 Yeah, I can start talking. Yeah, welcome everyone to the next session in the third day of the conference. And it's a great pleasure to introduce Professor Susan Juro. Did I pronounce it correctly? OK, thank you to this session. I'll just say, I won't take long, but I want to say when Deepa asked me if I want to chair for this session, I didn't reply to her. I think I haven't replied to her till now. And I read about your background, and I started reading your papers. And I was really happy and thrilled to know about your work. And Professor Juro has been working. She's a professor of education. And I wasn't sure if I would justice to introduce what she has been doing. But certainly, something which personally I also have been keenly interested in. This is basically community engagement. So Professor Juro is a professor of learning sciences and human development in the School of Education at University of Colorado. And particularly, she is interested in communities, communities building, what is meaningful to learners when they move on to become a part of community. And particularly, mathematics and STEM subjects. And how does it really connect to the real life of these learners when they move on? And she has been learning at school. Sorry, I apologize. I'm sorry, but she's been working with both school level learners as well as learners at universities. And it's really great to see such a wide spectrum of working with a wide spectrum of learners. Without taking much more time, I would like she's going to talk about using STEM to center community desires. And I would really invite her to speak more rather than me taking more of her time. But I'm really happy that she's here. And we are able to connect on this platform to hear from us. So over to you, Professor Juro. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this amazing conference. So I'm joining you today. Can you hear me? OK. I'm joining you from Denver, Colorado, in the United States. And I want to just say that I respect and acknowledge that I reside on the traditional and unceded territories of the youth, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe peoples. I'm going to start my, oops, I want to start my share screen share. And I think it's almost there. You can see that. And now you're watching me figure out how to do this. OK. You can see my slides, correct? Yes. Yeah, we can see that. OK. And I'm going to make myself small. OK. I want to also say that if you have questions as we're talking, please type them into the chat. But somebody might need to tell me that they're just interrupting me. I'm very comfortable with being interrupted. That's perfectly fine. So thank you. So it's really an honor to present at this conference to an audience largely based in India. But it sounds like you have a global audience. It's amazing to be presenting here. One, because I'm really interested to learn about the kinds of STEM research that's happening outside of North America and Western Europe, but particularly in the local contexts in India. I really want to hear more from you about what's going on. And second, my family is from India. My family is from Kerala. My dad is from Chennai. And it's really heartwarming to me and fulfilling to be able to share the work that I've been doing for so many years with you and this audience. So the title of my talk is Using STEM to Center Community Desire. So as I'm going to share today, sorry, I'm getting text from my dean. I'll just get rid of that. Sorry. Can you still see? You can't see it. Hang on. You can see it again. Back to normal. Correct. I guess she's that way. I'm going to see my screen now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it should be it. Yeah. So I'm going to share today about how the decisions we make about how we use and study STEM are tied to our ideas about what kinds of social relations that we value and which ones we want to sustain and also which ones do we want to disrupt. So my starting assumption is that if we want to use our research to disrupt anti-democratic practices and policies and organize for collective well-being, we need to design our interventions in ways that embody our commitments and engage an ongoing reflection on the contradictions and tensions that are likely to emerge as needs, resources, policies, and so on shift. So I'm a learning scientist. And that means that I draw a multiple disciplines to study learning and I design for learning wherever it occurs. That includes elementary school classrooms, afterschool programs, institutions of higher education, communities, and on the streets where people are marching for social justice. So the question of what is learning is the centerpiece of my work. The perspective that I take on learning is that it is about gaining new ways of knowing and new kinds of knowledge, developing new ways of being and becoming in the world. And as a corollary to these points, as we learn and change through our participation in social practices, we also change those practices. I understand learning as a dynamic and relational process that is deeply situated in the world. And because it's situated, it has social, historical, embodied, affective, cognitive, ethical, and political dimensions. Notice. So taking this critical sociocultural view on learning means that my roles and responsibilities as a learning scientist involve more than just observing and describing learning. They also demand designing for learning that can disrupt deficit perspectives on people who are minoritized by race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and more. And also I use my research and design to support the flourishing of the diversity of human ways of knowing, being, and doing. So from this perspective, the kinds of research and design work that I do have focused on understanding the experiences of people who have been minoritized along different dimensions and working with them, sorry, working with them to design toward justice. All of my projects involve working with partners, be they community members, students, and or teachers on pressing problems of their practice. So an assumption that drives my work is that all people and not just researchers have expertise. People know the problems of their own lives. They know what designs will work in their communities and why. They know how to find the resources, material, and human, that can be used to make a solution a reality. And they have a real stake in drawing on their past experiences in order to make a better future. So I choose to work in partnership with communities for all these reasons and more, and including that I get to learn alongside people as partners as we work on complex and meaningful problems together. Oops. So as a researcher, I try to enter into the ongoing work that people are already doing in their communities. And I find ways, and this is the hard part of the work, I find ways that I can use my expertise to support and potentially deepen and extend the work as the community so desires. So making decisions about with whom you want to partner, how and toward what ends is one that I take