American racism is deeply engrained in the nation’s ecology including its chronosystem and contributes to the nation’s unavoidably shared vulnerability. Interrogating an accurate portrayal of the nation’s history is informative for securing anti-racist research. This special issue commentary discusses the role of Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) as a means of providing an epistemic framing for disentangling and directly addressing the problem of structural racism in the conduct of science. Additionally it demonstrates the efficacy of PVEST and offers

A framework that emphasizes and integrates individuals' intersubjective experiences with Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory (PVEST) is introduced and compared with self-organizational perspectives. Similarities, differences and advantages of each framework are described. In a demonstration of PVEST's utility, a subset of data from the 3rd year of a longitudinal study (14- to 16-year-old middle adolescent African-Americans) is used for examining an achievement variable: negative learning attitude. Explored separately by gender, a regression model that contained risk, stress, and a

STEM, STEAM, Make, Dream explores the ways that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics can transform all young people’s lives through learning. This includes reimagining our collective relationship to STEM by presenting it as more accepting and accessible than previously acknowledged. Beginning with the ways that STEM has been used to marginalize many children, the book examines the need for the arts – including culture – to serve as an anchor for instruction. It also describes the need for “making” (hands-on creation and tinkering) in establishing relevance in learning. Then

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualize learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping

Purpose – This paper aims to center the experiences of three cohorts (n ¼ 40) of Black high school students who participated in a critical race technology course that exposed anti-blackness as the organizing logic and default setting of digital and artificially intelligent technology. This paper centers the voices, experiences and technological innovations of the students, and in doing so, introduces a new type of digital literacy: critical race algorithmic literacy. Design/methodology/approach – Data for this study include student interviews (called “talk backs”), journal reflections and

Discover how to give African American children the education they deserve with this updated new resource In the newly revised Third Edition of The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, distinguished professor Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings delivers an encouraging exploration of the future of education for African American students. She describes eight exemplary teachers, all of whom differ in their personal style and methods, who share an approach to teaching that affirms and strengthens cultural identity. In this mixture of scholarship and storytelling, you’ll learn how

In Native Science, Gregory Cajete "tells the story" of Indigenous science as a way of understanding, experiencing, and feeling the natural world. He points to parallels and differences between the Indigenous science and Western science paradigms, with special emphasis on environmental/ecological studies. After discussing philosophical foundations, Cajete addresses such topics as history and myth, primal elements, social ecology, animals in myth and reality, plants and human health, and cosmology and astronomy. In the Indigenous view, we human observers are in no way separate from the world and

This article asserts that despite the salience of race in U.S. society, as a topic of scholarly inquiry, it remains untheorized. The article argues for a critical race theoretical perspective in education analogous to that of critical race theory in legal scholarship by developing three propositions: (1) race continues to be significant in the United States; (2) U.S. society is based on property rights rather than human rights; and (3) the intersection of race and property creates an analytical tool for understanding inequity. The article concludes with a look at the limitations of the current

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by engaging Indigenous ways of knowing and being from a sociocultural learning theory perspective. Through analyzing families-in-interaction as they constructed dioramas with robotics that told their family stories, we explore how cultivating

The development of student identities—their interests in computer science, perceptions of the discipline, and sense of belonging in the field—is critical for broadening participation of underrepresented groups in computing. This paper reports on the design of portfolios in which two classes of high school students reflected on the process of making electronic textile projects. We examine how students expressed self-authorship in relation to computer science and how the use of reflective portfolios shaped students’ perceptions of computer science. In the discussion we consider how reflective