STEM IDENTITY PLAY

In this project, youth are positioned as creators rather than consumers of media. As such, this project will contribute to understanding to how digital storytelling can cultivate youth agency with stories that educate and move others. A primary contribution to the advancement of knowledge is our proposal to create and refine a grounded theory of identity play, a construct that, to our knowledge, is currently absent from the STEM education literature. Rather than viewing growth as becoming more scientific or movement towards STEM, identity play is expansive, not constrained by structures, so that growth is non-linear and networked. It may involve things like trying out, dismissing to find a better alternative, stretching, and connecting interests with no prior connection. Digital storytelling, coupled with scientific fieldwork, may lend itself well to promoting identity play. We investigate this potential.

*Please note that our research in theorizing STEM Identity Play is currently a work in progress.

Identity Work vs. Identity Play table, informed by Ibarra and colleagues’ work (2020):

  • Identity work is the forming, maintaining, and transforming one’s identities and worlds through personal actions and social and cultural historical interactions (Holland & Lave, 2001). It involves managing the interplay between personal agency and multi-level social structures, aligning oneself with or actively transforming cultural expectations and norms, and developing a sense of self that is coherent and meaningful within the various contexts of one’s life (Holland et al., 1998; Holland & Lave, 2001).

  • Identity play is a construct from organizational studies (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010) which we expanded upon in a recent study of middle school youths’ STEM learning (Carlone & Mercier, 2023). We define identity play as the exploratory process of trying out various narrations and performances of provisional selves (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010). Identity play involves playful self-discovery, imaginative engagements that deviate from expectations or self-understandings, and exploration of possible selves (Ibarra & Obodaru, 2020). We view identity play as different forms of self-making that comes from the horizon-expanding and novel aspects of an experience, especially in “Not-Like-Me,” “Like-Me,” and “Let Me See” spaces (Carlone & Mercier, under review).

See presentation below for our recent research on Identity Play:

Carlone, H. B., & Mercier, A. K. (2023). Identity Play: Nonlinear and Agentic Aspects of Middle School Youths’ Self-Making. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2023, pp. 1342-1345. International Society of the Learning Sciences.