Dr. Imogen Herrick visited the show on episode 100 Data Talks with Imogen Herrick to discuss her recent paper on using Community Science Data Talks to support students engaging both data and their emotional experiences related to climate change.
MR: For our first segment we read, how do these data make you feel the emergence of emotional pathways in community science data talks about climate justice issues.
LW: This was written by Imogen Herrick, Michael Lawson and Ananya Mateos.
MR: This was published in Science Education in 2025
02:17
This paper explores the use of community science data talks to engage students with climate related data sets through emotional pathways. By analyzing classroom interactions, they highlight how supporting emotional engagement fosters critical civic empathy and hope, promoting effective STEM learning and conceptions of agency toward climate solutions. And we are fortunate to be joined by lead author, Dr Herrick. Thanks for joining us.
Imogen Herrick: Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
MR: Dr Imogen Harrick is an assistant professor in STEM education at the University of Kansas and a full time mom. She does research at the intersection of emotion, place and environmental justice, and she loves listening to and performing live music. I got excited about reading your paper because the idea of doing data talks, data nuggets, fostering discourse around data is something that just super duper resonates with me. And seeing your work, unpacking how we can do that with climate data, was something that really caught my attention. How did you get started in working with classes on doing these data talks?
IH: 03:15
Yeah, well, I was a classroom high school science teacher for 12 years before I went and did my doctorate, and so I also was a stem instructional coach, and when I got into my program, I was thinking to myself, what are things that I have seen teachers pick up and do a lot of and that thing grow their practice in all these different ways. And the thing that came to mind was number talks. And math and number talks were something that, when I was coaching teachers, could easily integrate into their practice, and when they did, they saw a lot of value in it. They understood students had a lot of different ideas that they weren’t they weren’t aware of until they had opened this space of discourse for those ideas to kind of come to the through, come to the head. And so I was thinking to myself, Well, how could we get something like that going for environmental justice conversations in a science classroom? And so I sort of like use the number talk routine as a basis to think about ways to integrate data about local environmental justice issues, which are all exacerbated by climate change. And so this kind of all took
04:26
all together, sort of meshed into these community science data talks over time.
MR: 04:31
What’s so for people who aren’t familiar with data talks, these are, these are like small stand up discussion you maybe walk us through just very briefly. What is a data talk?
IH: 04:41
Yeah, for sure, yeah. Well, a data talk is, what do you notice? What do you wonder? Conversation where we’re really like elevating student voice and trying to unpack their ideas. And so what a data talk is, is you present a data and we can define data really broadly. We can think of data as a data visualization.
05:00
In we can think of data as a photo. We think we can think of data as listening to a snippet of a podcast, right a story.
05:08
So it’s about like, sort of like broadening the ways that we think about data, and then asking kids, what do they notice? What do they wonder? To surface their ideas and their previous experiences and their thoughts and to help each other, kind of get to this place of problem solving through their own perceptions. And so a data talk is really grounded in student discourse, getting students to talk to each other, and getting students to build off of each other’s conversation. And then, more importantly, teachers then kind of come in and they use these different question styles to kind of push the conversation further in the data talk, so, um, in our community science data talks, we have like, three pedagogical goals. So goals teachers would plan, around, like the dominant which is like, what’s the science? What’s the math, what’s the science and engineering practice? What is it that you want content wise or skill wise for the kids to get out of this conversation? But then there’s the critical, which is really like, how are you going to build their critical thinking around whatever they’re looking at and whatever they’re telling each other? And then there’s the affective, which is, like, these data are about places and people and things, and so we feel things when we talk about people and places and things. So the affective goal is, how are we going to support those emotions as we talk about these things?
LW: 06:28
So climate change is a really important part. I’m a high school science teacher, and I basically have been in recent years, sort of
06:37
looking at my ninth grade general biology curriculum with two major touch points, climate change and CRISPR. And these are the two like semester one is about ecology concepts, and it’s all centered around climate change, because as students, their future will be effected by climate change in ways that they may not be thinking about and that we may not be prepared for. And then on the second you know, we get into the molecular biology second semester, and their future is going to be affected by CRISPR in ways that they may not understand and we are not prepared for. And so that’s sort of how I schedule my year. And every year, climate change goes long and we get into second semester, but that’s fine. So I’ve been tweaking and changing my climate change experience for the entire time that I’ve been teaching. This is my 13th year being a high school biology teacher and
07:32
giving them data and like, what do you what do you see? What like? Let’s make sense of what this means, what are the consequences of this? That part of it was very comfortable to me. I very much in that space. But all of my data is like global level data. And so the contrast between, you know, showing them all of these huge decade or century or millennia or 10s of 1000s of years of data, and then having them, you know, interpret and and communicate relationships between ocean acidity and and diffusion of carbon dioxide and industrialization and like putting all that together, I feel really good at but
08:22
the the I don’t know, the
08:24
point of tension when reading your paper is that you humanize this by making it about where they are like and that was a highlight of both of the stories. Whether we were in,
08:37
was it was it Columbia?
08:40
Yeah, yeah. Or we were where I this. The cities were hidden. Los Angeles, okay.
08:47
And so no matter where we were,
08:50
the data that they were looking at was about where they were, which, of course, allows us to be more humanizing, because we think about where we are in the people that live where we are,
09:02
my kids, I can, and I will proudly own that my kids can tell you all about the ecological complications of what happens in this region, if this change is happening, and how that’s gonna affect ecosystems and organisms and cause migration and immigration and collapse. And you know, trophic cascades and and they, they will tell you all of those things, and I’m proud that they can do that,
09:26
but
09:28
I didn’t do this humanizing component of climate change, and that made me feel bad as I read,
IH: It shouldn’t. it sounds like you’re An incredible teacher, so you should never feel bad.
09:43
No, I think that’s really normal Laurence. I really think it’s really super normal, and I did too. So I’ll I was a teacher for 12 years. Taught AP Bio for a lot of those years. I also gave a more globalized perspective of climate change, because that’s how we can understand climate change, right?
09:59
But I.
10:00
Um,
10:01
there’s an an awesome science educator and Indigenous Studies author, Megan Bing, who kind of wrote this paper in, I believe, 2013
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where she talked about how, you know, when we do that, we sanitize the experience of science from their everyday lives. And that, in and of itself, makes them feel like they have no part to play,
10:27
because it’s about out here, not where they are in the moment. And when I read that, I was like, Man, she’s right. They’re right there. There’s this, there’s this component of place based education that’s really important for climate change, and really, to create advocates for climate justice, we really have to think about the places we are. There’s a ton of research in climate Ed and in educational psychology and psychology broadly that says, you know, kids are feeling overwhelmed, they feel worried, or they avoid dealing with
11:02
ideas about climate change. And so when we globalize it, we’re giving them no opportunity to process those emotions into any tangible action that they can take, which is what we know we need to do when they feel that way.
11:16
And so that’s sort of another thing that I was thinking about, to your point, Laurence, I was thinking I never did that when I was a teacher. I was thinking about how I did some like, you know, there was a creek in the school that I taught in Columbia, and we would go out and take water samples at that creek, and we would do, but we never related it to this broader socio ecological issue that we’re dealing with as a globe, right? And I wanted to figure out, well, that’s kind of hard to do, because place based education takes a lot of resources and times and knowledge and all of that stuff. So how do we help teachers get there in smaller steps? And so that’s where the data talks sort of came to be as I was sitting during COVID, honestly, and I was reading an article in science
12:08
about this guy who had his, Shnell was the last name was like Shnell, 2020, 20, I think was the paper. And he had this cool graphic, and it was just slices of a place. So it had like the urban slice that showed all the roads, and then I had like a tree canopy slice, and then I had a difference like and it was all these different slices. And I thought to myself, well, that’s an interesting way to think about place, and that’s an interesting way to think about climate change, and that could be done in small, small ways. So it’s really getting them they have to understand that broader pattern of science to really understand the mechanism of climate change, right? But if we’re talking about who they might become as people and how they might interact in the world, it’s probably more important for them to understand their role in that and what they can do about it versus the mechanism overall. So it’s a trade off, right? Like, so, like, if you’re doing this place based stuff, then we might not be talking as much about global climate change, and maybe the kids couldn’t explain what your kids can explain, right? Because there’s only so much time in a classroom to figure out what to do and how to do it and so on and so forth. So this was a smaller way to maybe start working towards kids finding connections between global climate change and their local places
LW: 13:32
well. And there’s other ways to sort of bridge the gap between those two distances, and like just adding an emotional awareness piece to even what I’m already doing. Let’s say we don’t change any of the content. We don’t do any local data talks. We do global data talks, but we can still have, you know, what do we feel about this? We can still have those conversations. So that’s it’s sort of like a richness that, like, you know, it’s going to take five minutes to allow that space. And you know, if you’ve done the work to create a classroom community where they’re safe to express then when we get to the more complex data dives, they hopefully they’re in a place where they can express that. So that’s like a small thing that I could be doing to bridge the gap. And then the second thing is a little more complex. So I read this paper, and I think to myself, Okay, I am under prepared to do this at the local level, which means I have to face that my understanding of the implications of climate change are naive. To be able to implement this at my level, I have to learn more to be at the mastery level required to present this quality of instruction to my students, and I am not at that point. Now, I do not know the like, local level policy consequence of climate change that
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I would need in order to do this for my kids. And so, you know, I’m thinking, Okay, so where? What’s it? What’s life like? Where I live? I.
15:00
In a pretty affluent section of Johnson County, there are, there are multiple golf courses within one mile of my school. Are there consequences? There are there implications there? What is the cost of living? What about, you know, yard maintenance like, what? What are the, what are the ideas of climate change that that are affecting this neighborhood. And then, are there nearby neighborhoods on the other side of town, north of Kansas City? Are there places around where life is different
15:33
in a manner that is meaningful, that is warned of? And are, where are those numbers? Where would I get those numbers? What numbers would I get? Like, I don’t know the answer to any of those questions, so I feel incapable. So earlier, when I made a comment, like I just vomited, like, I feel bad. It’s really I I’m not prepared to do this amazing thing in my classroom. And I my brain is thinking, what would it take to be able to do it? And I’m still struggling, so I’m kind of experiencing what the kids are experiencing, right? Like, this is big. I can’t do it. I don’t know this. I feel bad. So I’m going through that experience now, just reading your paper as as a professional,
IH: 16:19
sure, I think,
16:23
I think there are two things that I would say about that. One is, is that local data stories need to be created for teachers.
16:34
That’s just, I would say that’s, that’s just a fact of the matter. Now, good thing is, is that the data story that I did in my dissertation, which I created for LA, is every major US city, every single major US city could tell that exact same data story of redlining to tree canopy cover to inter urban heat to air quality to, you know, and you could continue to lay the lines it’s on. And you could talk about how that plays out, right? So there’s one data story that’s broad. We just recently did a group of folks decided to take these on in different places through the national consortium of food, energy and water.
17:15
And we did one in Connecticut, we did one in Baltimore, and we did one here in Kansas.
17:21
And the goal was for us to build these resources for teachers to tell different data stories other than this intra urban heat, one that you saw, one part of the paper talk about, but I agree with you, Laurence, it’s not something that I as a teacher was prepared to do. It’s not something that we have a ton of resources around.
17:40
But I think it’s funny because you already hit on one that we did for Kansas, which was the great American lawn.
17:48
Um, it’s funny that you said that, because that actually became a data story that we worked on. Was like, what is the great American lawn? How did it get here? Like, grass isn’t even from the United States. It’s not native. It came from Europe. They brought it over because Washington really liked all of the big palaces in Europe, and he wanted a grand lawn like that, so he brought grass over.
18:16
And so it’s actually a non native species, and we are sitting here like watering it and cutting it and making it perfect, and that’s contributing to global climate change in a lot of ways, and drought and everything else. And so it’s an interesting data story that also could be built and done in lots of places. So I think there are overarching ones that can be localized easily. And then I think there are more specific data stories that need to be built, like the prairies. The tall grass prairie is its own data story, right? Or well water in rural areas, and how that well water is impacted by various things that are happening in that community. And, you know, in Baltimore, they did the intra urban heat one again. So I think in a lot of ways, this work is beginning, and we’re trying to find teachers like you, Laurence, like like, maybe you and I can make a data story and put it out live and put it up and let people find those resources. And we’re creating a website right now that we’re going to start adding more and more. So I think you’re right to say, I don’t know this. I think neither did I.
19:21
And I also think it takes a bunch of people thinking this is a good idea to then start building and sharing and doing what we do in education, which is beg, borrow and steal anything good that we find, right? And so I think that’s sort that’s sort of the next phase of this work is to continue to build them out. We have a couple of pieces coming out in NSTA journals to talk about how we built them so other people may be able to take that up and build them themselves and add to the kind of reservoir of work.
MR: 19:57
One of the things that resonates with with these couple of examples and
20:00
In the lawn example is a perfect one. Is the emphasis on acknowledging the emotional experience of working with these data, because that hits me personally, very closely, and it, I think, aligns with some very similar conversations that we’ve even had on this show this year, talking about, if we’re examining political discourse, it needs to translate eventually into advocacy and action. If we’re talking about racial literacy and racial consciousness, needs to translate into advocacy and activism. And so if we’re talking about climate science, it, it hurts my heart like it. It’s if we’re just saying, look how bad everything is. And by like that, that’s a burden, like that that is has meaningful consequences. And so helping anybody who’s learning more about the data that we currently have about how climate change is affecting local communities, and then translate into local action like this is affecting the people you know, the people who live here, and there’s something you can do about it. So like, for your lawn example, if you’re not happy about this, you don’t have to just leave and be sad, like you’re not sliding into this nihilistic sort of vortex. But instead being you’ll say, if you want to do something about it, there are things that you can do. Let’s go establish a pollinator garden. Let’s go set up some rain barrels, like, let’s, let’s go do some things, because at the local level, you can do something,
IH: yeah, no, I think, I think you’re right to point that out, without the localization of science, we miss a lot of
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the doing of science in a meaningful way that’s outside of the classroom walls, right? Like, when I was a teacher, you know, you set up your labs. They love the labs. They love to do things right, like it’s fun, but in a lot of ways, we see that that that kids don’t transfer those experiences to their everyday lives. They don’t transfer those experiences to STEM careers or whatever, right? And so when we think about data talks and community science, data talks, particularly, I have yet to be in a classroom that did these, and now I’ve been in, I can’t even tell you how many classrooms We’ve enacted these in now
22:08
where the kids did not start to have conversations authentically, without being drug there about, well, wait a second,
22:17
I don’t like this, but we can do something about this. Like we could go plant some trees, or we could go, like you said, Get a rain barrel, or whatever it is that the issue is, or some of us that are more politically minded, which some kids really are right, that we can write our mayor right. We can go talk to him. We can, you know, and one of the other things that kids start to realize when they do this, and it’s funny, because it’s
22:47
it’s not something that I think a lot of people think of kids, but what I see consistently is that they start to realize that their voices are super powerful voices in communities, and they start To understand their power in this very cool way. Because when kids can articulate things and become transformative, transform, There’s a science educator that calls it transformative intellectuals, and I love that term because he’s like, he’s like, you’re you’re helping the kids become the transformative intellectuals in their communities, because they know all of this information and they can communicate it in ways that other people can understand it, and people are surprised by the intellectualism. So it also like invites more conversation, right? And so I think this is like a really cool role for kids to realize about themselves. They start to realize that they themselves can be agents of change, which, to me, is beyond any lesson I ever taught as a teacher. I think that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen emerge from these talks in other classrooms.
MR: So something that you said there that stands out to me and is really like a critique of me and what I have done, that a lot of the skills that I have practiced, a lot of the way that I thought about doing science labs, I love me some labs. It was very professionally focused. But what resonates here is that all of these experiences can be building towards citizens and so they can grow up to be an author of children’s fiction and have a pollinator garden. So like these are skills that are not inherently connected to professional trajectories, but are connected to engaged citizenry across a wide breadth of career choices. And that’s something that I think can connect with students who maybe don’t see something for themselves in the science classroom, that’s that’s hyper focused on professional preparation
24:37
IH: 100% and I think that’s the mistake that’s been made here in science education, and I was a part of it, so I can blame myself too, right? But when we look at COVID, for example, like COVID was a pretty big moment in the US to think about science denial
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and misinformation and.
25:00
How people understand the process of science, right? Because with the mask mandates, let’s go with that just as an example, right? Like people had a really hard time when new information was gathered and something else was suggested, they could not understand that. That is the process of science as is, hold on, I’m losing my my earbuds falling out of my ear. Hold on.
25:26
But that’s the process of science, and that was really interesting to watch, in a bad way, interesting to watch on the main stage. To understand that people really didn’t get that. They thought that that was meaning that the scientists did not know what they were doing, and I think that’s a problem that we as science educators have almost prefabbed science and almost pushed science into this laboratory focus in this way where people really don’t understand that science is messy. Science is complex, that new information comes in, and it doesn’t disrupt a whole theory, but it does make us shift towards a more accurate scientific explanation, right? And COVID, I think, is just like such a good example of why, potentially, we need to start showing that Messier side so that our students can learn how to deal with the, you know, the kind of the socio scientific world as it is, and realize that a lot of science is not in a lab. I was listening to NPR this morning, and nature has a contest every year where they have a photograph that show, I can’t remember what it’s called, but they have a photograph that they show the process of science being happening, and all three of the top three were out in like the field, right, like out on a boat doing this, or out in the mountains doing this. And I don’t think that kids in regular, traditional science classrooms walk away seeing that as a scientist job.
LW: You know, when we think of these big issues like climate change or, you know, COVID public health concerns or things of that nature, we’re really in the issue of persuasion. And we, we, we want to live in a world where facts and numbers and data are persuasive, but the human psychology, they just That’s not. That’s not. What’s persuasive is narratives. And if you are an expert, if you are mastery, if you are super comfortable and competent, then you can look at numbers and interpret it as a narrative. And so that’s, that’s what’s happening at this really complex, abstract level. But if you are not if you don’t have mastery in the statistical analysis or the cause and effect schema or or the network of influences, if you don’t have mastery, then the numbers are just
27:54
garnish. And so what’s compelling about the to bring us back to the local data science talks, what they do is create a nearby, tangible, like understandable, normalized citizen experience that the students can go outside and see like they know that narrative. It’s right there, like in the Columbia story, with the the the
28:30
landslides, the mudslides, the kids were saying they see people’s homes on the side of this mountain, and the way those homes are constructed brings me concern, because the next time there’s a heavy rain, that house, that house, and the person that lives there, that one, that person might be homeless after that event. And that’s a narrative that makes them think about, Why is it raining more? Why? Why is this happening? Why? Why is there so much erosion there? Why they they have the narrative to be persuaded, and that is another reason why these are powerful.
IH: 29:06
Yeah, it’s a story. You’re right about the stories, and I’m going to bring us into the world of affective neuroscience. So in the paper, we talk about transcendent thinking just a little bit. But really there is a fabulous affective neuroscientist. Her name is Dr Mary Helen Imordino Yang,
29:27
and they do extraordinary work with adolescents around transcendent thinking, and basically school as it is, as we know it right now, is all built around what we know about memory, really like we’re trying to help kids develop all of these different aspects of their memory, their procedural memory, you know, their kind of semantic memory, which is like their facts and their concepts. But she, she and her lab talk about how there’s this third part of memory, which is autobiographical memory, and turns out and.
30:00
Lot of her research, which goes to the story thing that you’re just like hitting on. Turns out, in a lot of her research, you know, autobiographical memory is the stories we tell ourselves, the stories of like, who we are, what we stand for, what we want the world to be, and all the rest of these memory aspects of learning get hung on this autobiographical memory, and it’s actually what we use in new situations to pull up how to interact with that situation. And so stories and narratives are a part of really, our developing brain, too, and our brain does that as well as we’re when we’re looking at things. So when we’re talking about the kids in Columbia with the houses, they’re pulling up this story of that part of their city and what they know about it, right? And that’s helping them utilize this new information and hang this new information on that story, right? And so it’s a way that we they find actually that in adolescence like that, the more work that kids do in transcendent thinking, which they kind of define as
31:10
like, sort of like this way of thinking about what’s happening now, but also what’s happening in the future, and this way of being able to productively think about possible implications for the future, but also think about past things that have happening. So what transcendent thinking really is is connecting to the complexity of the world and where they fit in it, and when they interact with those types of opportunities to think, they actually develop their brain in bigger ways. More synapses fire, more synapses connect, and it’s all undergirded in our emotional center of our brain. So when we’re doing transcendent thinking, we’re feeling a ton. And that’s why I think the
31:57
how does this data make us feel question or other questions, like, who is impacted by this data? That’s why those those question probes, are so important in classrooms, because they’re helping kids connect to that emotional center in a direct way. It’s happening that emotional center is firing whether you connect to it or not, but centering it and allowing there to be a collective processing of emotion actually is helping kids engage in transcendent thinking at that moment
MR: 32:28
you mentioned, like, it’s not that hard to ask students how they feel, and that’s true. Like, that’s a very simple, straightforward question, yeah. Like, I could do that. Anybody could repeat that question. But a piece of what was core to your training, and something that is similar to what we have seen come up in past papers that have touched on student mental wellness and student student thinking and cognition, is the importance of there was training. You trained the teachers to engage with some of these topics. And I think it’s important for anybody listening to think it’s not that hard for me to draw out students in this emotionally vulnerable place. It’s not, but you need to do it with responsibility and respect and care. And I think it’s, it’s worth drawing out in that moment that you did a fair amount of training. What was it called? There was, there was a particular paradigm for the training.
IH: 33:14
He healing, informed. Healing. Informed is kind of a combination of what you would consider trauma, informed pedagogies,
33:22
and really thinking about like
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environmental justice impacts people, and those people are in classrooms. And so if you just show data, if you just take community science data talks, and let’s say we put them on a website, and a teacher just says, I’m going to do this today with zero thought around it. Right? What can happen is, is, is, is, you’re, you’re going to feel a lot of kids are going to feel a lot of emotions and maybe not feel able to express them, because the environment isn’t cultivated in a way where that an expression feels safe,
34:06
and that is really what, not what to do.
34:11
And we try to really hedge that in that paper, a lot to talk about how healing informed practices are more than holding space for emotion, you can hold space for emotion without having any intention to care for that emotion, right?
34:31
And so I think one of the biggest things to kind of, and I think we say this in the paper,
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we tried to, like, really be very clear about this was that these teachers that were doing this work, they were ready to do this work. They were people that had noticed that this was missing from their practice because they were people that had cultivated learning environments where.
35:00
Students felt like they impacted the learning environment and felt like they had roles to play in the classroom, and then they weren’t sitting in a classroom going from class to class without any sort of community around that class. And so the teachers that we worked with all had extraordinary classroom communities where the teachers really listened to the students around what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it, and what needs they needed to be met to be able to learn those things. And then these teachers, after they had done long done that work, brought these discussions in and were able to hold space to hold space to verbalize, because what happens in a community science data talk with a teacher that doesn’t have that space when you ask, how does this data make you feel? Nobody’s going to talk. Nobody’s going to say anything. Because feeling something, and especially when you get into like middle school and high school, like saying how you feel in a public space, you must feel safe to really share that.
36:05
And so I think that’s really, really important. And I think a lot of the stuff that we talked about was like, you know, grounding practices is something that you might want to do before you ever do this, which is really helping kids, like, kind of sit with their emotions, you know, just do an emotion guided emotion participation activity around nothing, just around how they’re feeling right now in this moment, and give them the time and the space to experience their body, and then teach them how to ground themselves with an object or with whatever it might be. And so a lot of these teachers already did a lot of mindfulness practice, practitioner work with their kids, and so that’s why you see dialog when they ask, how does this data make you feel? Because the kids already feel really safe to share how they actually feel. And I think the other point is that’s really important is that the adults should not narrate any of it. The adults should be
37:05
reflectors, or, I would say, like amplifiers, of student ideas. So let’s say somebody in the classroom says, Well, I noticed that there was fewer trees in this neighborhood versus this neighborhood, and the teacher could say, thank you. Sarah said that they noticed that there are more trees and blah, blah, blah, and more trees in this so they’re directly amplifying that again, so that everybody can hear it, or probers with Questions Only, so that the kids really are the ones that are driving the conversation, and that conversation feels safe to them and that the teacher is not driving it.
LW: 37:45
I’d like to go back to a topic that we dropped. We went down other branches about this autobiographical memory piece, because I
37:55
one of the things that I has been important for me as a teacher with my students is this concept of student identity, and I, of course, just acknowledging who they are in my classroom and saying you as you are in my classroom is valuable, and we’re gonna acknowledge and respect who you are. That, of course, is a part of identity, but also to help them develop identities. As I, you know, I am a student, I am a learner of science, I am a writer, I am a mathematician, I am a data analyst. I am invested in ecology, like, I have a relationship with these things, like, I want to encourage their identity as a learner. And there’s all kinds of you know psychology, like you know mindset psychology, the I Can I am capable, I am able. And here’s the evidence, and here’s what we’re going to do to build my skills, like I can do this. I am learning that like this, this
38:56
efficacy concept, and how it that attitude of self matters significantly in terms of learning, and I have not really thought and so I wonder, what relationship is there between an identity as a learner and their autobiographical memory, right? What, like, I have a story about myself doing something in science, or I have a story about myself doing something in my community, or I have a story about myself in this way that helps me build an identity that then shapes the incoming information. Because if I am a math learner, and math information is coming at me, my brain says, Well, I’m a math learner, so I’m gonna I’m gonna consider that information. And if we say, I hate math, I’m not a math person, and then we see math information, our brain is less likely to prioritize that for processing, and it’s less likely, you know, hippocampus is going to give up sooner, and we’re going to spend less time engaging with that material. So I wonder what relationship this like identity and autobiographical?
40:00
How memory interact to shape our relationship with future information.
IH: I think it’s everything. So when you were talking, I was thinking to myself about, like, Well, I think it’s every
40:15
Yeah, no, I’m just saying like, I think, I think you’re I think identity and I autobiographical memory are the same. Because when you think about who you are, how you fit into the world, and the stories that you tell yourself of who you are and how you fit into the world, that’s your identity, right? And so I think one of the things that we
40:42
should think more about is how identities are intersectional, and that our identities have like, I said to you guys at the introduction, you guys are like, what’s your like, main identity? And I was like, Well, I’m a mom and a scholar, and there’s a term that I use in the paper called a mother scholar, and I was very intentional to put that in there, because it’s really important, because the aspect of mothering is something that I do in my scholarship. It’s the way that I interact with my participants, it’s the way that I interact with the world, but also my scholarship is interacting the way that I mother right? So like, I think the we need to think about these identities as being more intersectional and understanding that the more relevant that our learning experiences are, the more likely that we’re going to find a place on our autobiographical memory to hang new information. And when we hang new information on that story, then our identity is becoming more expansive and more intersectional, and so we’re building those identities through these experiences. And that’s why I think localization is so valuable, because it allows us, if I’m not somebody who sees myself as a math person, right? That’s something you hear kids say, I’m not a math person, right?
42:01
But then we do something in math class that has to do with how I am. Let’s do science, because I’m better at science examples. I’m not a science person, but I really, really, really like doing my nails, right? And I see myself as somebody who’s very artistic and great at doing nails. I even have, like, a side business where I do my friends nails, and then when I’m in science class, and all of a sudden we’re talking about chemical reactions. And the chemical reaction we’re talking about has to do with why certain nail polish dries faster than other nail polish. Now, all of a sudden, I am able to hang that information on this very clear story that I tell myself all the time. And so I start to see science as part of and a part of what I like to do. Does that make sense? And so it’s a way that I think when we when we build in relevance. It doesn’t have to be environmental justice, data relevance alone, I think, is really, really, really important, and it’s hard to do in a classroom, because it’s hard to be relevant to 30 different individuals, right?
LW: 43:15
But everybody is living but there are people living on, yeah, we’re all living in the same community, and there are people living on that mountain, and there are mud slides and there are there is heat stroke, and there are trips to the emergency room and
IH: and so we’re all activating our autobiographical memory in some way,
43:36
right? Well, I think the other thing is, is that we always think of identity as individual, right? Like that, like we see ourselves as math person, a science person, so on and so forth. But I think a lot of the what I think the autobiographical memory work is showing us is that and the transcendent thinking, really more is that to engage in transcendent thinking, you have to think about other people, right? And so then it becomes less about me and more about my role in community, right? And I think that, in and of itself, is something that we forget about as teachers, because we’re like, taking the standards, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re thinking about the standards. We’re trying to make sure we’re that we’re trying to make sure that we’re hitting what we’re supposed to hit, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re preparing them for right the next layer, level test score, what have you. But in a lot of ways, I think young people really need opportunities to contribute to like being part of community and developing a sense of purpose in community, and that, in and of itself, is actually growing their brains in ways that would support all of those other goals, right?
LW: Okay, great, okay. Like, how did that come to be? And do you have plans to do more? Because, like, the like, we’ve we’ve read.
45:00
Tons of papers, literally, tons of papers. Okay, maybe not literally, but, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one from this part of the globe to that part of the globe, and it was so obviously a conscientious decision to do that, especially since we’re talking about climate change, right, which is the global phenomenon. Like, that’s so great. I just, I just, you know, like, like, like, when you’re at the museum and you’re working at a piece of art, you’re like, I really like that brush stroke right there. That is a masterful brushstroke. And that’s how I felt when I saw that. It’s like, Oh, man. What a, what am I? What a, what a touch, what? So I want to know, how did that come to be like, how did, how did, and and do you have plans to continue to do that such at such a global scale? I’d like to know more about that part of your of your work,
IH: 45:50
absolutely. Well, it’s part of my identity, goes back to that intersectional identity. So I, I taught in the US and Title One schools and private schools, and I also taught in the international school system in Columbia. And so one of the things that I always found interesting about teaching across contexts is that students have different value systems. Parents have different value systems. Countries have different value systems, but when it gets down to like learning, and when you get down to the brass tacks of learning, it’s really a relationship oriented sport in a classroom, meaning that like kids will learn with you If they trust you, if they are a part of your community, and they feel a part of your classroom community, right?
