Shifts in Agency in a High School Maker Class

• In Event: 34.028 - From Making to Agentic Participation: Perspectives on and Approaches to Fostering Epistemic Engagement in Making

Abstract

One important outcome from participating in maker activities is an increased sense of agency, including Stroupe’s (2014) notion of epistemic agency, where students move away from being “passive information recipients” and begin to take on “responsibility for shaping the knowledge and practice of a community.” Data for this poster come from a 15 month long study of making in a high school setting, in a weekly “pop-up” makerspace we created at the school. We fostered student agency by positioning them as capable problem solvers, and granting them autonomy to choose their own projects.

Data include weekly interviews, video recording during sessions, and an end-of-year interview. Analysis focuses on changes in discourse throughout the year. Preliminary analyses show that, over time, most students moved toward greater agency in how they positioned themselves as knowledgeable within the classroom.

For reasons of space, we focus here on one student, Laura. Electronics were not part of Laura’s main projects, but were an intermittent interest over the year. In her first encounter with electronics, she worked through a tutorial to blink an LED using an Arduino. She told us: “I want to master the whole LED lights thing… because I thought it was really cool.” Asked about challenges, she added, “You just have to memorize how to do it. I don't really have a good memory, and if I forget what goes where, it might not work out as well.” At this first moment in time, she showed excitement and interest about the topic, and conceptualized the intellectual work of electronics as memorization.

Her second experience came a few months later: “We were trying to connect all the cables and it was super complicated in my head, and then I figured out how to do that and I am good at it now…Now I know one specific thing that I really like and that I really learn well.” Here, she again emphasized her enjoyment, but also her competence. The task was still “super complicated”, but rather than just a memorization task, it was something one “figured out.”

A month later, she chose electronics for a teaching demo required in a different class. She reported: “I … took a breadboard, some LED lights, some batteries, some copper tape, and reminded myself or re-taught myself how to connect them to a breadboard. Like little things that I was taught that I am gonna teach in my teaching demo.” Here, we see a further shift – now she can control her own learning for a consequential school task. By the end of the year, she moved further, and was teaching younger cousins about electronics, positioning herself as an expert within her family.

Laura’s case exemplifies two meaningful shifts: one, from an epistemic view of electronics as something that needed to be memorized to something that involved sense making, and two, from a view of herself as excited but poorly suited to the present intellectual demands (memorization), to a view of herself as sufficiently expert as to teach others.

Authors

• Lee Michael Martin, University of California - Davis

• Sagit Betser, University of California - Davis

• Colin Dixon, University of California - Davis