Reimagining Relationships and the Division of Labor in Designed Joint Activity: The Affordances of Making and Tinkering Activities in a Culturally Diverse, Hybrid Learning Ecology

• In Event: 60.037 - Designing Possible Futures for Youth From Nondominant Communities: Teaching, Learning, and Designing in the El Pueblo Mágico Ecology

Abstract

As a social design experiment, El Pueblo Mágico privileges opportunities for youth to become designers, both of new artifacts and new identities. This paper focuses on the design of one such opportunity: Making and Tinkering, in which youth from nondominant communities are brought into STEM activities that push on traditional arrangements of divisions of labor and their inherent hierarchical social relations in educational settings. Grounded in sociocultural theory, and situated within Nasir’s (2012) framework elaborated in Racialized Identities, we draw on a corpus of ethnographic data that includes weekly observations and interviews collected over one year, to examine the affordances and constraints of the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities. Specifically, we focus on joint activity to analyze shifting interactions over time, in order to understand how tinkering practices afforded distributed expertise in ways that facilitate more symmetrical relationships and shared practice. Such practices, we argue, support the design of equitable, transformative learning spaces.

Despite the hybrid, informal nature of the learning ecology, the novice teachers tended to position themselves as the epistemic and pedagogical authorities upon entering the educational space. Yet, because Making and Tinkering activities in this ecology are socially organized in ways that privilege the repertoires of practice and ingenuity of youth from nondominant communities, we observed shifts in the novice teachers’ positionality within practice, in ways that troubled their longstanding notions about what it meant to be a ‘teacher.’ Youths’ proclivity to “dive right into the practice” (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013) of making and remaking STEM artifacts often surprised the novice teachers. We found this to facilitate numerous instances of “role reversal” between expert and novice- a central tenet of a sociocultural approach to learning. The social organization of the practice also required all participants to physically position themselves at the same level with each other, while soliciting a multiplicity of hands. We found that this repositioning re-mediated the traditional spatial hierarchies of an educational space and heightened joint engagement in shared learning activity.

In line with the social equity goals of the larger social design experiment, the particular activities of Making and Tinkering motivated the novice teachers to critically examine unexamined assumptions about the potential of learners from nondominant communities. In jointly creating STEM artifacts such as Squishy Circuits and Scribbling machines, the intergenerational learning ensembles began to leverage the cultural, linguistic, and historical diversity of the various ‘makers’ of the tinkering space. In particular, we found that designing STEM-oriented activities, in which everyday knowledge and cultural practices could be leveraged towards learning, promoted shifts in novice teachers’ understandings of teaching and learning. These shifts in understanding and practice, we argue, are critical to designing for new pedagogical imaginations, in which all youth can be repositioned as valued partners in learning.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley