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keywords:

Community-Engaged Research, STEM Education, 
Anthropological Methods, Contexts, Identities 

 
abstract
Community engagement in STEM learning and teaching 
largely focuses on citizen science projects, serving 
the needs and goals of the largely white and male-
dominated STEM fields with only cursory attention to 
the lived experiences and narratives of the learners 
who engage in these experiences (Mahmoudi et al., 
2022; Rautio et al., 2022). This article explores how 
researchers can work with students to uncover how 
they experience learning environments and pathways 
for change according to their community memberships, 
aspirations, and goals. Participants in this research 
are high school biology students in a diverse mid-
suburban city. To understand their perspectives, 
students participated in activity structures grounded 
in anthropological methods, including ethnographic 
interviews (Emerson et al., 1995; Spradley, 1979), 
illustrations (Haney et al., 2004), and pile sorts (Boster, 
1994; Ryan & Bernard, 2003). Moving between 
consensus and individuals, this research demonstrates 
how students’ critical and meaningful experiences and 
aspirations can be understood and heard.  

introduction
Those representing marginalized identities and 
communities—particularly race, ethnicity, home 
language, and dis/ability—are underrepresented in 
all STEM areas and often unable to leverage the 
opportunities, tools, and practices that a rigorous and 
well-rounded STEM education affords. This is true 
even in community-engaged STEM learning and 
teaching research, which largely focuses on citizen 
science projects. While citizen science projects have 
the potential to provide “authentic STEM experiences” 
(Lewenstein, 2022), they typically serve the needs and 
goals of the largely white and largely male-dominated 
STEM fields (Mahmoudi et al., 2022; Rautio et 
al., 2022) with only cursory attention to the lived 
experiences and narratives of the learners who engage 
in these experiences. Citizen science initiatives also 
occasionally serve as public relations strategies that 
intentionally discount the experiences and goals of the 
communities they should be serving (Blacker et al., 
2021).  
 
The fact that pathways through STEM education are 
described as a “pipeline” and the failure of diverse 
students to “successfully” gain entry into STEM 
careers is described as a “leaky pipe” is concerning. 
The STEM pipeline is not neutral, even though 

Understanding STEM from Students’ 
Perspectives: Exploring Students’ 
Lived Communities and the Learning 
Communities They Wish to Create 

Author
JEREMEY PRICE, Assistant Professor, Urban Teacher Education, IU School of Education, IUPUI  



the metaphor makes it appear this way. The STEM 
“pipeline” contains numerous systemic and structural 
barriers for marginalized and underrepresented 
individuals and communities with limited entry points, 
pathways through, and exit points, resulting in more 
of a maze or labyrinth than a pipeline. The concept 
of epistemological, cultural, and linguistic barriers is 
primarily overlooked within STEM education and the 
STEM “pipeline” specifically (Cannady et al., 2014), 
as are the deep wells of cultural, social, cognitive, 
navigational, linguistic, aspirational, and resistant 
capital and wealth of marginalized and underrepresented 
communities (Yosso, 2005).  
 
These omissions perpetuate and sustain the largely 
racial, social, and gendered monoculture of STEM 
learning and community engagement. Because science 
is integrally intertwined with society, science disciplines 
require a scientifically informed public, not just cohorts 
of diverse, well-prepared, and well-trained scientists. 
Rather than operating at cross-purposes, these goals 
are mutually compatible and can support each other. 
This can only be accomplished by listening to and 
understanding the experiences and perspectives of 
diverse communities and the students who represent 
them.  
 
The classroom is a site where different communities 
intersect through the interaction of its members 
(Seiler & Elmesky, 2007). As human agents 
with diverse cultural, linguistic, racial, class, and 
experiential backgrounds, students and teachers are all 
representatives of intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 
2017; Hernández-Saca et al., 2018; Tan & Calabrese 
Barton, 2018). Carrying these intersectional community 
memberships with them, historical and cultural 
factors are not “checked at the door” when entering 
the classroom (Holland & Lave, 2001). This influx of 
meanings around STEM learning is further influenced 
by various structural factors, such as racism and white 
supremacy, classism, ableism, politics, and notions of  

global competitiveness (Fensham, 2009; Fraser-Abder et 
al., 2006; Tan & Calabrese Barton, 2018).  
 
This research seeks to understand how students 
understand STEM learning activities within 
sociohistorical ecological contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 
1986; Stern et al., 2021), allowing us to understand more 
fully the experiences, goals, and cultural capital and 
wealth (Yosso, 2005) that students bring through their 
whole selves. This approach understands that this means 
not only providing “authentic scientific experiences” 
(narrowly defined as the epistemological and practical 
work of scientists in their field) but also understanding 
the science that students do outside the classroom in the 
worlds which occupy much of their time and thought 
(Polman & Miller, 2010; Tan & Barton, 2016; Tan & 
Calabrese Barton, 2018) and bring those worlds together 
in STEM learning. These experiences, which value and 
connect the sociohistorical contexts of the learner would 
science, would be authentic—and not alienating—
for students. This research seeks to understand what 
these experiences could look like from the student's 
perspectives. 

contexts and research 
methods 
Cotstead High School and the C-Block Biology Class 

I worked with a “middle-track” high school 
biology classroom comprised of students with 
prior achievement, home languages and cultures, 
and socioeconomic class. The district is located in 
Cotstead1, an inner suburb of a large New England 
city. Cotstead hosts a large number of technology and 
biotechnology companies in expansive office parks 
along a stretch of an interstate highway. However, 
residents of the city are greatly diverse, with a large 
number of immigrant and blue-collar families compared 
to its more affluent neighboring towns and cities. A 
school of about 1,400 students, approximately 12% of 
students at Cotstead High are Black/African-American, 
 

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25% Latinx, 5% Asian, and 0.4% Native American, 
while the remaining students are white. 

 
Ms. Stoneham is a second-career veteran teacher 
who previously worked as a histologist in a hospital 
in the larger New England city. This previous career 
is significant as it provided Ms. Stoneham with lived 
experiences in a non-teaching STEM career. Her 
C-block biology class (see Table 1) represented a range 
of economic backgrounds, and about half the class 
spoke Spanish at home (with families largely originally 
from Guatemala and Puerto Rico). Some students spoke 
Brazilian Portuguese and Armenian at home. As a 
“middle-track” science class, there was an emphasis on 
study skills for academic success as well as the content 
of biology. However, tracking students at the subject 
level masked some of the diversity of achievement 
and the expectations they held for themselves. Most 
students held college attendance as an important goal, 
and several were in honors-level classes at the highest 
achievement levels in other subject areas. 

data collection and analysis 
I used four different data collection and analysis 
practices: pile sorts, participant illustrations, 
ethnographic observations, and ethnographic interviews. 
The protocols for this study can be found at https://osf.
io/y4vzp/.  
 
Pile sort activities provide visualizations of the 
relationships between different aspects of STEM. 
Students were asked to place different stories or 
vignettes describing people doing science-related 
activities into any number of related piles (Boster, 
1994). I then interviewed each student individually 
and asked them why they placed each vignette into the 
particular piles. An aggregate proximity matrix was 
calculated, and a non-metric multidimensional scaling 
(MDS) analysis was conducted on two dimensions 
(Ryan & Bernard, 2003) using RStudio (Gebeyaw, 
2017; RStudio Team, 2022).  

Table 1
Research Participants and Disclosed Identities 



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Students were asked to draw a picture of what it looks 
like to “do science” at two different times. These 
illustrations were collected and analyzed using recursive 
and comparative qualitative content analysis (QCA; 
Mayring, 2000). QCA provides a holistic approach to 
understanding the meanings expressed in participant-
generated illustrations. A holistic approach involves 
going back and forth between taking notice of the details 
and the “whole picture” to understand the illustration 
(Haney et al., 2004). I considered low- to mid-inference 
features, that is, only those elements clearly exhibited in 
the drawings themselves (Freeman & Mathison, 2008). 
These features were examined within the context of the 
individual drawing and then compared with identified 
features across the entire set of drawings to generate 
a list of themes based on similarities and differences. 
Next, each student was interviewed and asked to 
describe their illustration, and the students’ explanations 
were compared with the generated list of themes. The 
explanations were used to refine the list of themes and 
generate written vignettes (Van Maanen, 2011) for 
individual student illustrations.  
 
