Designing for Equity: Supporting Youth to Navigate Sociotechnical Resource Networks

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

Abstract

Supporting equity in learning environments requires us to listen to young people, but it also requires listening for the right things and asking the right questions. Our studies of young makers have shown us that, while content knowledge is an essential part of expertise in making, as it is in any domain, knowledge-centric views are insufficient to explain how young people come to be flexible and adaptive problem solvers (Martin, Dixon, & Hagood, 2014). Instead, we must attend to the meta-level understandings of context that allow youth to navigate the complex socio-technical networks of resources available to them (Martin & Dixon, in preparation; see also Bell, Bricker, Reeve, Zimmerman, & Tzou, 2013). For example, youth learn not only how to use a particular tool, but who to go to when it is broken, which websites offer trustworthy advice, and when to give up and use a different tool.

This conceptualization of competence as distributed and contextualized has shaped our approach to supporting equity in youth maker environments. We must look beyond content knowledge to consider how youth come to navigate the complex webs of resources available to them, and work to identify and ameliorate barriers as they arise.

Our study context is a year-long maker class we ran, in collaboration with a resident teacher, at a diverse Northern California public charter high school. Fourteen students (8 boys, 5 girls and 1 gender fluid) participated weekly from 9am to 2pm, in lieu of an off-site internship experience. Students worked as they wished on projects of their own choosing. We provided resources, helped troubleshoot, and encouraged students to be resourceful and reflective problem solvers.

To support our equity goal – all participants should have robust opportunities to be full participants – we worked to identify barriers to navigating the space. Such barriers are rarely simple problems, but more often evidence of enduring tensions that must be renegotiated (Engestrom, 1987). At the end of every session we employed short interviews with students that, among other things, asked them to identify sticking points. This question “worked” in our space, creating easy discourse with students. The issues students identified ranged widely, and included technical, ideational, and social barriers. We tried to identify the underlying tensions (which often required additional inquiry), and then iterated our learning environment designs (Brown, 1992).

In our poster, we will share a breadth of tensions and our efforts to disrupt them (cf. Ma, 2016). For example, we found that many students were uncomfortable interrupting mentors who were working on projects, a practice we implemented to position mentors as approachable co-learners. In response, we initiated a discussion on help seeking, changed patterns in how mentors worked, and sought to encourage existing practices of giving and seeking peer advice.

Our work links three components: a conceptual emphasis on fostering resourcefulness across networks, an equity goal of enabling all students to be full participants in these networks, and a methodological technique of interviews on sticking points as input to an iterative design research approach.

Authors

• Lee Michael Martin, University of California - Davis

• Sagit Betser, University of California - Davis

• Colin Dixon, University of California - Davis