Using a critical ethnographic participatory research approach and a new analytical method of critical participatory co-analysis, I worked with youth research partners to explore their engagement in STEM learning over time and space. We examined how youth navigate STEM learning spaces, how they act to reimagine and recreate the world around them, and how different practices and resources support learners' critical mobilities, enhancing their efforts to construct STEM pathways to their desired futures.Youth seek desired futures in increasingly complex and multilayered ways with agency and purpose. Institutional structures have consistently demonstrated patterns of working against these efforts, especially for Youth of Color and youth from low-income communities (National Science Foundation, 2019). Learning ecologies are layered with power in complex and dynamic ways that position and constrain youth pathway efforts, increasing the urgency of understanding youth perspectives on how structures can better support their efforts to build their futures with STEM. I sought youth perspectives on practices of their learning mobilities and geographies, with special attention to critical out-of-school mobilities of youth who were seeking STEM-oriented futures. I used a critical justice definition of equity to examine the complexity of youth pathway efforts in systems of power that mediated resource access and influenced their purposes, perceptions, and actions. Questions included: How do youth who engage in informal STEM programs construct pathways across their learning and development spaces towards desired futures in STEM? What do their pathway-making efforts look like and include over space and time, how are efforts structured/supported, and how do youth, in their own words, understand those efforts?I partnered with five youth to learn more directly from their perspectives as members of communities historically marginalized in STEM (Youth of Color from low-income communities in Michigan). I had known and worked with youth research partners for years through my teaching practice in an out-of-school (informal) STEM engagement program. We co-generated data (including multimodal portfolios, representations, and narratives), and we conducted critical ethnographic participatory research to better understand the complex components, structures, and directions of their pathways. We then developed an innovative approach for co-analyzing the research data we had co-constructed together, critical participatory co-analysis. This helped me to arrive at findings that were built from multiple data points and perspectives, acknowledging the legitimacy of youth expertise over their own lived experiences and pathway contexts.I found that youth constructed STEM pathways through practices of a) navigating the world as it is, b) working towards the world as it could be, and c) processes of becoming. These practices demonstrated how youth experienced and made sense of their pathway construction efforts within and against the worlds in which they lived as they moved towards their futures. Findings rethink what pathways include, how youth navigate the world towards their desired futures, and how they reconstruct their world in order to reach that future. This advanced a) understandings of learning ecologies and pathways, b) methodologies and methods for learning about pathways, and c) knowledge on equity in informal STEM learning, with implications for researchers and practitioners.
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