“I Am Science and the World Is Mine”: Embodied Practices as Resources for Empowerment

Those who are most marginalized, both culturally and economically, in society are concentrated in the nation's largest urban centers and have the least opportunities to be successful in school science or to pursue higher education and career trajectories in science, mathematics, or engineering. This article shares the results of a study in which African American economically disadvantaged high school students living in Philadelphia were hired as student researchers and had the opportunity to develop a curriculum enhancer — a movie entitled Sound in the City. The findings reveal that the students' capacity to act, or their sense of agency, expanded both through the process of making the movie and with the final movie product. During the production of the movie, the youth accessed multiple resources (both physical and human) to represent abstract physics facts in contextualized ways. Specifically, this article illuminates how they drew upon embodied practices that included rhythm, verbal fluency, and high energy in creating and filming the movie segments, as well as behind the scenes as they worked to understand the physics content. This study urges the science education community to consider how students' embodied practices can connect them to science in empowering ways that expand their capacity for action in multiple spaces.