Spring 2023 DEI Speaker: Dr. Flávio Azevedo

Tuesday, April 25th, at 4:30pm on Zoom

The LDT GSA in collaboration with the LDT program are bringing an outside speaker to Penn State virtually to speak on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Learning Sciences.

Register here.

Toward a more humanizing and justice-seeking research practice: Lessons from a loving self-critique

I was charged with considering my work and thinking around equity and inclusion in STEM practices, in- and out-of-school, as well as the politics of interest-based participation and engagement and the prospects for more democratic STEM learning spaces. To do so, I will develop a loving self-critique (Paris & Alim, 2014) of my research trajectory and (contested!) contributions, particularly as these relate to the development of sociopolitical research in the learning sciences (and related fields) and the realities of everyday research/professional life. By centering entanglements between intellectual, professional, and institutional dimensions of research, my goal is to disrupt views on the “purity of research” and its long-term development, while simultaneously highlighting the generative nature of principled practice and the possibilities for more humanizing and just-seeking work.

About Flávio Azevedo

Flávio Azevedo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His research is grounded in the learning and cognitive sciences and it is organized into three intersecting strands—the nature of STEM interests and interest-driven participation, learning out of schools, and foundations of cognition and learning in STEM disciplines. Broadly, the construct of interests refers to the diverse ways people engage any given activity, so that pedagogies for interest development can be powerful pedagogies of inclusion. Dr. Azevedo’s three research strands are thus conceived to shed light on interest-driven learning across timescales and settings of STEM practice, in- and out-of-schools, as well as the socio-cultural and political contexts of such practices, as means to broadening participation in STEM and to intervening on mechanisms that (re)produce educational and social inequities. This work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Cognition and Instruction, Science Education, and the Journal of Mathematical Behavior.