very seriously. So on this slide, I just included a couple of pictures of places and ideas that my research team and I considered as we began the Learning in the Food Movement project, which is the project that I'm gonna talk about today. So in the Learning in the Food Movement project, we studied the kinds of learning that people do in social movements as they envision and enact different practices and policies that will affect the future of their communities. So we spent time trying to understand the work of people developing and advocating for school gardens. So that's a picture at the top of the slide. Communities developing innovative food systems in polluted neighborhoods. And we studied issues such as how race is linked to food justice, issues in how problems are framed, who leads the initiatives and how they're funded. So we did this broad ethnographic work to identify the different kinds of work that people in our region of the United States were doing and why they were doing it. The decisions that we made regarding with whom we would partner and why were directly linked to how we understood and they understood community desire and how it was being advanced or not by different groups of activists. So I wanna note a couple of points about my use of the words community and desire. The ideas I've been developing have been deeply shaped by my meeting of sociocultural learning theories as well as writing by the critical scholar and feminist, Bell Hooks. Is everyone following along? Okay, I wish I could see you. If you have questions, please feel free to drop them in the chat and I think I'll see them. Okay, so to begin with, I just wanna talk about communities a little bit. Communities are, I understand them to be dynamic entities with shifting boundaries, changing members and adaptable practices. The community with whom my team and I worked comprised working class Mexican immigrants to the United States. They were living in a mid-sized city neighborhood and participated in a backyard garden program. You can see them in this picture here, supported by a nonprofit that was focused on food and economic justice. The majority of the members of the community shared some of the following cultural experiences. So many had immigrated from Northern Mexico within the past 15 years. And many of those people still had family and community in Mexico and they traveled back and forth across the border. Many of the people with whom we were spoke or understood Spanish as well as English but Spanish was the predominant language that they used. And many of them had experienced racism in the United States against people from Mexico and Latin America more broadly. And this affected their professional educational experiences as well as the kinds of resources they got in terms of healthcare and the law. So when I use the term community desire I'm describing an orientation that I take toward understanding the efforts of a minoritized group like the group I studied to sustain themselves against various forms of oppression while also maintaining hope and imagination for a different kind of more just future. And that was based on their own actions and interactions with other people. So this orientation toward understanding community desire requires empirical investigation. It's not something whose nature should just be assumed. It needs to be studied in a way that can capture its lived, complex and often contradictory nature. So community desire is also something that is enlivened across scales. It's made evident, for instance, in how people talk, how they collaborate with others for change and in the tools, policies and laws that are developed as a result of community action and that mediate further action. So to study community desire, I've used a variety of qualitative methods with my team primarily drawing on participant observation, interviews and the analysis of artifacts to understand what people are doing, thinking and trying to accomplish as they work on meaningful real world problems. I also designed ways for people to engage tensions as a way to develop solutions that account for multiple perspectives and attend to the challenges of communicating across differences that implicate our identities and worldviews. I'll just say about this photograph. The photograph that's me in the middle with my daughter many years ago, now sitting on my lap and we're working with our community partners, this is actually in my neighbor's house, a couple of doors down and we had organized with the activists a fundraiser to raise money for their professional development and the further advance of their programming. So I included this here because I did want to point out that a lot of this work that I do with communities as I know many of you are probably doing as well, it is not contained by my scholarship. It flows over into my life and into the rest of the things that I'm doing in the world. And I think that's an important kind of methodological point to make and we can talk about more later. Okay. So I'm gonna share an example of how I used and thought about STEM as a way of centering community desire in the multi-year learning in the food movement project. So my team and I worked with a nonprofit that I call Impact that's the pseudonym and it was located in a city in the US Rocky Mountain West. The nonprofit focused on growing and distributing vegetables in a neighborhood that did not have a lot of stores where people could buy affordable, fresh and healthy food. So the nonprofit founders who are pictured on this slide on the left hired a team of residents who worked with community members to plant and tend vegetable gardens in their own backyards. So the team of residents were called Promatoras, a Spanish word used to describe residents who acted as community health workers and supported each other's wellness by sharing information and resources. So the lead Promatora with whom our team worked is pictured in the center image on the screen. She's wearing a green shirt. I'm pointing and that's useless but she's wearing a green shirt in the middle. The model used at the nonprofit was inspired by a similar model developed and used for many years in Latin America. So as many of the residents in the neighborhood were immigrants from Latin America, the model, the Promatora model aligned well with the values and social practices of many in the community. So my team and I were interested in working with this nonprofit because we appreciated how they were building explicitly on the cultural and historical assets of the community to address problems that the community had identified as important. So one of the reasons the nonprofit wanted to work with my team was because they wanted to define and extend the model that they were using, what they call the Promatora model. So it could be used more effectively and in other communities. So the nonprofit impact received most of its funding from grants that supported the backyard garden program. They did a variety of other interventions in the neighborhood, but the backyard garden was really its core intervention. The grants that they got were primarily focused on increasing the number of vegetables that were produced by the gardens. So the grant metrics for success led to an emphasis on certain dimensions of the nonprofit's work and a D emphasis on other aspects. So specifically in reports to the grant tours, the nonprofit emphasized the pounds of vegetables that were produced in the backyard gardens that the Promatoras and the residents grew. So on this point, the program was very successful and this is now old data, but still makes the point. As the image shows, the nonprofit started the backyard garden in 2009 with just seven gardens. And by 2018, they established more than 2,000 backyard gardens and the gardens produced more than 500,000 pounds of organic produce. And this was then shared among neighbors. It saved people money, but more importantly, it afforded the community a sense of pride in what they were doing for themselves. So as we learned on my team through our extensive research documenting the Promatoras as they worked in the gardens, met with residents and explained their work to us, growing vegetables was important. I mean, you can see on the left of the screen, that's one of the many gardens, right? The growing vegetables was really important. It's what brought residents into the program. They wanted to grow their own food and have their own food, but only focusing on the vegetables ignored the relational, affective and advocacy work that the Promatoras were regularly doing with the residents. The Promatoras were going into homes, meeting with residents, talking with them. They weren't just going directly into the gardens and meeting, they were meeting and talking and learning about the residents' lives and the other kinds of issues that the residents were facing regularly in this neighborhood. So when they visited, for example, they learned about the health challenges that grandmothers were facing. Immigration troubles that separated families, weddings and successes, and educational problems that the children were having in schools. And these residents who regularly saw the Promatoras would share their problems and expect that the Promatoras and the non-profit could offer some advice and guidance and maybe some programming for them. So the Promatoras were doing a lot more than just the garden work. This face-to-face relational work was foundational for growing the gardens because without the trust of the residents and the care and commitment that was shared with the Promatoras, which they described as relationships de confianza, the backyard garden program could not be sustained. So the official data that was collected and reported to the major grantors, including the US Department of Agriculture, presented a one-dimensional view of the issues that the community was facing. It diminished the existence and power of community desire. The data that was shared with the grantors emphasized that this was a community that lacked resources, that didn't have fresh food, that didn't have good grocery stores. And it also did not address the root causes as to why the community was struggling to get these basic resources. It didn't address, for example, discriminatory lending practices in the community and systemic racism. It only focused on what the non-profit was providing for the community, not what the community was doing with these resources for themselves. The data left out the ingenuity of the people in the community. The data did not capture how relationships de confianza built through sustained engagement, listening and responsive action, laid the foundations that supported residents to organize for change. So from a practical perspective, without representing the fullness of their experiences, the promotoras knew they could not get access to the resources that would help them to help residents and uplift and sustain their communities, their community. This was about community desire and that underpinned the promotoras' work and this is captured, I think, nicely in this mural that was painted on the front of the offices of the non-profit during the time of my study. They changed the way it looked and they put the face of a woman speaking her desire into the world. So what's important to understand here is that the logic of the grants, which were essential to the existence of the non-profit, drove its leadership, its economic and its educational structures, which then affected what the promotoras were able to do and who they were able to become through their work in the non-profit. So when the promotoras' work was not made visible, right? It affected their day-to-day work with the non-profit from decisions about who should be in leadership positions, how much should promotoras be paid and what kinds of professional development and education would be needed to support the backyard guard and work. The representation of their work, only by counting vegetables was something that the promotoras wanted to challenge and transform. They wanted to make their work with residents more visible and more consequential for their learning and their community's future. They wanted to do this work with the support of our research team, my team, because they learned from working closely with us that we understood the value of their work and their bigger dreams for the community. They also recognized that we had some power in this space. We were bringing in, we were bringing in expertise, we're bringing in some bits of money, but they knew that we could cross kind of the borders of the non-profit and speak to both the executive leadership to the grantors and to them and the residents. And they valued that and they used it for their own purposes. And I was happy to have lunch. So with the promotoras and the non-profit directors, we, the research team, organized conversations and data analysis sessions, along with arts-based activities to uncover and confront tensions related to the representation and practice of the promotora model. So this picture is from one of the sessions where if we invited the promotoras to represent the meaning of their work artistically using multiple forms of media. So one thing that we discovered from doing this, everybody used clay, play-doh, to create an image that represented the work they did. And I think a basic assumption was that many people were going to make vegetables and they did, they did some of that. But a lot of it was more about being in community, connecting with community. The images were about flowers blooming, right? They weren't only talking about vegetables. They knew that their work was much more important than that and that they wanted to stretch out and connect to broader systems in the neighborhood and in the city. So this art activity in particular, as well as theater activities like Theater of the Oppressed helped the promotoras to tap into different dimensions of their work and to articulate the tensions that were hard for them to discuss in direct conversations with the nonprofit leadership. They were able to represent those things more abstractly, which then allowed for us to have whole group conversations that got to some of these key tensions. So through reflective dialogue with our partners at the nonprofit and with colleagues and collaborators at the university who were from the business school and the college of engineering, we decided that collecting more robust data on the promotoras work, capturing what they're really doing, right? Could address multiple stakeholders' interests. So we could, by collecting better data, we could more effectively and fully capture what the promotora model really was because it's not just about growing the vegetables. It was about what the promotoras were doing in the community. So specifically, we came up with the idea with the promotoras that we could intervene in the nonprofit's technical infrastructure and social organization by changing the kinds of data that were being collected on the promotoras work. So who's doing the collection and who is interpreting and representing their value. So with the promotoras and a team of information technologists, we co-designed a software application that we referred to as the promotora app that the promotoras could use to document quantitative and qualitative data about their work with residents. And that would be useful for centering community desire and shaping future actions based on that desire. So one of my doctoral students who is now Dr. Leah Peña-Teters focused her dissertation research on this process. So I wanna take a moment because I know there's a lot going on in this project and it's not all like evidently clear how it's related to STEM. So I wanna step back and just pull out some of these ideas. And now if there are questions, you should certainly ask me. So how STEM sort of empower, implicated in this work with the promotoras, I'm just gonna name three main ways in which I see that STEM shows up in this work. So, and some of it's very basic, right? So first, it's part of the data categorization system. What gets counted and is linked to what gets valued. So the basic categories that the grants required, that was shaping what got valued by the grantors and by the nonprofit. The categorization systems are connected to science and technology and mathematics actually. The second point is that STEM was part and is always part for the nonprofit of the behind the scenes work. So once the data on the pounds of vegetables was collected by the promotoras, they used to go out into the neighborhoods with paper and pen and write down how many vegetables were grown, how many pounds. They'd weigh all those things, right? They'd write it into a paper form and then they bring those back to the nonprofit and hand the form to one of the executive directors. He would then input the information into Excel and then he would create data representations and write about the data in the grant reports and other publications for the nonprofit. I wanna point out that the promotoras while they wrote down the information but they didn't input anything into the systems. They didn't do anything with Excel. They didn't know how to use it and they didn't know how to create the graphs that were representing their work. So there's another space where STEM was being dominant. The use of STEM was being controlled by the executive directors who were fairly unaware that even though they were doing this, they weren't thinking about it. Even though they were doing lots of other really good work, they weren't reflective on this point until the promotoras started to complain that they wanted to interpret the data. They wanted to point out the holes in the data. So in the third part, and this is probably the most obvious, is that STEM was a daily part of planting and tending to the gardens, right? The promotoras shared with the research team that they were, you know, they plant the gardens. They pull, it was backbreaking work. I mean, they pull out trees. They make the garden spaces and then they would have to problem solve and they felt that they were doing a lot of this on their own to figure out problems with soil, with infestations and so on. And they had the idea that they should have some sort of like a Facebook app that they could use where they could input what the problems were that they were working on and share that with other promotoras so that they wouldn't have to reinvent solutions all the time but they would understand, oh, in this part of the neighborhood this is what the soil's like. Here's how you could add to the soil to make it a healthier ground to grow vegetables in. So these are all the ways in which like STEM was all over this project. I would just say, I mean, you could probably tell STEM wasn't the lead in my research in this community but it came through and it was evident and it was something I couldn't deny, right? I had to figure out how are we thinking about STEM in this project? How are the promotoras? How are the nonprofit leaders thinking about it? And then as we started to recognize that it was pressing in a variety of ways we then also had to figure out how is this related to power dynamics in the nonprofit? How is this connected to community desire? In what ways could we intervene so that we could really advance the desires of the community? So are there any questions about this or just generally things I've been saying so far? Yeah, so far they didn't know on the chat, but yes. If there are colleagues who want to ask, please feel free. Yeah, please. I can keep going. I can keep going. That's fine. I'm good. We'll take more in the end. So understanding all these different dimensions and talking to different kinds of people with different forms of expertise, including engineers and information technologists and people from the business school who understood what developing the economic literacy in this space might entail. After we all talked, we came up with the idea that we could develop this app together and that we would be very attentive to what it should document, how information that it gathered could be shared and who would leave the documentation and interpretation work. So the collaborative design work that produced the Promotora app involved mutual learning on the part of everyone involved. The Promotoras needed to learn new technical skills for documenting relevant data, uploading it onto a server, using an actual app to do this work rather than just paper and pencil and interpreting it in order to make arguments, grounded arguments for changes in policy and practice, not only in the nonprofit, but broader into the city. So the technologists who are pictured here on the screen working with the Promotoras and our team, they needed to learn also, they needed to understand how to hear community desire, how to like attend to it respectfully and how to listen for the stories and figure out what kinds of design tools they were gonna make that could support community desire. In our team, you can see at the bottom picture in the middle, that's my former doctoral student, Lea Pena-Teters with the blonde hair. Our team, including me, also had to relearn about the nature of power as it was embedded in the use of specialized language for coding and developing technology and how it can exclude people without that background and still set. So just as a more concrete example, the technologists who worked with us did not speak Spanish. And the Promotoras mostly spoke Spanish and wanted, could best express themselves and what they wanted in Spanish. Bringing those two teams together was more challenging than we thought because it wasn't just that we could translate from Spanish to English and vice versa, we realized that the technologists had a lot of specialized languages they were using and they talked about the constraints of the technology in ways that like would stop conversation with the Promotoras and make the Promotoras feel like they weren't being listened to. So we had to figure out very different ways for engaging as a group and collaborating because of all these, you know, attention that we were given, giving to community desire, to power dynamics and how you design technologies. So we had to learn, we had to learn as well and we had to draw on our expertise as pedagogues to really create a more robust learning space. So the Promotora app, I should go back to this, sorry, the Promotora app, which is formally known as ICT Pardín which is garden in Spanish, use an open source mobile data platform called ODK. And some of you may be familiar with ODK is very well known and many nonprofits around the world use it. We chose it as a platform because, and we meaning the technologists informed us that we should use ODK as a platform because it's relatively easy to use and can be used to collect data in an offline mode that can be uploaded later and it's fairly inexpensive. Those things mattered for the nonprofit because number one, they didn't have money, they didn't have wifi for the Promotoras to use when they were all over the neighborhood, you know, gathering their data, they had to use it in offline mode and then come back to the nonprofit office where they could connect to wifi and upload the data. All of those things were really important and hard to like anticipate at first when we first started doing this work. So it's some of the stuff that we had to learn. So all of these factors contributed to our decision to use ODK to support the Promotora app. And so with the use of the app, the Promotoras were able to document vegetable growth and production. They were able to document strategies for dealing with problems that they were facing in the gardens like the infestations. And they were also able to document conversations they were having with residents about issues including mental health, domestic violence and young people's educational experiences. And we only very simply included a place for them to write in like an empty space. You just write in, what did you talk about today? What came up? But the good thing about that was that we could then collect data on like what kinds of conversations were different Promotoras having around the neighborhood? Oh, many people are having conversations about a need for domestic violence education and they needed support for that. That was important for us to learn. These were community workers out in the neighborhood learning and they were gathering this information that as we were able to gather the information and then act on it, the residents were even more committed to doing the work with the Promotoras and with the nonprofit. So co-designing the app helped the Promotoras in many ways. So number one, they learned new skills, right? But they also made their work visible. They illuminated dimensions of the Promotor model that were previously invisible to the nonprofit leaders and undervalued as such. And they were also able to use the app and the data that we collected to argue for new metrics for assessing their contributions to the organization. So from the perspective of learning, right? To remember what I said I care about in terms of learning like new knowledge, new ways of being and also changing practices in the community. I wanted to say that the Promotoras gained new knowledge about how to collect and interpret data on all aspects of their work. They developed in terms of being and becoming, they developed a stronger sense of how they could advocate for themselves and their community. I mean, they learned to use data to make arguments for why they should pursue new grants, for example, in the organization. And as the Promotoras and the shared understanding of the work of the nonprofit shifted, the organization of work at the nonprofit also changed. The Promotoras were given and took on greater leadership positions with the nonprofit. They wrote new kinds of grants. For example, one of them was about increasing awareness about domestic violence. And in this way, the intervention that we all did together supported a deeper centering of community desire in the organization. It led for the organization came to understand better the community that they were serving, right? And that the dreams of the people and the challenges that the people in the community were facing became the drivers of what the nonprofit was doing. So this painting on this page by Javier Cortada captures the integral role of the Promotora. So you can see in the picture, there's somebody holding a clipboard, that's the Promotora. It captures like the how important the Promotora is in the community as a resource for families. And you can also see that with the clipboard, the power of the Promotora as a person who could collect data and use empirical data to make change in the neighborhood. So I'm gonna close with a set of questions that I've been thinking about because many people asked me about how I think about STEM in my projects. If STEM is not the main thing, how do I ever come to it, right? So I wanted to share some of these questions and maybe we could talk about them. So I'll just read them. So what I think about is what is the ongoing work that you wanna support and understand when you're working with the community? And how does this work relate to your positionality, like who you are, your background in histories and your views of what justice entails? How do the members of the community with whom you want to collaborate understand their work and the historical and ongoing tensions that shape it? Within the community with whom you're collaborating, what are the desires of those who have been most harmed by the status quo? I say this because you might notice, I focused on the Promotoras. I didn't focus only on the executive leaders of the nonprofit. I focus on the people who felt most harmed by the way things were, right? And I wanted to understand this question here, what effort are they making to develop their desires? And then in the work that you're doing with STEM, so this is a bit of a flip, how is your work in service to community desire? So that's like a question I would ask the information technologists, like they can do all these cool things with technology, but how are they using it to advance the desires of the community? And then the last is what resources can you share to support the development of community desire? Heal