Critical Relationality:
A Justice-Oriented Approach to Education and Education Research
By Maria C. Olivares, PhD and Eli Tucker-Raymond, PhD
Critical relationality means we co-constitute.
It means: my humanity, my integrity, and my dignity are rooted in my willingness to safeguard your humanity, secure your integrity, and protect your dignity.
Critical relationality in education is premised on understanding the following tenets:
- All learning is political (e.g. Freire, 1970). Race and ethnicity, as political constructs, are operationalized as primary mechanisms for oppression in learning environments (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995)
- Roles and relationships (e.g., between researchers and participants; between teachers and students) are powered and need to be interrogated in order to be reimagined
- Flattening hierarchies requires distributing authority for learning and knowing
- Identity, foundational to learning, is dialogic and relational (e.g., de Peuter, 1998; Shotter, 1993)
- Social transformation of schooling and beyond requires praxis-oriented methodologies for professional work as well as understanding teaching/learning (C. Sandoval, 2005)
In this blog post we will share an overarching view of critical relationality as theory and methodology for education research. We offer a glimpse into the generative work and findings that have come out of operationalizing a critical relationality design lens with implications for humanizing educational experiences in STEM for minoritized youth.
In our work as education researchers and designers, we strive to reconceptualize what it means to be educators, learners, and researchers. We view ourselves as learners and orient to youth and teachers as experts and educators in their own right. In this way, we strive to integrate our critically relational commitments through all aspects of who we are as people and professionals, acknowledging that the two are — and should be — inextricably connected. We focus on STEM education because they function as gateways to economic and political [dis]enfranchisement and thus must be viewed through the lens of civil rights (Moses & Cobb, 2001; Tate, 2001; Philip, Olivares Pasillas, & Rocha, 2016; Tucker-Raymond, Lewis, Moses, & Milner, 2016).
We carry out our research projects and learning environment designs with the explicit goal of disrupting oppressive power structures and dynamics in teaching, learning, research, and leading. We do this through a creative, playful, and artful approach that emphasizes all human learning as ongoing and iterative — inclusive of ourselves as researchers at all levels of project management. We strive to not only enact critically relational equity in our design of learning spaces, we also work to build in opportunities for youth and adults of color to participate in consequential ways at all levels of research and design. We do this in a committed and humble effort to be responsive and accountable to the concerns, interests, needs and perspectives of the critical stakeholders who are often de-centered from the core of “equity” initiatives that attempt to “fix” marginalized populations without attending to the systemic inequities that structure and delimit their daily lives, opportunities, and potentialities.
We are not here to save anyone or to turn anyone into scientists.
We are here to learn and thrive together.
Our work seeks to reimagine approaches to research, collaboration, teaching and learning in STEM that relationally respond to our understanding of tenets introduced above and hold the following six guiding commitments simultaneously constant as a constellation of possibility, potential, and hope.
Critically Relational Commitments:
As an example of how critical relationality plays out in the real world, one of our projects, with colleagues Brian Gravel, Amon Millner, and Ezra Gouvea, focuses on understanding how to support middle and high school STEM teachers in creating more humanizing STEM learning environments by challenging them to change their relationships to the disciplines they teach, the tools they use in their teaching, and, most foundationally, their students. Teachers explored craft, electronic, and digitally-based materials (e.g. micro:bits, die cutter) as a way to integrate computation into their disciplinary classrooms. As a group, they learned how to make things with the materials, engaged in co-learning with young people, and designed and implemented their own units. Our overarching theme for learning was movement. In phase one, we asked participants to “make something that moves.” In phase two, we asked them to consider movement from multiple perspectives, including social movements.
Overall, teachers were open to learning and experimenting with their practice. Donna is an 8th grade science teacher in a racially and economically diverse school district. At the time of the project she was entering her 17th year teaching. She constantly looked for ways to make the science in her class relevant to students. In the past this had meant connecting physics to sports like soccer and dancing. However, this year she noticed and shared with us that her students constantly referenced social movements on their way into class and in their exchanges with one another. And so, in phase three, Donna sought to connect her physics unit on Newton’s three laws of motion to social movements. She wanted to explore relationships between what was important in their lives and what they were learning in her class. As we thought with Donna about the unit, we knew that social movements would not be a perfect metaphor for the laws of motion and vice versa, however, we all saw new possibilities for learning through an exploration of their juxtaposition.
She ended up giving students a choice to make paper automata (see image) that would exemplify two things, (1) a social movement that was important to them (e.g., #metoo or Black Lives Matter) and (2) one of Newton’s three laws of motion. In the class we followed, three groups of three students chose the Black Lives Matter movement. Other groups represented various social movements such as #takeaknee, #metoo, #nobordernowall, climate change, and LGBTQIA rights.
The group we called ZED, to reflect their first name initials, was one of the Black Lives Matter groups. ZED selected Newton’s third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the post interview, all three students sat together, building on one another’s ideas about their project and the connections they made between science, social movements, and their own lives. Efren (students’ names are pseudonyms) explained the relationship between physics and social movements, mapping the similarity between action/reaction and people protesting when they feel police have shot someone unjustly and then the subsequent action provoked from others, playing on the two sides pushing against each other.
With Black Lives Matter, this specifically is almost like a riot or protest. That’s the action. The reaction is what you get out of that. How can we react to it? And how does it change afterwards?
Zora further explained, that the project had helped her see connections between science and social movements for the first time,
So if there’s a death and people feel like that death is because of police brutality, then they’re going to react. They’re going to protest. They’re going to make an example so that they can get their message across so that whoever they want a reaction from, they can get it and hope for change.
Perhaps most explicitly, David saw the project as a way to affirm their different experiences of blackness and their identities as Black students,
We all knew that we wanted to do something to represent a part of who we were. And for Efren who’s probably, on that side, Efren looks very African American so for him it was…for me it was mostly, probably less than half because even though I’m half and half, then there’s that part of me that kind of gets taken away from other people just thinking that I’m just white. I’ve got to express also who I am in this project.
As David articulated, each student, as a person, experiences the world differently, be it through their racialized identities or their academic ones. Those experiences shape the ways they participate. Through this instantiation of critical relationality, Donna was able to create a space where students could reflexively reshape relations to science and to self. It meant confronting power within and outside of the classroom by expanding the purpose and potential of inquiry in a physics class. It meant flattening hierarchies by giving students control over the content of their work and the ways in which they approached it. By opening up the space for her students to center their racialized identities as they explored and expressed concerns about their world and issues that mattered to them, Donna helped usher in new perspectives from youth on science and its relevance to the world as they experience it. This is of critical importance in these times when people of color are under political, educational, economic and physical assault. Humanizing learning spaces must serve as resources for our young people to engage in self-reflection and social critique as they come to understand themselves and the world that is unraveling before their eyes.
The work we do is about reflecting on what we say we stand for as professionals and holding ourselves accountable to the communities we seek to learn with through concrete integration of our partners’ insights, interests, and perspectives. For instance, our work with Donna, the other teachers, and young people helped push our thinking about the importance of a critical relational stance in the design of learning spaces and education research. The example we presented is one instantiation of how a critical relational orientation can create humanizing learning spaces that disrupt racism and other forms of oppression and work toward expansive and transdisciplinary learning. In our research projects, we continue to look for ways to push our collaborative community-based efforts forward and refine our critically relational response in ways that disrupt everyday manifestations of systemic racism and educational inequity. For us, this requires reconceptualizing research, research grants, and cross-institutional partnerships as resources that can be mobilized to meet the expressed needs of the very people that have been historically excluded from STEM fields and education.
Maria is an education research scientist whose work explicitly acknowledges and challenges the role of racism in STEM education. She works with youth, teachers, community partners, and researchers to design formal and informal learning environments that support expansive and creative inquiry in STEM. Maria is from South Central Los Angeles, the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants, and the first in her family to gain access to higher education.
Eli is a former middle school teacher. He grew up white, in Cambridge, MA and lives there now with his family. He has conducted ethnographic and action-oriented research with community organizations and schools in Chicago, IL and in the Greater Boston Area. He believes the golden era of hip hop was 1986–1992. He has served as principal investigator and co-principal investigator on several National Science Foundation funded grants.
Both are research faculty with the Earl Center for Learning and Innovation, part of the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University.
*This work was partially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation #2021180 and 1742091. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the National Science Foundation.
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (MB Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum, 2007.
de Peuter, J. (1998). The dialogics of narrative identity. In M. M. Bell and M. Gardiner (Eds.). Bakhtin and the human sciences: No last words, 30–48. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68.
Moses, R. & Cobb, E. (2001). Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. Beacon Press: Boston, MA.
Philip, T. M., Olivares-Pasillas, M. C., & Rocha, J. (2016). Becoming racially literate about data and data-literate about race: Data visualizations in the classroom as a site of racial-ideological micro-contestations. Cognition and Instruction, 34(4), 361–388.
Sandoval, C. (2013) Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN
Shotter, J. (1993). Becoming someone: Identity and belonging. In N. Coupland and J. Nussbaum (Eds.) Discourse and Lifespan Development. pp.5–27.Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Tate, W. (2001). Science education as a civil right: Urban schools and opportunity‐to‐learn considerations. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(9), 1015–1028.
Tucker-Raymond, E., Lewis, N., Moses, M., & Milner, C. (2016). Opting in and creating demand: Why young people choose to teach mathematics to each other. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 25(6), 1025–1041.
