"Make Your Dream a Reality": Mapping the Nodes of Criticalities in African American Boys' Making Endeavors

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

Abstract

Objectives
Inequity and underrepresentation in STEM of youth from marginalized communities persists despite decades of school reform. At the same time, high quality out-of-school time STEM experiences can positively impact participation and learning in STEM, particularly among youth from lower-income communities (Harvard Family Research Project, 2012). The “maker movement,” in particular, has evoked interest for its potential role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning and attainment, with promising “democratizing effects” (Hatch, 2014). However, with a few exceptions (e.g. Halverson & Sheridan, 2014, Bevan et al, 2015, Calabrese Barton, Tan & Greenberg, 2015), little evidence show how the maker movement is particularly empowering of marginalized youth. Taking an explicit equity lens in probing for “democratizing effects” in making, this paper follows two teenage African-American boys’ two-year engagement in a community youth makerspace program. Our research questions are:

What are the nodes of criticalities that undergird African-American teen boys’ making endeavors?
How do these nodes of criticalities inform and shape the youths’ making process?

Theoretical Framework
This study is grounded in an expansive view of learning (Engeström & Sannino, 2010) as well as a Mobilities of Criticality (Authors, under review) framework. The former focuses attention on broadening participation boundaries and the fluid nature of learning as ideas, tools and practices are remixed in practice (Gutiérrez, 2012). The latter theorizes how vulnerable youth can agentically use the experiences suffered from their positions of peripherality as pivot points to move to a more empowered stance.

Methodology
We engaged in longitudinal critical ethnography (Madison, 2010) which privileges multiple perspectives, foregrounds dialogic interactions between researchers/stakeholders and allows for critique of potentially oppressive relationships. This approach was important as we attempted to make sense of how minoritized youth negotiate the norms and particular ways of being in a learning space, as they engage in STEM/Making activities. Data sources include rich field notes, interviews and youth-produced artifacts. Both youth participated in 90-minute, weekly makerspace program for two academic years.

Findings
We present the cases of Peter (aged 15) and Kevin (aged 14), both from low income families attending a middle school serving high percentages of African-American and Hispanic youth. After a brief youth profile for each teen, we explore three key making projects they each undertook, the last one as a group project where they worked collaboratively to hack a tension baby gate into a sound activated motorized one for handicapped or elderly child-caregivers. We examine the nodes of criticalities –in both senses of the word – significant & disempowering experiences – evident in the ways the boys framed the making projects and the design and making processes. These nodes of criticalities are related to materials access, the boys’ home and school experiences, and the new ways in which they are shaping the norms and culture of their community youth-makerspace. We discuss how these nodes of criticalities informed their projects and their reasons for how they went about making their innovations. Discussions of what “democratizing effects” were wrought by these nodes of criticalities concludes the paper.

Author

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro