks of relationships may be critical, both as resources...
This review explores Alfred Schademan’s “What does playing cards have to do with science? A resource-rich view of African
American young men” by examining how he uses two key concepts—hybridity and resources—to propose an approach to science education
that counters enduring deficit notions associated with this population. Our response to Schademan’...
Researchers have been exploring the issue of women’s attrition from science doctoral programs for over two decades, but understanding
the problem of the under-representation of women in science has remained limited. Thus, the study on which this chapter is based was
conceived to examine possible reasons for the under-representation of women in phys...
A liberatory pedagogy, from a Freirean perspective, seeks to transform the classroom into a dialogic and student-powered learning environment by restructuring the student-teacher dichotomy. The purpose is change—not only to individual students’ lives and opportunities but also to the wider social reality. While these are the goals of many science e...
The zones framework conceived for the examination of thinking about teaching, is validated, and extended to the examination of thinking about learning. This is done by extending the framework to examine thinking about teaching and learning in a population of science graduate student teaching assistants. Semi‐structured interviews explore these stud...
In Canada today, a gender disparity persists in the enrolment and persistence of doctoral students in physics. Scholarship on this disparity has, in the past, focused on issues of equity and difference in order to find ways to recruit and retain more women in physics. This approach offered a limited perspective on gender and relied on essentialist...
Projects
Projects (2)
Researchers in STEM education have demonstrated that women and under-represented minorities, especially women of colour, do not persist in STEM fields at the same rate as their White male peers because of social and interpersonal factors. Studies have shown that persistence in STEM fields is dependent upon the development of a STEM-identity. Many post-secondary campuses have STEM clubs/organizations to support students by creating a space where a unique set of resources can flow between individuals; however, few studies have examined the roles that relationships play in these networks, and their influence on students’ identity work as they move through their academic programs. This work addresses the current gap in the literature regarding student participation in equity-based STEM initiatives, and the networks that both students and faculty members access to make resources available to students. Using analytical tools from social network analysis (SNA) and identity theory, this research examines the resources available through social interactions and the influence of these resources on the development of STEM identities for under-represented populations in STEM.
