“Run it through me:” Positioning, power, and learning on a high school robotics team

ABSTRACT

Background: Scholars have analyzed the possibilities that robotics-centered learning programs offer, including opportunities for developing collaboratively and engaging in authentic STEM professional practice. This work adds a sociopolitical perspective, explicating a case of a newcomer to a robotics team that elucidates the nuances of in-the-moment social positioning and its enduring impact on youth’s participation in afterschool STEM learning environments.

Methods: Through interaction analysis of three episodes and ethnographic perspectives, participants’ contributions to social interaction are analyzed as chronotopes, or spacetime representations, to understand how Denisse’s, a young Black and Latinx woman, role as the driver of the team’s robot at competitions is collaboratively crafted, building on the feminist tradition of positioning theory.

Findings: My analysis shows that Denisse is both empowered, through co-production of future decision-making in practice, and disempowered, through the rejection of non-present spacetime storylines at the competition. Further, notions of expertise and ownership are brought to bear on interactions, together with racialized and gendered narratives across the negotiations of the role of the driver to limit Denisse’s local social power.

Contribution: This story shares how representation is not enough for educational justice for minoritized youth and informs how STEM education communities must take on the task, together.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the generous editors and anonymous reviewers who gave critical feedback that helped this manuscript become much more than it could have otherwise. I am also very grateful to the following people who were integral to the formation of this article with support and feedback through many drafts: Jasmine Ma, Sarah Radke, Rishi Krishnamoorthy, Karis Jones, Sue Kirch, Cath Milne and contributors to the Interaction Analysis at NYU.