STEM/Arts Integration for Radical Healing in Black Youth: An Equity-Oriented Study of the Transformative Power of STEM and the Arts

Dionne Champion

The proposed project is an ethnographic video analysis of informal embodied arts-STEM integrated activities that support STEM learning for Black youth through culturally sustaining practices. This work seeks to understand how arts-integrated approaches to STEM teaching and learning create space for radical healing, the healing of racial trauma and development of positive associations with STEM that are rooted in positive associations of self. In this project, I will analyze video of activities and interviews from three different STEM/arts programs to identify aspects of learning in culturally sustaining arts-integrated STEM environments that align with the elements of the radical healing framework. Using existing data sets from three past projects, I will engage in micro-ethnographic analysis of activity and participation structures, attending to facilitator and youth talk, actions, and interactions as they participate in creative embodied sense-making activities. I will utilize that analysis to design and pilot a new set of activities that foreground these elements and analyze that data to develop a set of design principles for radical healing through STEM/arts integration. This work will contribute a new theory for studying informal arts-integrated STEM spaces that attends to well-being and the development of STEM-positive cultural identities for Black (minoritized) youth learners.

About Dionne Champion

Dionne N. Champion is a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the design and ethnographic study of learning environments that blend STEM and creative embodied learning activities, particularly for youth who have experienced feelings of marginalization in STEM education settings (e.g. African Americans, girls). She is interested in understanding the ways these populations draw on their everyday practices and use their bodies as resources for learning and identity development. Dr. Champion is an engineer, dancer, arts educator, and learning scientist. She received her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences (2018) from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, her M.Ed. in Dance from Temple University, and her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Florida A&M University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist at TERC. Dr. Champion is developing a research program that interrogates and complicates the ways we think about sense-making, particularly within informal learning environments where STEM is not just STEM, movement can be more than ?just? movement, and the pathways to understanding are not linear, normative, or even always predictable. Through her work, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation and published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences and the Journal of Information and Learning Sciences, she seeks to construct broader conceptualizations of cognition that substantively intertwine STEM learning and development, attending to the affective, social, and emotional while broadening STEM knowledge and understanding.