Black Love: a conceptual framework for Black youth within a community-based informal STEM program

Abstract This article presents a conceptual framework, Black Love, to support Black youth’s STEM learning in a community-based informal STEM program. The Black Love framework is emergent of Worsley’s on the ground work within the community and facilitation of STEM to Black youth as a Black woman. Black Love draws from the theoretical frameworks of politicized care and rightful presence to look at the educator–youth relationship and youth’s perspective of their presence within the STEM program. It asks the question: What does it mean to engage in informal STEM teaching and learning when the environment is undergirded in the principles of Black Love? Participatory design research is used to look at the co-constructed culture of STEM learning environments. From the data, two vignettes are presented that focus on; (1) STEM-related onto-epistemologies and (2) critical relationality focused on integration of youth voice and interest.