Creative Connections: Disrupting the Norm in a Community-Based Makerspace

• In Event: 25.045 - Creative Resource Leveraging and Critical Mobilities in Equity-Oriented Makerspaces

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines digital artifacts created by youth in an equity-oriented community makerspace to illuminate the ways in which digital media tools serve as sites of possibility for youth to push against existing narratives about who has ownership and knowledge about makerspace resources. We consider the ways in which digital tools offer opportunities for youth to creatively claim positions of expertise and power (Kafai & Peppler, 2011).

Perspectives
Using literature on makerspaces as sites for equitable creation (Authors, in press), our study also draws from the critical considerations of creativity (Banaji, Burn & Buckingham, 2010), multimodal composing (Vasudevan, Schultz, & Bateman, 2010; Jewitt, 2006), and critical uses of digital media tools (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010) to explore 18 youth makers’ digital media tool use as evidence of their public identity work and self-positioning as experts in STEM and their own community.

Methods/Data Sources
Data come from field notes / videos of a year-long participant observation with youth (225 hours) and more than 65 youth-authored digital video artifacts. Analysis involved constant comparative coding for iterative movement across data (Calabrese Barton et al., 2013; Kolb, 2012), using our conceptual frameworks (above) as a guide.

Results
We present on two main findings. First, youth video production emerged as (a) moments of self-expression, (b) deliberate moves to exhibit proof and ownership of knowledge/skills, and (c) a desire to showcase solutions and unique expertise developed for community needs. For example, upon successfully constructing a light-up greeting card, one youth urgently and excitedly requested a smart phone from an adult mentor to shoot a DIY “How To” video as a public display of his pride and as a portable and personally familiar/user-friendly platform for him to make the process/practices accessible for his peers.
Second, youth used multiple, multi-leveled and power-mediated opportunities to present themselves and their journeys in this space in imaginative, authentic, and assertive ways that creatively demonstrated their individual interpretations about what it means to have a voice in STEM. As one example of this, after realizing there was no reading material available for them on the subject of piezo pads (and that the vast majority of YouTube help videos are constructed by adults who are not interested in speaking to middle schoolers), youth critiqued and rejected the idea that only adults were privileged to publicly give/receive scientific knowledge with authority and agency. As a revolutionizing solution, youth created a series of short videos designed to encourage other youth to participate in and gain access to these resources. These youth-authored videos explain scientific and engineering processes and practices in ways youth described as less “boring,” more “accessible,” more “exciting and funny,” and more related to other young learners in STEM.

Significance
As digital media tools become increasingly available, we see here their potential for providing youth with additional space to declare and demonstrate their creative reclamation of scientific knowledges and making practices. Supporting this elevation of youth voice allows for affirmation of their existing expertises and support of their learning in STEM.

Authors

• Sarah Keenan, Michigan State University

• Day W Greenberg, Michigan State University