Making Publics: The Iterative Design of High School Makerspaces

• In Event: Reclaiming "Failure"? The Iterative Dimensions of Learning Through Making

Abstract

Objectives: This presentation examines the tensions that emerged when a new public high school instituted makerspaces organized around iteration, design, and participatory learning within a competency-based school model in a resource-challenged urban school district in the northeast. The paper presents findings from the school’s first year, focusing on the development of one of three school-based makerspaces—the Media Innovation Lab.

Framework: This study is premised on the idea that to fully participate as active citizens in their communities and the world more broadly, young people must become producers and makers of their own content who understand how different communication technologies function (Ito et al., 2013; Jenkins et al., 2006; Papert, 1980; Author 3, 1996). This study adopts a sociocultural orientation to literacy (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) to understand the literacy dimensions of making as situated within particular cultural and ideological contexts.

Methods/Data: The presentation reports findings from the first year of a four-year design research study (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2003) that follows 115 high school freshmen in three makerspaces, investigating the development of their communication and representation practices and problem-solving capacities. In the first year, researchers worked with stakeholders to collect a wide variety of qualitative data across three design cycles, using the data to inform design of the Media Innovation Lab. Data collection included extensive field notes, video and audio, youth artifacts, surveys, and interviews. Data analysis included recursive process, thematic, and design coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Findings: The Media Innovation Lab became progressively more focused on connecting to the ‘real world’ across the three design cycles. The lab emphasized the importance of trial and error, experimentation, and design thinking as youth created media for expanding ‘publics’, but these iterative, outward-oriented practices sat in uneasy alignment to the school’s competency-based curriculum and assessment practices. This contradiction left students motivated to participate in the lab but unsure about how their participation ‘counted’ in the school. As youth addressed real world problems through their media projects, however, they re-positioned themselves in relation to new audiences, as change agents focused on issues of equity and social justice. This public dimension of the media lab work motivated students to iterate and improve on their projects even in the face of uncertainties about the ‘value’ of such practices within the broader context of school.

Significance: This presentation outlines several challenges to implementing an innovative learning model that integrates making in a standards-based school context, an area that has not yet been widely researched. The study highlights the tensions that emerge when an ethos of iteration and risk-taking bumps up against the realities of performance assessments and evaluation, particularly in light of the fraught history of ‘failure’ for already marginalized students in a ‘failing’ urban school district. The conference theme about public engagement is particularly salient to the ways young people addressed pressing social problems by creating media for multiple publics and in so doing created counternarratives to reframe predominant (deficit) discourses about youth.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Theodore P. Nichols, University of Pennsylvania