Make-her-spaces as Hybrid Places: How Design Thinking Enabled Girls’ Critical Literacies

• In Event: Lifelong Identity Work: Examining Identity Formation From Preschool to Adult Teachers in a Range of Local Contexts

Abstract

The study investigated how design thinking both enabled critical literacies and fostered new literacy practices for sixteen sixth grade Latina and African American girls. It also examines the ways that girls, who lacked access to digital tools in their makerspace (classroom), used design thinking to develop places in which to negotiate their gendered and racialized identities. Design thinking is a 21st century pedagogical approach that affords learners with the ability to problem solve through the creation of tangible artifacts much of which are digitally mediated (Stanford University Institute of Design, 2012). Design thinking has roots in constructionism theory. Papert (1991) argued for a theory of learning based in constructivist practices that afforded learners the ability to create tangible artifacts.
In order to make connections between new and critical literacies, design thinking and identity processes I draw on the work of Kwek (2011), Freire (1970), and Nasir (2012). While Kwek (2011) called for learning in preparation of a 21st century workforce, Freire’s (1970) focus was on the development of critical literacies that would transform the social world. Despite the difference in terms of the end goals for education both design thinking and critical literacy parallel as they call for critical thinking, action, and engagement. This paper begins to fill the gap that exists between design thinking processes and identity processes as it explicitly links design thinking with the formation of racialized and gendered identities (Nasir, 2012).
The study site was an urban middle and high school with a student population that was sixty percent Latino and thirty percent African American. Data sources for this research include observations of classroom instruction, formal and informal interviews with the focal teacher, informal interviews with students, and ethnographic field notes. As a result of the material resource of the design challenge students were able to conceptualize a change of place. They formulated relationships despite difference and envisioned a better community for themselves. Despite the limited access to technology, girls developed new literacies. However, the design of the process, not the process itself limited the development of Freirian praxis. In this classroom both the teacher and the students were limited by the practice of ending the process at the prototype stage. In other words, when done to completion, design thinking has affordances for both action and reflection; therefore it can be mapped onto Freirian praxis.
This work illuminates how design thinking affords educators with the opportunity to facilitate hybridity within classrooms that are constricted by a lack of material resources. The hybridity includes the use of high and low-tech tools in multimodal forms, and the design of hybrid places.


References:
Kwek, S. H., (2011). Innovation in the classroom: Design thinking for 21st century learning. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/group/redlab/cgi- bin/publications_resources.php
Nasir, N.S. (2012). Racialized identities: Race and achievement among African American youth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating Constructionism. Retrievable from www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html
Stanford University Institute of Design (2012). Retrievable from dschool.stanford.edu

Author

• Aaminah Norris, University of California - Berkeley