Edna Tan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3829299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edna Tan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edna |
| FAMILY NAME | Tan |
| SIGNATURE | TAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4583-4557 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Rigor and Representation: Leading the Next Five Years of JRST
Science Education research and its impact on theory and practice are critical levers for creating a more just and engaging science education experience for all learners. As we begin our five-year editorial tenure, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST), like so many academic journals, faces both challenge and possibility. We are honored to serve as Co-Editors-in-Chief of NARST's flagship journal, to uphold this publication's long trad…
That's Just Gonna Make Them Upset: Youth Authoring Emerging Epistemic Ideals Through Rightful Presence
There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of affect as shaping youths' negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper we examine how power and affect shape epistemic negotiations as youth and adults designed a community survey during a 7th grade biology unit on str…
I'm not giving up on you: Exploring the roles of politicized trust and critical agency in the Scratch coding trajectory of two Black boys
This article looks at how a Black informal STEM educator supported two Black boys' learning opportunities in coding, specifically investigating how the establishment of politicized trust between the informal STEM educator and youth supported their development of critical agency. Using the dual lenses of socio‐spatial relationality and politicized trust, we explore how the socio‐spatial relationality of place, materials, and educator–youth interac…
Intergenerational Asian diaspora mentoring in the academy: Mapping the terrain of allied political struggles through critical relational ethnography
This paper investigates intergenerational Asian diaspora faculty mentorship within the context of higher education in North America. Drawing on intersectionality, rightful presence, and third-generation cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), the authors theorize across three activity systems—predominantly white academic institutions (PWI), a collaborative research project (LSP), and critical dialogue space (ADS)—to understand their collectiv…
Co-making against antiBlackness
This article focuses on how Black girls counter the antiBlackness that pervades the culture of STEM/making through their STEM-rich, community-engaged co-making practices. As youth engage each other, their communities, and the world, they make in ways that respond to a critical awareness of the world as it is, and with a desire to agentically author a world that could be. Using participatory critical/relational ethnography and lensed through ideas…
“We actually made something and solved a problem”: Exploring relationships between middle school engineering culture and girls' engineering experiences
As historically construed, both engineering culture and school science culture marginalize girls. With the focus on engineering in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), engineering education researchers have called for a more targeted investigation of how girls at the K‐12 level engage in engineering. This study investigates, through critical participatory ethnography, how 6th grade girls engaged in an Engineering for Sustainable Communit…
One World: Refugee youth incubating epistemologies toward rightful presence with/in community‐driven STEM
This study investigates how recently resettled refugee youth took up STEM‐rich making experiences at an after‐school community club in relation to negotiating their resettlement process. Using critical participatory ethnography grounded in sustained engagement with and in community, authors 1 and 2 worked with refugee youth through sustained STEM‐rich making programming where youth innovated and created products that they needed but did not have …
Collaboratively engineering for justice in sixth grade STEM
In this article, it is argued that processes of co‐production can support teachers and students in organizing resources for justice through science learning. Drawing upon a critical justice conceptual framework, critical ethnographic data from one urban middle school classroom during a unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities were analyzed. Findings describe how processes of co‐production yielded new Discourse threads focused on su…
Teaching & learning in makerspaces: Equipping teachers to become justice-oriented maker-educators
Making and makerspaces are becoming increasingly popular in K-12 schools. However, professional development on making for practicing teachers is under researched. We present case studies of two teachers’ sensemaking of making in a one semester graduate course on teaching and learning in makerspaces. The course was designed around three course tenets; maker as learner, as iterative, and as equitable and consequential. We utilize third generation c…
Supporting Teacher Visioning of Justice-Oriented Engineering in the Middle Grades
There are well-documented justice-related issues in engineering education. How do teachers begin to develop a way of seeing forward in their teaching, both in how they understand their role and their hoped-for outcomes for students, in ways that bridge the goals of justice with required engineering disciplinary expectations? In this manuscript, we focus on how teachers envision teaching engineering in ways that attend to the sociopoliticaldimensi…
Becoming in STEM: Developing a Culture of Criticality in the Space Between Person and Institution
This paper presents a single case study of a youth, Fall, tracing her STEM engagement from grade 5 through high school, across STEM spaces both formal and informal, utilizing critical, longitudinal ethnography. Drawing from social practice and critical justice theories, we present how Fall’s STEM history-in-person collided with the history-in-institutional-struggles, as a white girl growing up in multigenerational poverty who eagerly engaged in w…
Redefining entrepreneurialism in the maker movement: A critical youth approach
Background: This paper explores traditional iterations of, and new challenges to, the tightly linked discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation within the maker movement.Methods: In a yearlong critical ethnographic study with 12 youth makers, we investigated how youth engaged with and redefined entrepreneurialism through their identity work as justice-oriented, community makers.Findings: Examining youth experiences of entering their making des…
Hacking a Path into and through STEM: Exploring how Youth Build Connecting Pathways between STEM-Related Landscapes
Background/Context Minoritized youth from historically marginalized backgrounds continue to face systemic inequities in STEM. Existing strategies aimed at increasing diversity in STEM, which are guided by the STEM “pipeline” metaphor and are deficit-oriented, have yielded lackluster results. Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study This paper investigates how mi-noritized youth attempted to build connecting pathways between STEM-relate…
Beyond Equity as Inclusion: A Framework of “Rightful Presence” for Guiding Justice-Oriented Studies in Teaching and Learning
Current discourses of equity in teaching and learning are framed around calls for inclusion, grounded in the extension of a set of static rights for high-quality learning opportunities for all students. This essay presents a rightful presence framework to guide the study of teaching and learning in justice-oriented ways. This framework highlights the limitations of equity as inclusion, which does not adequately address the ways in which systemic …
Rethinking High-Leverage Practices in Justice-Oriented Ways
Justice-oriented teaching must address how classroom-based disciplinary learning is shaped by interactions among local practice and systems of privilege and oppression. Our work advances current scholarship on high-leverage practices [HLPs] by emphasizing the need for teaching practices that restructure power relations in classrooms and their intersections with historicized injustice in local practice as a part of disciplinary learning. Drawing u…
How do middle school girls of color develop STEM identities? Middle school girls’ participation in science activities and identification with STEM careers
This study explores ways to support girls of color in forming their senses of selves in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) during the middle school years. Guided by social practice theory, we analyzed a large data set of survey responses ( n = 1,821) collected at five middle schools in low‐income communities across four states in the United States. Analyses focus on the extent to which key constructs that inform girls’ development …
Designing for Rightful Presence in STEM: The Role of Making Present Practices
Opportunities to learn in consequential ways are shaped by the historicized injustices students encounter in relation to participation in STEM and schooling. In this article, it is argued that the construct of rightful presence, and the coconstructed “making present” practices that give rise to moments of rightful presence, is 1 way to consider how to make sense of the historicized and relational nature of consequential learning. Drawing on theor…
STEM-Rich Maker Learning: Designing for Equity with Youth of Color
A Longitudinal Study of Equity-Oriented STEM-Rich Making Among Youth From Historically Marginalized Communities
The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making programs. Building a conceptual argument for an equity-oriented culture of making, the authors discuss …
Desiring a career in STEM‐related fields: How middle school girls articulate and negotiate identities‐in‐practice in science
The underrepresentation of non‐White students and girls in STEM fields is an ongoing problem that is well documented. In K‐12 science education, girls, and especially non‐White girls, often do not identify with science regardless of test scores. In this study, we examine the narrated and embodied identities‐in‐practice of non‐White, middle school girls who articulate future career goals in STEM‐related fields. For these girls who desire an STEM‐r…
Crafting a Future in Science: Tracing Middle School Girls’ Identity Work Over Time and Space
The underrepresentation of girls from nondominant backgrounds in the sciences and engineering continues despite recent gains in achievement. This longitudinal ethnographic study traces the identity work that girls from nondominant backgrounds do as they engage in science-related activities across school, club, and home during the middle school years. Building a conceptual argument for identity trajectories, the authors discuss the ongoing, cumula…
We Be Burnin'! Agency, Identity, and Science Learning
This article investigates the development of agency in science among low-income urban youth aged 10 to 14 as they participated in a voluntary year-round program on green energy technologies conducted at a local community club in a midwestern city. Focusing on how youth engaged a summer unit on understanding and modeling the relationship between energy use and the health of the urban environment, we use ethnographic data to discuss how the youth a…
Seeding an Authentic Community Making Culture
It Changed Our Lives”: Activism, Science, and Greening the Community
Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space
The findings reported on in this manuscript emerged from a design experiment conducted at a low‐income urban middle school intended to support the teacher in incorporating pedagogical practices supportive of students' everyday knowledge and practices during a 6th grade unit on food and nutrition from the LiFE curriculum. In studying the impact of the design experiment we noticed qualitative shifts in classroom Discourse marked by a changing role …
Beyond Equity as Inclusion: A Framework of “Rightful Presence” for Guiding Justice-Oriented Studies in Teaching and Learning
Current discourses of equity in teaching and learning are framed around calls for inclusion, grounded in the extension of a set of static rights for high-quality learning opportunities for all students. This essay presents a rightful presence framework to guide the study of teaching and learning in justice-oriented ways. This framework highlights the limitations of equity as inclusion, which does not adequately address the ways in which systemic …
Crafting a Future in Science: Tracing Middle School Girls’ Identity Work Over Time and Space
The underrepresentation of girls from nondominant backgrounds in the sciences and engineering continues despite recent gains in achievement. This longitudinal ethnographic study traces the identity work that girls from nondominant backgrounds do as they engage in science-related activities across school, club, and home during the middle school years. Building a conceptual argument for identity trajectories, the authors discuss the ongoing, cumula…
Creating Hybrid Spaces for Engaging School Science Among Urban Middle School Girls
The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up to do so. The authors argue that such merging science p…
Rethinking High-Leverage Practices in Justice-Oriented Ways
Justice-oriented teaching must address how classroom-based disciplinary learning is shaped by interactions among local practice and systems of privilege and oppression. Our work advances current scholarship on high-leverage practices [HLPs] by emphasizing the need for teaching practices that restructure power relations in classrooms and their intersections with historicized injustice in local practice as a part of disciplinary learning. Drawing u…
A Longitudinal Study of Equity-Oriented STEM-Rich Making Among Youth From Historically Marginalized Communities
The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making programs. Building a conceptual argument for an equity-oriented culture of making, the authors discuss …
That's Just Gonna Make Them Upset: Youth Authoring Emerging Epistemic Ideals Through Rightful Presence
There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of affect as shaping youths' negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper we examine how power and affect shape epistemic negotiations as youth and adults designed a community survey during a 7th grade biology unit on str…
Supporting Teacher Visioning of Justice-Oriented Engineering in the Middle Grades
There are well-documented justice-related issues in engineering education. How do teachers begin to develop a way of seeing forward in their teaching, both in how they understand their role and their hoped-for outcomes for students, in ways that bridge the goals of justice with required engineering disciplinary expectations? In this manuscript, we focus on how teachers envision teaching engineering in ways that attend to the sociopoliticaldimensi…
Creating Hybrid Spaces for Engaging School Science Among Urban Middle School Girls
The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up to do so. The authors argue that such merging science p…
Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space
The findings reported on in this manuscript emerged from a design experiment conducted at a low‐income urban middle school intended to support the teacher in incorporating pedagogical practices supportive of students' everyday knowledge and practices during a 6th grade unit on food and nutrition from the LiFE curriculum. In studying the impact of the design experiment we noticed qualitative shifts in classroom Discourse marked by a changing role …
We Be Burnin'! Agency, Identity, and Science Learning
This article investigates the development of agency in science among low-income urban youth aged 10 to 14 as they participated in a voluntary year-round program on green energy technologies conducted at a local community club in a midwestern city. Focusing on how youth engaged a summer unit on understanding and modeling the relationship between energy use and the health of the urban environment, we use ethnographic data to discuss how the youth a…
Seeding an Authentic Community Making Culture
It Changed Our Lives”: Activism, Science, and Greening the Community
Desiring a career in STEM‐related fields: How middle school girls articulate and negotiate identities‐in‐practice in science
The underrepresentation of non‐White students and girls in STEM fields is an ongoing problem that is well documented. In K‐12 science education, girls, and especially non‐White girls, often do not identify with science regardless of test scores. In this study, we examine the narrated and embodied identities‐in‐practice of non‐White, middle school girls who articulate future career goals in STEM‐related fields. For these girls who desire an STEM‐r…
Crafting a Future in Science: Tracing Middle School Girls’ Identity Work Over Time and Space
The underrepresentation of girls from nondominant backgrounds in the sciences and engineering continues despite recent gains in achievement. This longitudinal ethnographic study traces the identity work that girls from nondominant backgrounds do as they engage in science-related activities across school, club, and home during the middle school years. Building a conceptual argument for identity trajectories, the authors discuss the ongoing, cumula…
STEM-Rich Maker Learning: Designing for Equity with Youth of Color
A Longitudinal Study of Equity-Oriented STEM-Rich Making Among Youth From Historically Marginalized Communities
The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making programs. Building a conceptual argument for an equity-oriented culture of making, the authors discuss …
How do middle school girls of color develop STEM identities? Middle school girls’ participation in science activities and identification with STEM careers
This study explores ways to support girls of color in forming their senses of selves in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) during the middle school years. Guided by social practice theory, we analyzed a large data set of survey responses ( n = 1,821) collected at five middle schools in low‐income communities across four states in the United States. Analyses focus on the extent to which key constructs that inform girls’ development …
Designing for Rightful Presence in STEM: The Role of Making Present Practices
Opportunities to learn in consequential ways are shaped by the historicized injustices students encounter in relation to participation in STEM and schooling. In this article, it is argued that the construct of rightful presence, and the coconstructed “making present” practices that give rise to moments of rightful presence, is 1 way to consider how to make sense of the historicized and relational nature of consequential learning. Drawing on theor…
Becoming in STEM: Developing a Culture of Criticality in the Space Between Person and Institution
This paper presents a single case study of a youth, Fall, tracing her STEM engagement from grade 5 through high school, across STEM spaces both formal and informal, utilizing critical, longitudinal ethnography. Drawing from social practice and critical justice theories, we present how Fall’s STEM history-in-person collided with the history-in-institutional-struggles, as a white girl growing up in multigenerational poverty who eagerly engaged in w…
Redefining entrepreneurialism in the maker movement: A critical youth approach
Background: This paper explores traditional iterations of, and new challenges to, the tightly linked discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation within the maker movement.Methods: In a yearlong critical ethnographic study with 12 youth makers, we investigated how youth engaged with and redefined entrepreneurialism through their identity work as justice-oriented, community makers.Findings: Examining youth experiences of entering their making des…
Hacking a Path into and through STEM: Exploring how Youth Build Connecting Pathways between STEM-Related Landscapes
Background/Context Minoritized youth from historically marginalized backgrounds continue to face systemic inequities in STEM. Existing strategies aimed at increasing diversity in STEM, which are guided by the STEM “pipeline” metaphor and are deficit-oriented, have yielded lackluster results. Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study This paper investigates how mi-noritized youth attempted to build connecting pathways between STEM-relate…
Beyond Equity as Inclusion: A Framework of “Rightful Presence” for Guiding Justice-Oriented Studies in Teaching and Learning
Current discourses of equity in teaching and learning are framed around calls for inclusion, grounded in the extension of a set of static rights for high-quality learning opportunities for all students. This essay presents a rightful presence framework to guide the study of teaching and learning in justice-oriented ways. This framework highlights the limitations of equity as inclusion, which does not adequately address the ways in which systemic …
Rethinking High-Leverage Practices in Justice-Oriented Ways
Justice-oriented teaching must address how classroom-based disciplinary learning is shaped by interactions among local practice and systems of privilege and oppression. Our work advances current scholarship on high-leverage practices [HLPs] by emphasizing the need for teaching practices that restructure power relations in classrooms and their intersections with historicized injustice in local practice as a part of disciplinary learning. Drawing u…
Collaboratively engineering for justice in sixth grade STEM
In this article, it is argued that processes of co‐production can support teachers and students in organizing resources for justice through science learning. Drawing upon a critical justice conceptual framework, critical ethnographic data from one urban middle school classroom during a unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities were analyzed. Findings describe how processes of co‐production yielded new Discourse threads focused on su…
Teaching & learning in makerspaces: Equipping teachers to become justice-oriented maker-educators
Making and makerspaces are becoming increasingly popular in K-12 schools. However, professional development on making for practicing teachers is under researched. We present case studies of two teachers’ sensemaking of making in a one semester graduate course on teaching and learning in makerspaces. The course was designed around three course tenets; maker as learner, as iterative, and as equitable and consequential. We utilize third generation c…
Supporting Teacher Visioning of Justice-Oriented Engineering in the Middle Grades
There are well-documented justice-related issues in engineering education. How do teachers begin to develop a way of seeing forward in their teaching, both in how they understand their role and their hoped-for outcomes for students, in ways that bridge the goals of justice with required engineering disciplinary expectations? In this manuscript, we focus on how teachers envision teaching engineering in ways that attend to the sociopoliticaldimensi…
Co-making against antiBlackness
This article focuses on how Black girls counter the antiBlackness that pervades the culture of STEM/making through their STEM-rich, community-engaged co-making practices. As youth engage each other, their communities, and the world, they make in ways that respond to a critical awareness of the world as it is, and with a desire to agentically author a world that could be. Using participatory critical/relational ethnography and lensed through ideas…
“We actually made something and solved a problem”: Exploring relationships between middle school engineering culture and girls' engineering experiences
As historically construed, both engineering culture and school science culture marginalize girls. With the focus on engineering in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), engineering education researchers have called for a more targeted investigation of how girls at the K‐12 level engage in engineering. This study investigates, through critical participatory ethnography, how 6th grade girls engaged in an Engineering for Sustainable Communit…
One World: Refugee youth incubating epistemologies toward rightful presence with/in community‐driven STEM
This study investigates how recently resettled refugee youth took up STEM‐rich making experiences at an after‐school community club in relation to negotiating their resettlement process. Using critical participatory ethnography grounded in sustained engagement with and in community, authors 1 and 2 worked with refugee youth through sustained STEM‐rich making programming where youth innovated and created products that they needed but did not have …
Intergenerational Asian diaspora mentoring in the academy: Mapping the terrain of allied political struggles through critical relational ethnography
This paper investigates intergenerational Asian diaspora faculty mentorship within the context of higher education in North America. Drawing on intersectionality, rightful presence, and third-generation cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), the authors theorize across three activity systems—predominantly white academic institutions (PWI), a collaborative research project (LSP), and critical dialogue space (ADS)—to understand their collectiv…
I'm not giving up on you: Exploring the roles of politicized trust and critical agency in the Scratch coding trajectory of two Black boys
This article looks at how a Black informal STEM educator supported two Black boys' learning opportunities in coding, specifically investigating how the establishment of politicized trust between the informal STEM educator and youth supported their development of critical agency. Using the dual lenses of socio‐spatial relationality and politicized trust, we explore how the socio‐spatial relationality of place, materials, and educator–youth interac…
Rigor and Representation: Leading the Next Five Years of JRST
Science Education research and its impact on theory and practice are critical levers for creating a more just and engaging science education experience for all learners. As we begin our five-year editorial tenure, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST), like so many academic journals, faces both challenge and possibility. We are honored to serve as Co-Editors-in-Chief of NARST's flagship journal, to uphold this publication's long trad…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (15 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Mathematics education (11 works) · Social science (9 works) · Ethnography (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works)