Probing Participatory Partnerships: Equitably Consequential Making by, for, and With Marginalized Youth

• In Event: 14.015 - Making Spaces for Youth From Nondominant Communities: New Approaches for Supporting Equitable and Consequential Experiences

Abstract

As makerspaces continue to appear across the nation, understanding and shaping this movement with an equity-oriented lens is important. A few studies (Buchholz et al, 2014, Halverson & Sheridan, 2014, Bevan et al, 2015) call attention to the potential youth-oriented makerspaces can have in supporting youth in framing, unpacking, and interrogating salient concerns and needs with the tools of science, engineering and communities so as to innovate unique solutions to address particular inequities in their lives.

Building on this nascent literature, we investigated equity-oriented making pedagogies. We are interested in understanding what role “participatory ethnography plays as a pedagogical approach” to supporting youth making. Questions include:
1. What role does participatory ethnography play in equity-oriented making pedagogies that support youth in the co-construction of new making practices, narratives and spaces that position youth with agency to make on their own terms?
2. How does participatory ethnography support mentors/practitioners/researchers in making-spaces to learn more about youth concerns and desires for making and the cultural practices they bring to making?

Our study is grounded in an expansive view of learning (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). This perspective challenges settled notions of what it means to participate in practice by making visible the boundaries of formal/informal, novice/expert, and past/present/future, and how these boundaries change over time and scale (Rahm, 2014). They provide tools for seeing learning/doing as situated within local practice, and as involving the re-mixing of ideas, tools and practices as new possibilities for becoming in-practice (Gutiérrez, 2012).

Data sources: participant observations in the two community-based makerspaces (78 hours), conversation groups with youth makers (36 hours), and artifact-based interviews. Data analysis was guided by our conceptual framework and member-checked by participants.

Participatory ethnography as pedagogical practice repositioned youth and making, and helped foreground youths’ relationality to people, communities, activities and timescales in collaborative, critical and connected ways. For example, as youth moved their projects across spaces through ethnography, they expanded the scales of criticality and connectivity in their work. The problems the youth hoped to solve reflected personal and community concerns linked to their community’s unique history and context (e.g., “keeping younger children safe when playing outdoors” and “helping kids make friends,” “feeling safe at night,” providing peers with “glamour and fashion” and “helping homeless people be outside in winter at night and feel safe and warm”). However, these problems were also entangled in systemic oppression experienced by their community, such as decaying infrastructure (e.g., limited street lighting), police brutality (e.g., need for protection) or economic concerns (e.g., the high number of homeless people), geography (e.g., harsh winters, short days) and youth concerns (e.g., peer relationships, bullying, glamour)

Four pedagogical principles emerge from these findings: Participatory ethnography as pedagogy 1) emphasize youth participation, not just as respondents, but as people who contribute to the research by bringing in their concerns; 2) situates knowledge production within local contexts in decolonizing ways, 3) engages youth in dialog across interacting scales of community concerns, and 3) contributes to the improvement of conditions for youth.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, Michigan State University

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro