This dissertation reports on a 16-week ethnographic study of politicized caring within a museum-based tinkering program for high school students called the FabYouth program. Drawing on a data set that includes 16 field notes, 785.83 minutes (about 13.1 hours) of ethnographic audio-video recordings, 280 photographs, and ten student interviews, I pose the following questions: 1) How do students describe their experiences as participants in the FabYouth program? 2) To what extent and in what ways do facilitators support students? 3) To what extent and in what ways does the FabYouth program support students’ growth over time?With politicized caring as an emergent theme that is tied to my findings, I first demonstrate that students experienced politicized caring by analyzing how students compared across more and less caring environments in their interviews. As a theoretical contribution, I introduce the construct of politicized uncaring. Then, I demonstrate how students narrated experiencing politicized caring as tied to supporting their feelings of competencies and politicized uncaring as tied to constraining their feelings of competencies. Going a step further, and motivated by student accounts of experiencing care as key to their time in the FabYouth program, I explore politicized caring as interwoven in the practice of teaching by analyzing moments of direct assistance in the FabYouth program. The findings from this micro-ethnographic analysis suggest that the lead facilitator enacted politicized caring through forms of direct assistance that created learning opportunities and positioned students to take on particular learning and identity resources. Having evidenced how politicized caring was interwoven in learning as an experience and in the practice of teaching, I then demonstrate how the FabYouth program provided learning and identity resources over more extended periods of time. To do this, I traced a student’s participation in the program and analyzed how she took up resources and came to identify as a teacher. Finally, I provide the theoretical and pedagogical implications for enacting politicized caring and contribute to scholarship on how learning environments support Black students’ learning and identity processes.

Creator

• Echevarria, Ruben

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-s5v5-xx69

Subject

• Education

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_857794
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15832

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright