Creating Pathways to Design Through Imperfect Literacy Acts: Sketching in a Fifth-Grade Engineering Project

• In Event: Reconceptualizing the Learning Spaces Created by Elementary Classroom Engineering

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand the role of disciplinary literacy practices in engineering design work by investigating the ways upper-elementary students use multiple representations to construct knowledge, identify with the domain, and navigate different pathways towards collaborative engineering goals (Lemke, 1990; Moje, 2011). Building on the first author’s previous analyses of students’ interweaving of virtual and print-based texts when designing physical artifacts (Author 2010, 2014), we zoom in on sketching to investigate the roles that “mixing and mashing” (Jewitt, 2006) of texts play in students’ design processes. Specifically, we focus on learners’ creation of and uses for sketches while designing, building, and programming robots.
Drawing together literacy frameworks that emphasize how individuals alter and combine semiotic resources to create new texts (e.g., Kress, 2010) and Schon’s (1992) idea of designing as a communicative activity of deciphering design worlds, we argue that in the complex space of engineering, students develop multimodal representations of their own design world to engage and co-construct the evolving design world of their collaborative team. Although communication theorists have investigated the role of sketching in enabling engineers’ disciplinary need to communicate in multiple dimensions (e.g., Geisler & Lewis, 2002), little is understood about elementary designers’ sketching practices.
Data analysis relied on video-recordings and transcripts of work-sessions for six teams engaged in collaborative engineering projects (14 sessions) in their regular fifth-grade class. Transcripts of whole-class instruction and interviews as well as photographs of students’ sketches also informed our interpretations. Analysis drew from methods of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001) and sociolinguistic microanalysis of discourse (Erickson, 2004). After identifying all classroom episodes in which sketches played a role (29 total), we sequentially analyzed their elements (e.g., perspectives, complexity, lexiconic/iconographic communication (Luke, 2003). Following in the analytic path of Lewis (2000), we matched sketches to their in-context use to understand the interplay between characteristics of sketches and processes and functions of sketching practices.
Our analysis indicates that students did rich communicative work in their pursuit of a design goal and that various acts of literacies were integral to that process. Throughout the design process, students mixed and mashed these fragmented and imperfect literacy acts to build pathways between independent and collaborative conceptions of complex design worlds. Sketching served as more than a design tool; it served as a social glue within a co-constructed design world, supporting communication that gave way to collaborative pathways moving the design process forward. Students used sketching to facilitate communication with (a) group members, (b) the design itself, and (c) other stakeholders. Students worked with self-generated texts as well as self-generated uses of texts; however, no single text was powerful enough to sustain the evolution of a design. We observed a fractured and broken employment of literacy working to support the creation of a collaborative design world. Although all texts and uses of texts were imperfect and imperfectly suited for various reasons, somehow students connected broken literacy acts to serve imperfect communication that made a pathway through which students arrived at design goals.

Authors

• Michelle Jordan, Arizona State University

• Jamie Mae Collins, University of New Mexico