Tracking Equity in the Language of Making: A Functional Linguistic Approach

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

Abstract

A powerful window into youths’ cultural models for making spaces is through narratives of making (Authors, 2015, 2016). Who and what youth describe in a making space, the kinds of actions they attribute to them, and the causal connections they make in their narratives can, we argue, be helpful indicators of how youth see themselves in a making space (cf., McAdams, 2001). The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how the tools of functional linguistics (Martin & Rose, 2007) can be used to critically analyze youth narratives of making in order to better design equitable making experiences wherein youth narrate themselves as active and agentive learners and makers.

The 13 youth making narratives analyzed here are drawn from a larger experimental study of the ways 36 fourth-graders responded to different experiences of making with circuits (see Authors, 2015 for details). All 36 participants completed surveys of self-efficacy and task value, but a randomly selected group of 13 participated in a 5-10 minute interview with a researcher, focusing on what they made and their envisioning of future making. After verbatim transcription, these interviews were analyzed for a number of linguistic features, including main-clause subject and predicate types, activity sequences (Martin & Rose), and causative verbs. We then examined how the patterns in these features helped us better understand participants’ making experiences.

Three aspects of the language of making emerged that may offer diagnostic insight into the equity (or not) of the making experience: (1) Participants’ language often suggested the centrality of making rather than their role as maker, perhaps seeing themselves as more peripheral. Participants’ most common main-clause subject was a third-person reference to the project as a whole, a part of the project, or some construct like electricity. (2) In narrating themselves, participants talked about themselves relatively equally as doers (e.g., “I made a little robot”) and experiencers (“I got this idea”), indicating agency and engagement. (3) Participants narrated making as a sequence of activities that almost always involved some obligation (“You had to put the cardboard on”) indicating an understanding of the constraints of the pursuit, sometimes imposed by the facilitator, sometimes by their own design constraints.

Attending to the ways youth linguistically represent aspects of the making process—the intended product, themselves, their actions and thoughts, and connections among these entities—offers insight into what they see as their own and others’ roles in making spaces. Youth in this study represented themselves as makers in some ways, but also noted the obligations that this kind facilitated making space entailed. This kind of analysis is important for understanding which aspects of the “traditional” making experience youth are challenging and which they may be adopting. We present it as a method that can be used to examine whether there are systematic patterns, for instance, in who represents themselves as a maker and a doer in the space and who does not, and how these patterns evolve with changes in features of the learning environment.

Authors

• Abigail W Konopasky, George Mason University

• Kimberly Marie Sheridan, George Mason University