past harms and cultivate new forms of knowledge and agency. And I wanna underscore that the work that we did on this project was always done in collaboration. The STEM expertise in particular was brought to the project through my collaborators in the College of Engineering and Information Communication Technology for Development. While they managed the technical STEM aspects of the Promontora app, it was in our work together that we were able to use STEM to center community desire. But part of what I did in the expertise I brought was in knowing who can I contact? Who are the people I need to be talking to? And I think that kind of expertise of knowing how to connect people is often underappreciated in the kind of work that people are doing when they're doing community engaged work. So I wanna end with that, but before I do just to thank all my collaborators because the nonprofit leaders were so generous with their time. The Promontoras were amazing collaborators. And I'll just name a couple of my students who were like ongoing partners in this work. And that's Molly Shea and Leah Pena-Teters. But I've listed everybody else here and I'm really grateful for their work. It was probably the most fun project of my career thus far. And it just continues to teach me a lot of things as I reflect on it. So thank you Ms. Gapps here now. All right, I know that was a lot. No, but yeah, it's open to questions and I request my colleagues to another, everyone to please type in your questions or raise your hand to speak. While they're doing so, I have many questions in my mind. I maybe go one by one and I hope, yeah, Mashud, yeah, do you want to go first? Okay, thank you. Thank you for the nice talk. My question is in this methodology, how important is that the team, the research team or at least the leadership in that team shares some identity with the community that you are working with? Is that practically as well as methodologically how significant do you think that is? I love this question. Thank you so much. It's an important question. And yet I think there does need to be a sense of some shared commitments around identity, right? But I also recognize that some people will say, oh, you're Indian-American, you shall only be studying Indian-Americans, right? And I think that's a limited understanding of what identity is. It's not simply like can you match your racial or ethnic or language background to some other community. I think that in getting to know people, you have to have some sort of connection around the kinds of commitments that you have. And for me, I think part of the largest commitment on my team to the promotoras was that we were largely women. We were women on this team. And most of what we connected around was being women who were doing what we called invisible work to support the running of justice in an organization. We bonded over that. And for me, I connected with the promotoras that they were in an immigrant community that was very similar to the kind of immigrant community that I grew up in. So I think that like while positionality always matters, what the nature of the connection is gonna be is not always evident. But you gotta pay attention to that. And that positionality connection changes through time. You have to pay, you gotta understand what it could be and recognize that some people on the team are not, they're not, they don't connect with the people in the nonprofit or in the communities. And they may not be the right people to work on your team. So I'm actually happy to keep talking about this, but I know that's a probably not satisfactory answer, but I think it's very complex and important. Yeah, that was really helpful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So there's a question, there's a comment and a question from Sulochna. She's appreciating its great work and thanks for sharing with us. She would like to know, when you started working with the community, was it after the nonprofit started working with them or what was your idea or research question which motivated you before you started, you knew of the specific needs and your possible contribution? Oh, I love that question. So we, so the learning and the food movement project started really quite long before we started working with this particular nonprofit. We started in like 2013 and spent more than one year, so about almost two years doing kind of pre-ethnographic work on understanding the food movement in the US Rocky Mountain West, right? We wanted to understand what was going on the food movement. We took a wide view of like, who's doing what? What's going on in schools? What's going on in black communities? What's going on in Latino communities? What's going on that's connected to broader national movements around this? And we, through that work, we came across a few organizations that we thought, these are really amazing groups. These are the groups that we're very interested in. They're doing something really innovative. They're building, they're connecting. Their vision of justice is aligned with our vision of justice, which goes back to your question about positionality. They are, what they dreamed for their work was so connected to what we also thought as a research team, justice could look like in the future, where it's not white people or researchers with a lot of money, leading organizational change for other communities, but really trying to people, trying to figure out what could communities bring to the change. So what we saw, we found these three organizations and then we started spending time with those three organizations in particular, spending quite a bit of time with them. And then from there, realized this one group called Impact was where we wanted to spend most of our time. And then you also asked like, why did, why study this? What did we start with? My interest in beginning this project really came from wanting to understand how micro interactions like talk and interaction just between people could actually empirically be connected to what goes on at a macro level. So how can ordinary, how do ordinary people actually change macro level policies? How does that happen? We know it happens. I mean, of course it happens, but how does that really happen? And I felt like in the learning sciences, my field, few people were really doing that work. A lot of people in the learning sciences were studying micro interactions. What is happening face to face in math classrooms? For example, nothing wrong with doing that, right? Nothing. I did that kind of work in my dissertation, but where I felt it was lacking was, how does that connect to broader issues? Like ideology, yes. Like our colleague, Thomas Phillip studies that work and Ayush has been doing that work, but what I wanted to know like, what were community members doing? And how can we represent that in our field so that we can change what people in the field study and count as learning that is really consequential and making a change in the lives of people in the world? So thanks, you could see, I could talk about that one forever. Thanks for the question. Thank