All observations and interviews were recorded with an 
audio recorder, and I took field notes and wrote daily 
research memos. The observational and interview 
data analysis process was through a vignette analysis 
approach (Van Maanen, 2011), aimed at “…present[ing] 
the reader with the stories identified throughout 
the analytical process, the salient themes, recurring 
language, and patterns of belief linking people and 
settings together” (Anfara et al., 2002, p. 31). Collected 
artifacts, observational data, and research memos and 
field notes were coded using the Atlas.ti qualitative 
data analysis software over several rounds. I drew 
upon established constructs for adhering to standards 
of quality and rigor (Anfara et al., 2002; Howe & 
Eisenhart, 1990).  
 
findings
This section is divided into three parts, first, an 

exploration of the role of the teacher, and then two parts 
based on a methodology to understand the students’ 
perspectives: a pile and a prompted drawing activity. 
The exploration of the role of the teacher provides 
a grounding into the operations and approaches 
promoted in the class as a whole. At the same time, 
the methodology-based parts demonstrate different 
perspectives on approaches to STEM learning that 
intersect with students’ sociohistorical and cultural 
contexts.  

setting the (teacher) stage: 
science-as-gaining-knowledge 
It is essential to understand the classroom context in 
which formal STEM learning occurs to fully interpret 
from where some of the ideas being conveyed by the 
students arise. During one of the early ethnographic 
observations of the class, Ms. Stoneham initiated a 
discussion with her students on the meaning of science: 

 
Ms. Stoneham: What does the word science   
mean? 

 
Eduardo: This class. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Does anyone remember way, way, way 
at the beginning of class? Does anyone remember what 
science is? We cleaned out our binders, so this is going 
to be a tough one. Science, the word, means to gain 
knowledge. Remember? Gain knowledge. Yep [pointing 
to Margarid]. 

 
Margarid: Yeah, but you gain knowledge in every class. 

 
Gabriel: The science of... 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Yup, the science of what? The science of 
history. Yup, everything is kind of like a science. Right? 



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Margarid: But why is this class specifically called 
science? In this class? 

 
Ms. Stoneham: OK, what are specifically studying in 
this class? 

 
Multiple Students: Bi-ol-o-gy. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Which is what? 

 
Gabriel: The study of life! 

 
Ms. Stoneham: The study of life. Alright! And how does 
that apply to you? 

 
Gabriel: We’re life. 

 
Amanda: We’re... 

 
Ms. Stoneham: We’re... we’re... 

 
Amanda: Living things. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Right! Living things! 

 
Gabriel: We’re life. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: So we’re trying to make sense of... 

 
Multiple students: Ourselves. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Exactly. And how we fit into what. 

 
Rosa: The world. 

 

Ms. Stoneham: And other living organisms. OK? And as 
a scientist, as in the room, here, with me, we are gaining 
knowledge, right? Yes? 

 
Eduardo: Yeah. 

 
Ms. Stoneham: Yay. We’re all so happy to have all 
this knowledge. What are we looking for when we are 
scientists? What’s the goal of a scientist? 

 
Henry: Information. 
 
Ms. Stoneham positioned science for her students as 
a process to “gain knowledge.” She further positioned 
gaining knowledge as independent of a particular 
discipline, a universally-applicable mode of gaining 
knowledge. During an interview, the teacher reiterated 
her definition of science, stating that “...the word 
‘science’ is an umbrella for gaining knowledge on 
everything… For me, [science is] a learning process, 
the art of gaining knowledge.” As an “umbrella” and 
as an “art,” science as a concept is decoupled from 
the specificities of science as a practice, involving a 
general methodology, approach, and set of questions 
to be explored (Grinnell, 2009). While she generally 
discussed science in a universalistic manner, the 
teacher also worked to make this “art of gaining 
knowledge” accessible and authentic to students; 
biology—which could be treated as an abstract study 
of living organisms—was turned into an exploration 
of the students as living things themselves. These turns 
of language were intentionally deployed to help her 
students “gain knowledge,” as Ms. Stoneham expressed 
her process of helping her students engage in the “In 
other words, I have to understand how people learn to 
get them to, what actions do they need to take, to get 
that content knowledge. And that's kind of ever-evolving 
because it takes you a while to figure out how each of 
your students learn.” 



