This week’s readings were really interesting and a different way to look at what we have been talking about in class. The articles (aside from maybe the Barton et al. article) were not specifically about how students learn but I still think ideas of the sociocultural learning theory are embedded in the articles and these articles can be used to support the theory.
Cohen et al.’s article about STEM experiences and STEM capital talks a lot about identity and aquired “resources, skills, and knowledge through engagement with members of society.” That is basically how they define capital. From this definition it seems to me that even though they do not specifically talk about how people learn they still talk about how all the students’ resources come from their social experiences and; therefore, I think it would be an easy jump to say that you need these resources to learn (aka you need social interactions to learn).
Hughes’ article about sexual miniority students in STEM was also really interesting in that it did not mention learning that recall but in order for students to learn they need to be present in the learning environments. This article discussed important measures in the retention of LGBQ students in STEM. It seemed that the most important thing is that they feel safe and accepted and the best way they found of doing this was through research experience in their field. This is social and reminds me of apprentiship and LPP. The research experience gives them a faculty member and other students in the lab to work closely with creating a community of learners.
The Last article is Barton et al’s article about collaboratively engineering for justice. First, this article was super interesting to me just to see specific examples of how we can orient a STEM class to be justice focused. Barton et al.’s article discussed learning the most explicitly of the three readings this week but still not really in terms of theory like we have been exploring this semester. However, I think the curriculum and the choices the researchers made position this in the sociocultural realm. As far as the curriculum, the students worked in groups to co-produce a solution to an issue in the school community. I don’t think the teacher would have them do this if they didn’t think they were going to learn from it and this is clearly a very social/community based project so I think the teacher alligns with sociocultural learning theory. Also, I think the researchers probably align with sociocultural theory for multiple reasons but if I look specifically at their data collection and analysis they take field notes to look at students intereactions and discussions, they do interviews where one of the things they focus on is participation and engagement, and they capture videos to analyze class interaction and discussions etc. Their focus on co-production, community interactions and discourse seems to be hinting to me that they fall into sociocultural theory.
I didn’t really pull out much of the cognitive theory from these articles. I am interested to see if others did during our class discussion.
Grace, I agree with you about how the first two papers this week didn’t necessarily draw on a theory of learning, but they can still be used to exemplify the importance of social learning. It was my understanding of the Cohen article, that STEM capital is a cornerstone of students’ self-efficacy and that in order to have students feel confident and welcome in science, they need to have a large bank of this capital to draw from. This practice of giving students STEM capital seemed to be rooted in them participating in authentic experiences and helped me see the Cohen article as more situative.