Designing for Connected Learning in a University Course: Crafting With E-Textiles

• In Event: Connected Learning: Evidence in Support of an Emerging Model for Learning Across Settings Among Nondominant Youth

Abstract

One persistent challenge in education is making formal educational contexts personally and culturally relevant to students (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995). This is also a challenge to proponents of connected learning who often focus on after-school and informal settings as sites of greater flexibility for building interest-driven learning than school classes (Ito et al., 2009). However, we should not overlook opportunities for creating formal courses that can leverage students’ interests while building academic rigor in specific disciplines. In this paper we describe and evaluate one such course that applied a design studio model (Sawyer, 2012) to a university course entitled “Craft Technologies,” where students created a series of e-textile projects with conductive thread, sewable microcontrollers, and various LEDs, sound buzzers, and textile-based sensors (Buechley, et al., 2013). We present analyses of the ways students’ connected their interests, relationships, and prior expertise to pursuing new knowledge in the domains of computer programming, electronics, and crafting.

Our research is informed by Azevedo’s (in press) theory of lines of practice which outlines ways that interest-driven hobbies are informed by preferences and conditions specific to each individual. Though Azevedo grounded his theory in free-choice hobbies, we apply it to understanding students’ connected interests and learning in this formal course. In the course, students completed a series of five projects that applied a design studio model of learning: open-ended projects with purposefully designed constraints in a social context that provided public constructive criticism and personal reflection. The course culminated in students’ final projects which were open-ended and personally-driven.

Data come from experiences and designs of 18 of the 20 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the course, focused on pre/post interviews (n=8) that solicited students’ expertise, motivations, struggles, and reflections on their projects. We also include students’ reflective blog-posts and surveys. We conducted a two-step open-coding analysis (Charmaz, 2000) of interviews; emergent coding focused on self-perceptions, interests, abilities, and relationships as exhibited in their projects.

Though projects contained constraints meant to teach specific skills like programming, circuit design, or material testing, students’ finished products also reflected individualized interests (Pokemon, quilting), prior expertise (fashion design, video gaming), and relationships (projects for a family member, projects that exhibited skills learned from a loved one). Students’ final projects highlight ways that their prior interests, abilities, and relationships merged with academic content from the course, often pushing them to pursue new knowledge that would enable them to complete a desired design. Consider Cady, a complete novice in computing and electronics at the start, who chose to make a light-up skirt for her niece as a final project. To accomplish her project she learned new computing skills (procedures) alongside new technology (accelerometer) to create a skirt with 18 lights that blinked in conjunction with spinning (see Figure 1).

Our findings have implications for unpacking students’ development of hybrid new interests that encompass formal learning alongside personal and cultural relevance.
In this paper we suggest open-ended yet constrained design tasks as a lever for creating connected learning environments in formal classrooms.

Authors

• Whitney King, Utah State University

• Deborah A. Fields, Utah State University