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Students represented and resisted how Ms. Stoneham 
described science during the pile sorting and drawing 
activities. To fully recognize how youth understand 
a concept like science and how they wish to engage 
with and learn science, it is necessary to understand 
the influences on the meanings they assign to science. 
Teachers and educators generally exert a great deal 
of influence in American society, so we see in the 
following sections how the students worked to show 
that they’ve learned from their teacher but also that they 
often go beyond what is discussed in the classroom.

understanding the contours 
of science-in-action  
By examining the diagram generated through the MDS 
analysis (Figure 1) and comparing the diagram with the  
interviews, I could interpret the scales of the two  
dimensions represented in the diagram. The x-axis  
(left-right/horizontal) exhibits a continuum identified 
by the students between “People” on the left and 
“Things” on the right. The y-axis (up-down/vertical) 
exhibits a continuum between “Contributing to a Greater 
Community or Enterprise” along the top and “Individual 
Enjoyment” along the bottom. 

consensus categories of 
science  
The MDS diagram (Figure 1) represents a composite 
view of how the class categorized different aspects of 
“doing science” based on the provided vignettes. Every 
student was also interviewed to provide an overview of 
their sorting, outlined in Table 1. Each cluster will be 
examined in turn. 

In other words, I have to 
understand how people learn to 

get them to, what actions do they need 
to take, to get that content knowledge. 

And that's kind of ever-evolving because it 
takes you a while to figure out how each of 
your students learn.

Figure 1  
Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) of  Student Pile Sorting Activity  



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The first group, “Typical” Science, is what the students 
considered “normal” science activities. Students tended 
to relate items in this cluster regarding contributions to 
the scientific community or the scientific enterprise.  
 
The next group, “Making Things” Science, represents 
a sense of making or improving things rather than just 
contributing to science or engaging in an investigation. 
Students typically used words such as “invent” and 
“experiment” to describe these activities. A common 
thread that ran through these descriptions identified the 
goals of these activities as the things themselves rather 
than contributing to a larger community or enterprise.  
 
The Science, People, and Communities cluster 
represents activities centered around helping people 
and contributing to (non-scientific) communities. There 
was a relatively strong consensus among the students 

as to this group. Some of the activities, such as taking 
a walk, were accounted for by positioning the social 
community as part of the larger natural community.  

The vignette which described the activity of teaching 
biology is situated within its cluster, Teaching Science. 
Students did not consistently place the act of teaching 
biology in a particular pile so that it could fit into 
another cluster. Some students placed teaching biology 
as a core science activity, while others positioned 
teaching on the periphery. This lack of consensus 
accounts for teaching biology as a cluster in and of 
itself. When viewed against the dimensional scales, 
students viewed teaching as an activity contributing to 
a broader community and enterprise.

 

Table 2
Identified Clusters with Vignettes and Example Quotes



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individual categories of 
science: leah’s science 
identities  
Not all students took an activity-centric approach to the 
pile sort. Rather than sorting according to activities-
in-process, Leah, for example, focused primarily on 
identities and what their activities said about them. In 
describing her reasoning behind her sort procedure, she 
constructed identities and tacit narratives of being in the 
world for each person featured in the vignettes (Figure 
2). The narratives and identities she discussed served 
as an interesting counterpoint to the consensus-oriented 
MDS analysis above. 
Leah divided the vignettes into three separate groups. 
The first group, Normal People/Everyday Activities, 
“...is just like what normal people can do.” Glossing 
over the expertise, skill, craft, and talent necessary 
for some of these activities, Leah described them as 
“...what normal people do in their normal day lives.” 
Leah pulled these activities away from the purview of 
scientists and described them as “normal 
 
Leah’s second group, Normal People/Scientific 
Activities, included “...advanced people, who like 
you know, like had an education, do like scientific 
stuff. Like that’s their field.” According to Leah’s 
classification, these three people are educated in 
science but are not defined by science. Part of her 
classification is that she sees their work in a direct way 
benefitting people. Commenting on the improving stick 
notes vignette, she related that such work “...might  
contribute to helping us, in some sort of awkward 

way.” Leah’s final group, Scientific People/Scientific 
Activities, according to Leah, “...have to do with the 
world,” rather than with people: “it’s more like outside 
of like, nothing that has to do with humans.” These are 
people defined by science. She further says, “It’s just 
like, what scientists would, what scientists do in their 
spare time.” These are activities that scientists—people 
defined by their activities in science—engage in when 
there is nothing else of importance that needs to be 
done. 

seeing science in practice 
As noted above, the analysis of the first activity 
revealed the core five categories of drawings: Gaining 
Knowledge, Science as Collection, Science as 
Activity, Science as Nature, and Scientists Helping 
and Improving Communities and the World. These 
categories will be presented in turn, and then move on to 
looking closely at Debra’s illustrations.

 
Drawings included in the Gaining Knowledge category 
(Figure 3) directly interpreted how Ms. Stoneham 
described science as “gaining knowledge.” While 
Ms. Stoneham described gaining knowledge as an active 
process, the students interpreted the process as passive. 
Elements were drawn around heads or brains with 
arrows indicating that they were being put inside. The 
things which represented “knowledge” tended to involve 
a “typical” sense of science content (illustrations of 
viruses, cells, DNA strands, etc.), although at 

Figure 2  
Leah’s Categories of Science



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times included a broader and more general sense of 
“knowledge” to include other subject areas as well. One 
student drew a picture that depicted the Earth floating 
in space, connected with arrows to a disembodied brain 
also floating in space.

 
The second group, Science as Collection (Figure 4), 
represented doing science as collections of ideas, 
concepts, and paraphernalia. These collections did 
not tend to be tied to a particular place, nor did they 
typically involve human activity (with one exception, 
in the drawing on the right with a person holding what 
appears to be a light or microscope). One student drew 
science as a book to depict knowledge across various 
subject areas collected in one place. The knowledge 

 
collected in this book included biology and other school 
sciences topics (e.g., math, English, and business) 
and even childcare. This student’s representation is 
a different interpretation of Ms. Stoneham’s general 
description of science as representing all subject areas. 
Other students drew other objects and ideas, such 
as plants, test tubes, DNA strands, and the recycling 
symbol. It is also interesting to note that the lab bench 
depicted in the middle drawing—with a black top and a 
brown wooden bottom— directly reflects the form of the 
lab benches in the classroom. 
 
Drawings of Science as Activity (Figure 5) were 
typically tied to particular places and included people in 
these places. Although the middle picture in Figure 3 

was not tied to a specific place, it was included in this 
category because of the strong presence of the person 
in the drawing. The places were either outdoors in 
nature or a laboratory setting (or both, as in the drawing 
on the left). The laboratory-like settings reflected the 
classroom’s lab area, including the black-and-brown lab 
benches. The people in the drawings were usually doing 
things such as investigating and examining or working 
with test tubes. The drawings in this category were 
active rather than passive. Any paraphernalia or props 
were tied together and oriented to doing a particular 
task, unlike the drawings in the Science as Collection 
category. 
 
The drawings in the Science as Nature category (Figure 
6) ranged from general to specific. These drawings 
depicted “doing science” as nature, with scenes of grass, 
trees, animals, water, and suns. They also brought in 
specific content from the curricular unit being studied. 

These drawings tended to reflect the notion that doing 
science is connected to nature and that “science is  
 

Figure 3  
Representative Drawings in the Gaining  
Knowledge Category   

Figure 4  
Representative Drawings in the Science as 
Collection Category    

Figure 5 
Representative Drawings in the Science as 
Activity Category   



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everywhere,” a theme often invoked in interviews and 
classroom discourse. 
 
Rosa’s and Juana’s drawings in Figure 7 fell into their 
category, depicting the idea that science can improve 
society and make for a better life (Scientists Helping and 
Improving Communities and the World). Rosa labeled 
her drawing, “Scientists will help their community so 
the world will improve!!” Juana referenced specific 
social issues that have roots for understanding—and 
potential solutions—in STEM, energy conservation, 

and the life of people with disabilities. In doing so, 
she brings in a political dimension as well. These 
illustrations indicated that these two students expanded 
their sense of what science is and what it can be used 
for. 

debra’s drawings: being 
centered in science-in-action 
Debra was a student who expressed a high degree of 
intrinsic motivation to engage and participate in science 
class. As a temporary resident of the United States from  
 
 
 
 

Brazil, she found her English language skills to be an 
important mediating factor in her learning process. 
While she indicated visits to her grandmother’s farm 
exposed her to nature and the environment, Debra 
brought up another experience that reinforced her 
interest in science. She recalled being present through 
her stepmother’s pregnancy and stepsister’s birth:

  
She [stepmother] had a baby, so I followed her 
pregnancy, and I got to watch the, like, the labor. And it 
was really amazing…. I want to be a midwife, so it was 
like a great experience. It was like, oh, that gives me an 
idea of how it’s going to be like. And I got to help them 
too. It was really cool!

With this background in mind, Debra drew two 
illustrations (Figure 8). Her first illustration (on the left) 
was an example of the Gaining Knowledge category, 
with bubbles of science content and concepts entering a 
person’s head through inward-facing arrows.  
 
Her second drawing (on the right) was more complex. 
Illustrated through the conventional comic strip thought 
bubbles, Debra indicated that the main figure was 
herself, and she is thinking about five different aspects 
of science. The first aspect is the concept of evolution, 
which she described as one of the main organizing 
principles of biology. The second aspect is a laboratory 
investigation, replete with different colored substances 

Figure 6 
Representative Drawings in the Science as  
Nature Category  

Figure 7 
Representative Drawings in the Scientists Helping and 
Improving Communities and the World Category  

 Rosa labeled her drawing, 
“Scientists will help their com-

munity so the world will improve!!” 
Juana referenced specific social issues 

that have roots for understanding—and 
potential solutions—in STEM, energy con-

servation, and the life of people with dis-
abilities. In doing so, she brings in a politi-
cal dimension as well.



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in beakers and containers. The third aspect is two people 
experiencing nature. There is a bucket or container 
with a handle, which may indicate that the people are 
collecting something from the outdoors. The fourth 

aspect is a depiction of a pile of books. Lastly, Debra 
drew a person in a bed being attended to by a healthcare 
worker, as well as a range of medical paraphernalia. She 
also drew a red cross and a caduceus, symbolic of the 
medical profession.   
 
While at first glance, Debra’s second drawing could 
be considered Science as Collections, her illustration 
demonstrated a range of scientific activities. It 
highlighted several functions of science, including 
understanding the natural world, serving as a repository 
of these understandings, sharing these understandings 
publicly, and using these understandings to improve 
human life. She included a medical scene to not only 
connect her career goal of becoming a midwife; it also 
represented science in a way many people can connect 
and identify.  
 
Similarly, her depiction of the books and the laptop 
showcased not only the specific scientific content 
knowledge canonized in the books but also the publicly-
accessible and public-oriented Animal Planet and 
Discovery television channels. In an interview, Debra 
pointed to a role model from television who influenced 
her engagement in the classroom, Richard Rasmussen, 
on the Brazilian nature program Selvagem ao Extremo 

(“Wildness to the Extreme”). There was another way 
that Debra aspired to be like him, in terms of how 
Richard Rasmussen talked and expressed himself, 
noting that Richard Rasmussen was able to “talk about 
science and pronounce the words... without a problem.” 
Debra also described her idea of a “successful career,” 
framing markers of success in terms of helping people 
and the environment.

discussion and conclusions 
Moving deliberately back and forth between consensus 
and individual—while recognizing and understanding 
the identities, communities, and sociohistorical 
ecologies students represent—provided a deep 
understanding of how students understood STEM 
education and how STEM learning experiences can be 
structured in a community-engaged setting to honor 
the experiences, cultural wealth, and overarching goals 
of students. This research helps to highlight the need 
to make learning not only authentic but meaningful 
and valuable in the sense that their learning connects 
with and expands their understandings of their personal 
histories, their sense of their life’s trajectories, and their 
circumstances and relationships.

Through these research activities, students were able to 
find chinks in the armor of the textbook “public science” 
(Holton in Girod, 2001), the overly logical and well-
ordered side of science, in which universal laws and 
discrete facts trump the emotional and exciting process 
of science in the making. There were clear indications 
that companion meanings of science (Roberts & 
Östman, 1998), meanings passed on uncritically from 
curriculum or teacher to students, were evident in the 
students’ representations. Students picked up the idea of 
science as “gaining knowledge” across disciplines and 
fields and even took the act of “gaining” to be a passive, 
rather than active, process.  
 
Yet there was also evidence that students not only 
built upon but contradicted some of the prevailing 
meanings of science in the classroom by extending 

Figure 8 
Debra’s Drawings of Science in Action    



science not in content but in applicability. While they 
may not become scientists themselves, they were able 

to experiment with meanings and identities, which 
included the consideration of scientific understandings 
in a variety of contexts. Some students, such as Rosa, 
Juana, and Debra, saw the “usefulness” of science and 
scientific knowledge grow and expand. They saw the 
broader scientific endeavor as potentially having a place 
for them in a STEM career (Debra) or as a way to use 
STEM to accomplish inclusive and just goals (Rosa and 
Juana). For students like Leah, it would be important to 
understand ways to decouple the doing of science from 
a science identity, even though a plethora of research—
based on the pipeline metaphor—advances just that 
approach (Lyon et al., 2012).  
 
Beyond the movement from consensus to individuals, 
the methods themselves proved to be an effective way of 
understanding how students saw STEM and what they 
hoped to gain from it. This drawing activity provided 
unique and essential insights into how meanings are 
negotiated within a larger context. Especially with 
Rosa, Juana, and Debra, a field change occurred 
regarding how the students represented the actions and 
activities in science. Each of these students represented 
science so that they could relate to it and engage with 
it. Asking students to draw pictures rather than write 
provided a holistic perspective experience into students’ 
worldviews and meanings around science and science 
learning. Similarly, the pile sorting activity provided an 

understanding of how students organize their thinking 
about STEM and provided insight into their motivations 
as to why they would consider engaging in community-
engaged STEM learning.  
 
As we continue to encounter issues that are deeply 
embedded in understanding STEM, such as global 
climate change and local climate crises, health 
outcomes, and material inequalities, it is critical to 
understand how students, as members of communities 
and representatives of communities, see STEM, how 
they see themselves connected to it, and their goals. 
Without these insights, we will continue to push the 
same people through the STEM pipeline, serving to 
maintain the destructive and unjust status quo.

ENGAGE!  |  st u d e n t  vo i c e s 36

P R I C E  |  U N D E R S T A N D I N G  S T E M  F R O M 
S T U D E N T S  P E R S P E C T I V E S

This research helps to high-
light the need to make learning 

not only authentic but meaningful and 
valuable in the sense that their learning 

connects with and expands their under-
standings of their personal histories, their 
sense of their life’s trajectories, and their cir-
cumstances and relationships.

Each of these students repre-
sented science so that they could 

relate to it and engage with it. Asking 
students to draw pictures rather than write 

provided a holistic perspective experience 
into students’ worldviews and meanings around 

science and science learning.



VO L .  5,  I S S U E  1

P R I C E  |  U N D E R S T A N D I N G  S T E M  F R O M 
S T U D E N T S  P E R S P E C T I V E S

37

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