you, Arya, do you want to go ahead? Sure, thank you. So this question is not directly related to your work, but more to get an idea of what I can incorporate in my future project. So I'm a first year PhD student at IU Bloomington and I would like to work with a community like refugee students. So but it is definitely a community, I'm not a part of and I'm not an expert in it. So what are the important points I should keep in mind while interacting with a community, which I'm not a part of since you have done that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So one, I mean, Arya, thanks and are you, have you already started doing the work? No, I'm just starting with the literature. Oh, okay. So I mean, I think the most important thing is to show up for the work, like to go there and like be with them. I mean, a lot, I showed you a picture of my daughter at one of these events that we ran for them. I chose a community to work with that was located like eight minutes from where I live, right? That's not necessarily the only way, but I'm gonna share what I did. I chose a place where I could go regularly and that way I would go there all the time. I went there like just to volunteer, just to be there, to be a support, to learn what was going on but offer my support in any way that they needed, right? As they got to see me showing up regularly for their events, they did, and I shared. I was like, I'm a professor of education. I do such and such work, but I didn't say I'm here to study you. I said I'm here because I'm really interested in the work that you're doing and I'd like to see how I could be a part of that. So I think that's like a number one. So I guess I said two things. One, choose a place where you can actually go on a fairly regular basis to show off and be part of what they're doing and then I looked for ways that I could start to be of service to the nonprofit. So what came up for me, and I think this is pretty common, is that often nonprofits don't have people who can collect data. They need help with data collection. They need help with minutes, taking minutes at their meetings. I'm an expert at all that. Researchers are really good at taking notes plus it plays double because we can keep the notes. And so I started doing that work and when they needed help, which I knew would happen with some of their use of Excel and creating data representations, I've offered, I just volunteered to do that. And so I started that way, then they knew they could trust me and that's when they started asking for help on things. Only then after that long relationship building, did I say to them, you know, I'm at the university, there's some money for this and maybe we should apply for some money together. So that's how I started, Arya. I don't know if that's helpful to you or if you have other. It is. Thank you so much. Oh, sorry. One last thing I wanna share that Arshad Ali, who's a colleague in, I forget where Arshad is, I think in Illinois, I can share the information later. One thing he's written about really well is that you shouldn't downplay that like your researcher and you go in and you volunteer, but all you're doing is like setting up tables or sharing snacks or something. You have expertise. You need to let them know what you can do, but only do it after they've come to like you a little bit. They do need to like you and trust you. That definitely is a long process, I guess. So we have a question from Malik Shah. Can you, I mean, can you suggest ideas on how, maths, I mean, have you come across maths problems coming up in this framework and what kind of maths can be connected to backyard gardening projects? Oh yeah, I mean, I'll just say lots of people when they saw this project starting recommended, they were like, you should apply for grants to study the STEM, the science, the math in the project, right? I just chose not to. If I had a student who really wanted to, I would concussion to do it. I mean, the regular like mathematics that the promotoras were doing in the gardens was like completely, that nobody was even helping them do that. They were digging. They were figuring out plot sizes. They were identifying like which plants should go, which stuff to the next to the other plants, all things that I almost know nothing about. But these are the ways in which like mathematics was emerging there. And I mean, for me, I think it's really interesting to think about when the promotoras started collecting the data, what kinds of representations they were interested in creating. So once they got their hands on using Excel, they were interested to like to look at what different kinds of representations could afford them in terms of the stories they wanted to tell. So I think for me, that was where I was most interested in how they were going to use data to tell stories. So you probably use much more sophisticated, software applications to collect and represent data, but we didn't do that, but I can imagine something doing that. Okay, and we have a question from Prima. She appreciates your sharing. And also you mentioned that promotoras were pulling out trees to make space for what community wanted to grow. So she's curious what was being grown because immigrant folks may have a different like like what they want to grow and connection with, but they are growing up. So did they grow up specific plans or was it was? It's super interesting. I mean, so this is mostly Mexican immigrant community, but not only Mexican immigrants. So this city is a sanctuary city. So lots of immigrants come to the city because it's good for them, right? So the promotoras were working, when they were working with the Mexican community, immigrant community, they were growing all the things that they knew from Mexico and that they could use to make the foods that they wanted to eat. And I mean, they started growing tomatoes and eggplants and all sorts of stuff, but then they all, and they were making their like common cultural foods, right? And they actually would do that together. They started a food co-op and a food like in a kitchen where they would teach each other and share recipes. So they did that, but then also because they're living here in this particular space, they also started to learn about other kinds of vegetables that they could grow that were not common to them. So that was interesting. And then they had to learn how to integrate those other vegetables into their cooking. Then there were people from immigrants from China and immigrants who were coming from Somalia and they wanted to grow their own vegetables. And so it was like really an interesting space, but people would grow things and then not know what to do with them, right? And I just think this was really cool. That was like the next step that we started to study was that people started sharing all their vegetables with each other, because the design of the nonprofit, they started to share, but they really didn't know what to do with, for example, like an eggplant, right? Or they had names for some of these vegetables that are growing that were not the names that I knew growing up