Making and Designing for Equity With Children and Preservice Teachers

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

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
EPIC is an after-school club focused on critical perspectives on making, arts, literacy and play. It is the center of a partnership between CU-Boulder and Sanchez elementary school. EPIC aims to (1) provide robust learning for elementary students, many of whom are Latinx, come from families that are living in poverty, and are undocumented, and (2) prepare a majority middle-class, White population of pre-service teachers to organize for equity. Our poster examines tensions between our goals for social justice and making. We view these tensions as openings for deepening our understanding and re-design of the EPIC activity system (Engestrom, 2000).

PERSPECTIVES
EPIC organizes for equity on multiple levels: (1) through the university-school partnership; (2) through the university course on sociocultural theories of learning; and, (3) at the club where ensembles of elementary and university students work on projects that are disciplinarily-rich and have potential for social critique. This activity system is a social design experiment (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) oriented towards theory-building through systematic design and reflection and challenging oppressive educational structures.

EPIC pedagogy aims to leverage ensembles’ diversity of experiences - age, linguistic background, cultural-historical practices, and interests - as resources for learning (Schwartz, DiGiacomo & Gutierrez, 2015). The club privileges a side-by-side learning approach where learners participants engage in "shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity” (Rogoff, 1994, p. 209). These dynamic asymmetries can support youth in enacting critical agency and authority in their learning.

METHODS AND DATA SOURCES
To understand the nature of the tensions between making and equity, we analyzed data sources including: (1) materials from design planning sessions; (2) video and photographs documenting ensemble’s projects; (3) interviews with EPIC participants about their joint activities at the club; and, (4) university students’ fieldnotes documenting how they organized learning and teaching at the club.

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE
We designed for equity at EPIC by challenging traditional adult/child power hierarchies through the community of learners (Rogoff, 2003) approach and by facilitating interest-driven, content-rich making projects. Two tensions we observed were that (1) participants engaged less directly with social justice issues on the making day in comparison to club activities focused on arts, literacy and play; and, (2) pre-service teachers perceived their lack of expertise in making as an asset and an affordance for side-by-side learning, rather than an area on which they needed to develop further knowledge and skill. The first tension raises concerns for our mission at the club to actively, and explicitly, challenge injustices and dominant power structures, and the second tension raises significant concerns regarding equitable access to rich making for children from historically non-dominant communities. In considering making at the margins, these tensions underscore the need to interrogate how disciplinary knowledge and unproblematic notions of “expertise” mediate and can reproduce power hierarchies. Developing new conceptions of expertise that include commitment to asymmetries of skill, knowledge, and interest is critical in this effort. We hope this reflection supports our collective work in this arena.

Authors

• Kelsey Tayne, University of Colorado - Boulder

• R. Benjamin Shapiro, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Emily Claire Price, University of Colorado - Boulder

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder