Restructuring the relationship between STEM faculty and K-12: crafting a figured world of partnership

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, identity has provided us with a dynamic tool to understand and examine how people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially enacted worlds. Pertinent to this conceptualization, Skerrett and Sevian focus on science and mathematics faculty’s identities and seek to understand how certain aspects of their identities mediate certain motivations to involvement in K-12 service. While I believe that the authors presented an affluent discussion of agency from the perspective of identity, I think that if we are to understand agency from a sociocultural perspective, we have to magnify a view of identity and agency in the figured world of practice/activity. My main goal is not only to reclaim the importance of the individual dimension and agency within a profoundly social view of the self, but also to highlight the figured contextual factors that would either enable or constrain STEM faculty’s involvement in K-12 outreach. After first outlining the perspective of identity and agency that was adopted by Skerrett and Sevian, I extend the discussion of Skerrett and Sevian to move forward toward a figured world of partnership. I conclude by positing that the third generation of activity theory has a potential for contributing to our understanding of how the social institutional context and its structure is important to our understanding of individual agency.