in the United States, but they were the names of those vegetables that they called them in China, for example. So this is very interesting cross-cultural space and some of the vegetables in the beginning would go to waste because people didn't know what to do and they didn't know they could eat them. But yeah, it was really cool. And this is a hard place to grow vegetables in, in my opinion, is the ground is really different than where they're from. And so they had to spend a lot of time, what is it like adding to the ground to make it good soil? And of course, there's a lot of science in doing that. So Ayush has his hands up. Ayush, please go ahead. Hi, Susan, thank you so much for a lovely talk. Learned a lot. My question is a little more on the practical side. It feels like as you are working with the community over the long term, a lot of times you're also responding to things that are emerging, right? It's not like everything is preset and you are being it. And so I'm also thinking about how does the logistics of that work out with, you know, the machinery of academia from grants to other kinds of work around publications, et cetera, where, you know, sometimes like, it requires that kind of flexibility. Was that a challenge? Or did that flow smoothly? And like, I'm just curious as to, yeah. Yeah, so I'll say a couple of things about this. I don't know how much time we have, but hey, so one, I, that, that's exactly the truth. I pursued a project that was very open-ended by my design, right? I knew that if I were gonna do this, everything I do has to be really flexible and that needs to be understood not as a problem with my design, which is how many people look at it, but as a feature of my work, right? So I worked, I had the like, you know, the honor and like the luck of working with Chris Gutierrez when she was a faculty member at Boulder. She had also been a faculty member at UCLA where I had done a postdoc. So I had a relationship with her when she came, we really started talking about research methodology. And so we wanted to write more explicitly about this being a feature, you know, that you would need to adapt. So we started doing that. I think the part of what I was doing was building the world in which my research would be understood as good and rigorous and systematic and actually what we'd want to do, right? And I think people are very averse to doing this kind of work, right? I think that grants, just like the Promotores, I think grant tours don't wanna give money to people who want to say, well, I'm gonna follow the idea, you know? I'm gonna work with this community. I'm gonna see where it goes and I'm gonna adapt to whatever is going on in the world that's gonna affect their lives. So I will say that when I did this work, I mostly pursued, I primarily pursued local institutional grants for this work. And I was able to, I did the work. I convinced my university and I used my like expertise to convince them that this kind of work needs to be funded each year and that each year a different issue may come up, but I conceptualized it in my research as one whole project. But each year we really were focused on something different every single year. And every single year we only got a very small amount of money to do the work, but I got it every single year. And it allowed me to be improvisational in terms of how I adjusted to things. And if I think that if I hadn't had that approach and if I had gotten a grant that was focused on one thing for three years, I think I would have missed a lot, you know? But at the same time, somebody could have done that and found a bunch, could have done a completely different project, but I really was interested in following community desire. And that changes, you know, every day and during the time of this project, Donald Trump, it was elected president. And that changed what the community desired. It really changed things. I couldn't possibly keep saying, let's keep focusing on vegetables and promotora app. They didn't want that anymore. That wasn't the most important thing. So I had to shift and we had to focus on immigration law and policy. So that's what we did, right? So yeah, build the world that you wanna live in, you know, make the methods and the theories that you want make them real. And then publish about those things so that you can then become the journal editor so that you can then, you know, I mean, I'm serious about we've gotta work the machine. And I know that's what you're doing here with this conference. Like these are the ideas you want to grow. Get them out there. Yeah, just that. So we are out of time, but maybe if you don't mind, I'll just take the last question from Sarita that she's quick asking that. So in your work, community development is more important than actual task of, say, growing vegetable. And does it mean that like community outcomes, even if what was happening, the new development had nothing to do with STEM, you, the community outcomes will still be the same, like. I may be not understanding. I mean, yes, the community outcomes are important, but I will say they're deeply intertwined. Like there was no way the vegetables were not important in this project. I mean, the people needed to eat food, right? They needed to like do that. So I was mostly, I was actually, I will say, like very deeply interested in their intertwining. And I wanted to make an argument for the part which is community development that people seem to care less about. That was the part that was interesting to me, but I wanted to show they're like, I'm doing this with my hands. They're intertwined nature and help people understand STEM without the like relational dimension and the political dimension of it is not what I'm talking about. And I don't think that's the best way to do STEM research. Thank you. I think there's a lot more to discuss, but we are running out of time. I'll send you a mail with a lot of questions, which I have. Please. And, but I would like to take this opportunity to summarize and conclude this session. I don't know, I mean, how to say, it was really a meaningful session, I would say. It was, it's something which I think all of us need as we are struggling with different kind of projects we are doing. I think what you shared with us was really meaningful as we are really many of us at HBCS here are also trying to work with community and then struggling constantly with the academic frameworks and the epistemic framework, the academic framework and then there are many. And I think what you shared with us has a lot of value to many of us. And I really thank you for that. I don't know what words can express our appreciation for that, but, and I hope we'll have more conversations. Many of my colleagues will also get in touch with you. Thank you so much. And with this, we can conclude this session. Ayush, would you like to say something before we end? Okay. Thank you, Professor Susan and all the colleagues who joined from different parts of the world in this discussion. And we'll continue to join for the next two days. Thank you. Thank you. Take care, everybody.