Not Just "Babysitters": Building on After-School Educators' Funds of Knowledge to Define Learning Through Making

• In Event: Making at the Margins: Engaging Underserved Communities in Maker Technologies, Activities, and Spaces

Abstract

Introduction & Background
At an East Oakland school serving nondominant students, afterschool educators voiced concern about power dynamics regarding their in-school educator colleagues who: 1) viewed afterschool staff as “babysitters” and inconsequential to student learning, and 2) were majority white middle class, unlike afterschool staff who better reflected the student demographic. In response to this problem of practice, recognizing that afterschool education is important for youth (Afterschool Alliance, 2015) and professionalization of informal educators has been a challenge due to high turnover rates (Fleming, 2012), we formed a research-practice partnership (RPP) between the afterschool educators, the Exploratorium, and University of Washington. While the RPP was formed to explore how STEM learning in afterschool Making programs can support the school day through a sustained, mutual, and pragmatic collaboration (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013), the partnership also led to addressing power dynamics between informal and formal education at the school. This effort was informed by third-generation cultural historical activity theory that prioritizes focusing on dialogue, varied perspectives, and power hierarchies when engaging multiple activity systems within a network (Engestrom, 1999; Roth & Lee, 2007).

Challenging the notion that afterschool educators were just “babysitters,” this project built upon their funds of knowledge to inform school-day STEM learning through equity-oriented making. Our partnership began by identifying the types of inequities youth faced and how afterschool educators could address those inequities. Afterschool Making was seen as an opportunity to address inequity by welcoming youth perspectives, expertise, and culture in designing/building projects that offered multiple entry-points to learning STEM in ways that could positively impact youth’s lives.Our RPP sought to answer the following question: How can afterschool educators’ analyses of student learning support the development of a Making learning framework that informs connections between afterschool and in-school STEM education?

This study included participant observation (Erickson, 1998) of monthly meetings over 3 semesters during which researchers and afterschool educators jointly analyzed student learning data from informal programs. Data sources (audio recordings, photographs, fieldnotes, and interviews with formal/informal educators) were analyzed multiple times using a grounded theory approach to identify common codes, themes, and categories, as well as lines of contrast (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Results describe how informal and formal educators gained new perspectives about student learning through dialogue with one another. Afterschool educators created presentations analyzing informal student learning that were shared with in-school staff. The work of afterschool educators became newly visible to in-school staff, and afterschool educators reported an improved sense of pride and inspiration in their work. Differences in learning contexts between afterschool and in-school served as productive tensions through which to surface new ways of thinking about student learning across contexts. Such thinking informed the creation of a learning framework for understanding how learning through making can support STEM learning in school time. Building an RPP that centered on informal educators’ perspectives served as an important means for countering the power hierarchies that initially pushed them to the margins.

Authors

• Jean J. Ryoo, UCLA

• Bronwyn Bevan, University of Washington