A Mixed-Methods Study of Non-Text Social Media Content As a Window Into African-American Youth STEM Identities

Paper ID #21942 A Mixed-methods Study of Non-text Social Media Content as a Window into African-American Youth STEM Identities Donna Auguste, University of Colorado, Boulder Donna Auguste is a Ph.D candidate in the interdisciplinary ATLAS Institute, College of Engineering and Applied Science. Her research engages intergenerational learners of color with STEM through sensor- based experiences that are personally meaningful, providing an opportunity to assess impact of such experiences on STEM identities. She examines modern expressions of STEM identities in social media. She earned a M.S. in Information Technology Management at Regis University, a B.S. in Electrical Engineer- ing and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley; has 25 years of software/hardware industry experience and 21 patents; and has volunteered extensively in developing countries. Mrs. Tanya D. Ennis, University of Colorado, Boulder TANYA D. ENNIS is the current Engineering GoldShirt Program Director at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. She received her M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her career in the telecommunications industry included positions in software and systems engineering and technical project management. Tanya taught mathematics at the Denver School of Science and Technology, the highest performing high school in Denver Public Schools. She is a PhD student in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder studying Learning Sciences and Human Development. Prof. Shelly Lynn Miller, University of Colorado Boulder Shelly Miller joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, as an Assistant Professor in August 1998. Dr. Miller held the distinguished position of Chancellor’s Post- doctoral Fellow, from October 1996 through August 1998. Dr. Miller completed her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Berkeley in 1996. She also holds a MS degree in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvey Mudd Col- lege. Dr. Miller investigates sources of indoor air pollution, assesses exposures to indoor air pollutants, and develops and evaluates indoor air quality control measures. Her research has focused on indoor air quality since 1991. Dr. Miller has extensive experience conducting full-scale chamber and ﬁeld experiments, generating and measuring aerosols and bioaerosols, conducting both single and multiple tracer gas experiments, and indoor air quality modeling including both statistical and physical models. Dr. Miller’s current research projects include modeling studies of industrial odors and wellbeing in Colorado communities, diesel exhaust pollution, indoor environmental quality and respiratory health, asthma and air pollution, and radon. She has published over 60 peer reviewed articles on air quality. Dr. Joseph L. Polman, University of Colorado Boulder Joe Polman is a Professor of Learning Sciences and Science Education, as well as Associate Dean for Research, in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder. He designs and studies project- based learning environments for youth in schools and community programs. He focuses on learning and identity development connected to practices of science, literacy, history, and journalism, with a particular aim of fostering more engaged democratic participation. He serves on the editorial board of Journal of the Learning Sciences and the American Educational Research Journal, and will be president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences in 2018-19. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2018 A Mixed-methods Study of Non-text Social Media Content as a Window into African American Youth STEM Identities Introduction and Background Historically, researchers have observed that some African American youth suppress public expression of their interests in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) topics. Prior research has attributed youth denial of STEM identities to their perceived social pressures [1], [2]. When researchers interview participants in STEM education experiences, we receive certain responses that help us to learn about STEM identities. When we look to social media content, which is sometimes shared publicly and voluntarily, we see a possible window into the perspectives and identities of African American youth and young adults that may help us learn about STEM identities in a new way. Through this window, we may observe social media content that reveals STEM identities and community involvement. Along with text, the social media content may include non-text paralinguistic elements such as emoji, hashtags, images, videoclips, and GIFs (graphics interchange format, typically animated) that may be overlooked in our common discourse analysis techniques; yet these elements could potentially inform our understanding of identity expression. Non-text paralinguistic elements in social media content, such as emoji and hashtags, provide a potentially rich source of personal identity self-expression and sociocultural insights into emerging African American youth STEM identities. Acknowledging and respecting the modern ways that youth and young adults choose to express their identities, in this research study we sought to include paralinguistic elements in our analysis of their public discourse on Twitter and Instagram social media platforms. We examined social media content posted by engineering college students or people with whom such college students interact in a professional society, including their self-description of events and milestones, looking for trajectories of identification with multiple communities and social spaces, including hybridity and crossing social spaces. When analyzing these data, we found that youth and young adults sometimes employed paralinguistic elements in this social space to express sentiment related to identity and belonging. Our theoretical framework was that of a sociocultural view of identity development, built upon the concept of communities of practice. We used dimensions of communities of practice as a framework to organize and analyze the artifacts in our datasets, and as a means to understand the contributing roles of paralinguistic elements in those artifacts. In this paper, we describe the mixed-methods study, with results and dataset analysis. The research question that informed this study was: What patterns can be found and meanings made from paralinguistic elements used by African American youth and young adults when expressing their STEM-related identities in social media? Theoretical Framework and Literature Review The theoretical framework for this research draws upon sociocultural theories of communities of practice, and trajectories of identification with multiple communities and social spaces. Lave and Wenger established that communities of practice are groups of people who learn together and teach each other within a domain of shared interest on shared endeavors [3], [4]. In a community of practice, newcomers learn from oldtimers/elders, and sometimes evolve into oldtimers themselves. The fact that a community of practice is formed around a common interest in a certain domain is important for knitting that community together. A shared domain of interest, such as engineering, brings about a commitment to learn from each other. By sharing resources, such as tools and techniques for effectively using the tools, members of the community become practitioners as they learn from each other. The stories that they share about their experiences practicing within this shared domain of interest are a platform for learning from each other. Wenger identified three key dimensions of a community of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire [4]. Mutual engagement, he explained, defines the community because it exists when “people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate with one another” (p. 73), with complementary contributions and competencies that are shaped by their shared experiences. When joining a community of practice, people bring their initial differences, and as they learn together in community the shared learning experiences create further differences and also similarities. Wenger stated, “each participant in a community of practice finds a unique place and gains a unique identity, which is both further integrated and further defined in the course of engagement in practice” (p.75-76). Because members of a community of practice develop their joint enterprise with their own responses to their learning experiences, their mutual accountability and ownership makes the enterprise their own. Their joint enterprise helps them to make sense of what they are learning from each other, within a framework of evolving individual and community expertise and identities. The third dimension, shared repertoire, includes artifacts, discourse, tools, techniques, “… stories, gestures, symbols … actions, or concepts…” (p.83). In particular, Wenger stated that shared repertoire “… includes the discourse by which members create meaningful statements about the world, as well as the styles by which they express their forms of membership and their identities as members…” (p.83). Wenger studied identity in communities of practice extensively, finding that “… the formation of

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