Writing Data Stories
Kris Gutierrez, Professor
Education
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
Writing Data Stories is a new project that seeks to reorganize how young people, especially linguistically and ethnoracially minoritized students, learn about and interact with data. A partnership including Bay Area schools, UC Berkeley, the Concord Consortium, North Carolina State University and the University of Texas at Austin, the project will engage middle school students in exploring scientific datasets about earth and the environment using flexible online data visualization and analysis tools. Typically, school data investigations use small datasets that students create themselves, or larger datasets that clearly illustrate simple relationships and are less connected to students’ lives. Our goal is instead for students to author “data stories” that reorganize everyday and scientific conventions to position students themselves and the complex issues they care about at the center of each data investigation. In the process, students will be supported in learning to elicit support for their cause, critically reflect on their experiences, craft scientific arguments, and manipulate or wrangle large datasets.
At the core of this reorganization is a syncretic approach where students deeply study everyday and scientific ways of knowing or doing that are traditionally in tension. This approach was developed specifically to support learners from nondominant backgrounds, including students identified as Dual Language Learners. We are interested in bringing together experience on the one hand, and data on the other. It is common for people to dismiss personal experiences as subjective and suggest that empirical data are objective truth. Of course, neither of these are correct––experience is empirical, and data are subject to measurement error, sampling error, bias, and omission. What’s more, personal experience can expose problems with data, and data can help situate and contextualize personal experience. Consider the Flint Water Crisis: Official data analyses contradicted resident reports for years with tragic consequences; citizen science efforts where residents collected their own data eventually exposed the city’s neglect. Writing Data Stories similarly seeks to put students’ personal experiences and public scientific datasets into direct conversation. In this way, students’ everyday knowledge and practices are just as valued as scientific knowledge and practices, inviting students more authentically into the practices of science as they learn them.
Role: 1) Analyze video and audio data we collected from the science classroom where we conducted our study.
2) Co-construct poster, paper, and multimodal conference submissions with graduate students and faculty on project
3) Attend weekly 2 hour meetings
4) Be a part of a community of learners working toward developing analyses that are consequential to non-dominant communities.
Qualifications: We are looking for diverse undergraduates from multiple backgrounds and research experience. If you are interested in the project and hoping to develop your qualitative research methodologies, consider this project.
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology