Emotional configurations in STEM classrooms: Braiding feelings, sensemaking, and practices in extended investigations

Abstract

AbstractAttending to emotion in science classrooms can expand the range of resources valued for science learning, and it can offer insights into students' investigations. However, research that characterizes emotion as a part of disciplinary science learning is relatively nascent. In response, we explore the dynamic relationships between feelings, sensemaking, and practices in a sixth‐grade STEM classroom, guided by (a) Kimmerer's (2013) account of braiding Eurocentric disciplinary science with other resources, including feelings, and (b) Vea's (2020) framework of emotional configurations. We analyze data from multiple iterations of a 9‐week curriculum about guppies' survival needs and the dynamics of ecosystems, illustrating how students' feelings and their sensemaking through practices involving observation were intertwined in generative and mutually‐reinforcing ways. First, we show how the teacher and researcher made space for students to express feelings, in part in response to a student who used feelings to challenge “business as usual” classroom discourse on a day when guppies were discovered to have died. Then, we show how, in subsequent implementations, feelings, sensemaking, and practices were braided together to shape classroom investigations. We argue that attending to feelings in this way, as valued resources to be integrated with sensemaking and practices, is an important step toward equitable science teaching and learning and toward understanding learning in student‐driven contexts.