Diversifying STEAM : culturally situated drawing for math education with African-American youth

Abstract

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pedagogy has been a topic of focus for researchers working with under-represented students such as African-Americans in the United States. Recent attempts to include "arts" in STEM pedagogy (adding an "A" to the acronym to make "STEAM") include learning environments that combine math problems with arts activities such as drawing. However, questions remain regarding to what extent the STEAM movement addresses the challenge of increasing participation among under-represented students in STEM fields. Culturally-situated design tools (CSDTs) have been used extensively to examine the relationship between culture and math education through student simulation tools, such as the braiding of African and African-American cornrow hairstyles. This dissertation consists of a study involving four workshops conducted between 2011 and 2014, two of which seek to examine the impact of culturally-situated drawing on African-American student learning in math. Findings show that African-American students found different affordances, accommodations, constraints, and resistance in their learning experience using the Cornrow Curves CSDT to draw. These data are compared to data from other students using the CSDT to assess students' success in understanding math concepts and in how the culturally-situated nature of the tool impacted their creative work. This study demonstrates the connection between culture and agency for African-American students in a STEAM-oriented, technology-mediated learning environment that incorporates diversity through culturally-situated examples (in this case, African cornrow hairstyles). This provides the basis for a proposed framework, STEAMD, which diversifies STEAM (adding a "D" to the acronym) through culturally-situated drawing.