46:48
And I was curious like, okay, so that seems to be constant across context. It’s about relationships. It’s about setting up classrooms to be places where people feel like they belong. It’s about providing opportunities to learn that feel important, like all of these things sort of transcend context. But what’s different about these contacts? And so, you know, I have relationships in Columbia, and so I was doing this work, and I went back and did this work with them, because I wanted to understand climate change is a global problem. Understanding it in the US is great. Understanding it in two places is better. Understanding it in like 15 places is even better. And what are practices that could transcend places? Well, they’re practices that are driven by the people in the room, right? Not the
47:44
artifacts of the practice. They’re they’re things that are driven by the kids in the room versus the materials that you’re given. And they’re driven by discourse structures that allow space for information to be exchanged. And so I thought, well, you know, this practice might do well in all these places, let’s find out what the differences are. And interestingly enough, and it’s not in this paper that was in my dissertation, is that context actually matters with a lot of the student outcomes. So in my dissertation, I did a like I did, basically a comparative case study of a very, very affluent and area of LA mostly white kids that were super affluent, right? And then I did a context which was mostly kids that have been historically minoritized in an area of the city that was lower socioeconomic status. And the difference between those two contexts was that in one context, they had all the ecosystem services you could ever want for and in the other context, they didn’t have that many ecosystem services. So what happens when you do these data talks in different places? What are these student outcomes? Right? And interestingly enough,
49:02
collective efficacy emerges really strongly, In the case of the kids that have been historically minoritized and the kids that are lacking ecosystem services they had, they started to, like, really build this collective efficacy. And this kind of there. I use this. I use this. This is a very nerdy but it helps to understand it. I use transformative experiences in science. And it’s it’s got three dimensions. One is motivated use I learned something, I’m motivated to use it outside of science class. The second is experiential value is like because I learned this, I actually value it because it has some meaning to the rest of my life somewhere right, an expansion of percentage perception because I learned this now, all of a sudden, I see the world a little bit differently. And in that group, that experiential value became a collective experience.
50:00
Experiential value. I’m so glad that we learned this together, because we don’t think our community understands us, and we think we can do something to help them in the really privileged environment. What were the student outcomes? Well, first off, they struggled to deal with their own privilege. Shocker, right? Like there was a whole conversation at one point was, you know, is a tree a privilege became a conversation in these classrooms, like, is a tree a privilege? Is it really a privilege to have trees, right?
50:30
That’s amazing, right? You know? And so those kids, like, they built constructive hope to climate change. Like, okay, I’m hopeful that we can change things. But with the really, with the teachers like Mr. Nathan, who’s in the paper, he’s one of these teachers who pushed and who did perspective taking, and was not gonna let them go. He was not gonna let them walk away with them, thinking that they could move away from this problem.
LW: Yeah, I made a note about that in my paper about like highlighted as as teacher led perspective taking. Because, you know, when you you ask, you ask someone to say, imagine you’re in the garden, your grandma’s working and she faints. What do you do? How do you respond? And people can, people can work through that, and they can have responses. And then he, he, he kind of really artfully interrupted them to say, because there’s no trees, right? Like, and that’s not going to be part of someone’s natural narrative. Like, you know, when we’re in an amygdala state, we we’re shutting down all of those more complex, uh, abstract relationships. I’m like, I gotta get my gram out of the hospital. What is the direct line between me here and that there? And that’s what people are thinking. And so if you’re going through the motions, that’s what you’re thinking. And he really, like you said, he wasn’t going to let it go. He persistently and artfully reinserted the
51:59
privilege, if that’s the term we’re using it right now for them to think about in relation to, like this is happening because this is related to, this is all part of which is not part of their naturally developing narrative, but it’s, it’s the narrative that we are here to consider. And so he, he, like you said, he won’t let them go well.
IH: And he was on data talk, I think, like 12 or something. So he had done this with these kids from for a while, and he had all these data that they had already talked about, that they had already examined through these lenses, that he This was his final conversation with them, right? And so he was like, I’m gonna go, let’s go back to the housing data. Like, don’t you remember, right? Like, don’t you remember, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, he was really trying to get them to be transcendent thinkers and think about what this could mean, and what is their role in it, right? And I think, and because of that, those kids started to develop this critical civic empathy, where they were like, oh, man,
53:03
I do have a role in this to play. You know, it’s not impacting my community, but it’s impacting my broader community and my world, and I can play a role, and that’s really important, because if we really want to meet this moment of climate change, everybody’s gotta play a role, and everybody’s gotta understand that right. And that’s really the tricky part of climate change, is that we can’t just solve it on our own right. We have to work together to do it.
LW: Speaking about working together, let’s say I’m a teacher that says I’ve worked to build an emotionally safe space in my classroom, but I’m not at the place where I can do a local data story myself. Is there a place where I can go and find other pre written data stories that I can consider for my classroom?
53:52
IH; You can contact me. I have them. We are building a website currently so and there we have practitioner pieces. We have one for middle school, one for high school, or sorry, we have one coming out in science and children for an NSTA journal that I can easily send preprints. We have one coming out in science teacher with high school focus that I can put it out. But I also have all of these other data stories that teachers have done that you are welcome to contact me and grab. And there’s lots of book chapters and things that I can set those will all be on a website soon.
LW: When that website has a valid link, please let us know.
IH: We’ll do we’ll do that. I’m happy people can email me, yeah. Email me,
54:37
Yeah. I’m happy to respond and send them to anyone. Yeah.