Other spaces for young pople's identity work in physics: resources accessed through informal physics education in Sweden

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2022

For students from minoritized backgrounds in physics, especially White and racialized women and students from working class backgrounds, inbound identity trajectories into physics are generally regarded as exceptional. In this study, we investigate the experiences that minoritized students have which may support their sustained interest and achievement in physics, and their ongoing inbound trajectories into post-secondary physics education. To understand these experiences, in this presentation we look to the role of informal physics education (IPE) programs as “other spaces” which can offer resources that support students’ development of practice-linked identities. This study collected timeline interview data from 21 students enrolled in post-secondary physics programs in Sweden. In this presentation, we draw on data collected from 7 of these participants, all of them young women in their first year of physics at universities across Sweden. In the analysis we identify the various forms of resources made available through IPE learning contexts, and how these create possibilities for young people to engage in forms of identity work that contribute to the construction of new possible selves in physics. Findings suggest that students can access important relational and ideational resources through IPE programs. Relational resources included a) supportive social networks; b) enduring relationships; and c) relatability.  Ideational resources emerged as: a) sources of information which possibilized physics for participants; b) information that provided possibilities to learn about the life of a physicist; and c) important sources of recognition for participants seeking membership in the field. We argue that these resources are critical to support participants’ potential to disrupt the dominant narratives among young women that “physics is not for me” (Archer et al., 2020). Rather, IPE opportunities can support the imagination of “possible selves” in physics (Markus & Nurius, 1986). However, while we highlight the importance that IPE experiences play in the lives of young people in physics, we also discuss that these kinds of experiences remain inaccessible to most students, and thus reproduce a certain elitism in the field. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of how the relative inaccessibility of IPE experiences can preserve dominant relations in physics, and may do more to obscure social inequalities than it does to repair them.

Archer, L., Moote, J., and MacLeod, E. (2020). Learning That Physics Is ‘Not for Me’: Pedagogic Work and the Cultivation of Habitus among Advanced Level Physics Students, Journal of the Learning Sciences. 29, 3, 347-384.
Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American psychologist, 41(9), 954.