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Making to Make Change in Oneself and One's Social World

Sat, April 29, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 221 D

Abstract

The California Tinkering Afterschool Network (CTAN) was a research-practice partnership involving a group of out-of-school time programs serving young people from economically and racially marginalized communities in both urban and rural settings. This Network formed out of shared concern that the spread of the Silicon Valley’s Maker Movement into low-income educational settings threatened to reproduce rather than challenge longstanding inequities in STEM education. As several scholars have noted, despite its self-representation as a transgressive, grass-roots DIY movement, Making as it was being marketed and expanded into educational settings was predominantly presented as heteronormative, individualistic, and even capitalistic (Buechley, 2013; Chachra, 2015; Vossoughi, Hooper, & Escudé, 2016), the same dimensions that have characterized approaches to STEM education that have historically excluded many communities from participation (Haraway, 1988; Lemke, 1990).
We adopted a transformative activist stance (Stetsenko, 2010), integrating cultural historical and critical pedagogy perspectives of Vygostky and Friere, to posit learning as a dualistic process of taking up conceptual, cultural, and critical tools in order to make change in oneself and in one’s social world. On this view, engaging young people in processes of Making supports their uptake of a range of tools not only to make objects, but to make themselves and to make their community. This approach allowed us to integrate the somewhat disparate research literatures on Maker communities and Making as individually empowering (see Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014 for a review). It focused us on how Making could, in economically and racially marginalized communities, develop empowered and creative and intellectual risk-taking learning communities, in which young people were supported to deepen their commitment to their ideas, their work, and the social group. As a research-practice partnership (RPP) network, we learned from one another, and the questions we asked in the end were not the questions we began with, as we drew on experiences and insights from across the network. Ultimately, as we came to better understand both the tensions and possibilities, we focused our work on how to support program facilitators, who generally came from the same communities as the young people in the program, to implement STEM-Rich Making in equity-oriented ways.
Ethnographic research was conducted in five sites over two years. We met regularly as an RPP team to review video data and field notes data together, jointly developed a coding scheme, and later analyzing data. Collectively we identified key equity-oriented dimensions of Making that could support young people’s deep engagement, and the kinds of professional development that OST facilitators needed to provide such support.
This poster will share the theoretical frame undergirding the study, the RPP processes for inquiry and meaning-making across the network, and the tentative design principles which we are currently using in Making professional development programs for formal and informal educators. 

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