The Affordances of Immediate Feedback in Making and Tinkering Activity: Shifting the Social Organization of Teaching and Learning

• In Event: 72.065 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 72.065-6 - The Interaction of Problem Solving and Learning Environments

Abstract

El Pueblo Mágico is a social design experiment in which youth and adults co-construct STEM artifacts in a hybrid intergenerational learning ecology. This paper focuses on ‘Making and Tinkering’ practices to examine the partner-like relationships and side-by-side learning that emerges as both novice teachers and children engage in the joint activity of making, re-making, and designing STEM artifacts like ‘Squishy Circuits’. Grounded in sociocultural theory, and situated within Nasir’s (2012) work on Racialized Identities, we draw on a corpus of data including weekly participant-observer field notes and interviews over one year, to examine how tinkering activities afforded immediate feedback and the necessary social conditions for learning, in ways that created more symmetrical social relations and participation structures.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley