"Trying to Solve Darkness": Youth-Makers' Engineering Solutions to Community Problems

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

Abstract

Purpose:
What do youth want out of their making experiences and why? How might these concerns be attended to by making space designs and pedagogical approaches? While the maker movement has been touted as the latest panacea that would democratize STEM education, there is little evidence that the dominant culture of the maker movement has been broadly shaped by a diverse audience over a sustained period of time. As science education teachers and researchers committed to equity and to supporting historically underrepresented youth in becoming empowered with STEM expertise and know-how, we ask the following questions:
1. How do youth seek legitimacy in and through their STEM-rich making?
2. What aspects of their lived experiences across spaces do youth invoke and leverage on in their bid towards legitimacy, in their STEM-rich making? How are these efforts by youth supported in the making space?

Theoretical Framework
We draw from two frameworks, critical pedagogy of place (Grunewald, 2003) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). The former is anchored in decolonization and reinhabitation processes that work in concert towards living well in beneficent and sustainable ways. Intersectionality not only highlights tangled webs of oppression, but urges the formation of dynamic alliances towards social transformation, once these interconnecting webs can be named, identified and understood.

Methods & Data
We employed critical, longitudinal ethnography over two years (2014-2016) as the research method in this study. Described as “critical theory in action” (Madison, p.14, 2011), qualitative researchers utilize the tools of empirical research in an activist manner to address and unmask injustices in particular lived domains, working towards transformation for social justice. Data generated included artifacts, weekly youth conversation groups, and video analysis capturing youth interaction with STEM and community experts at various stages in their design process. Data analysis involved multiple stages and levels of coding based on procedures for open coding and method of constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Findings
We present two case studies --Tamzin’s lighted and alarmed cautious hat for homeless youth and Thomas & Tara’s how-to making videos-- to illustrate two key findings: 1) In the what, why and how of their making, youth operated from a plurality of salient identities reflective of their lived experiences, often entrenched in systemic oppressions. We identify axes of oppression along the following lines: race, gender and socio-economic class. We unpack how youth themselves were cognizant of these axes of oppression in the ways in which they read injustices that framed their making. 2) Decolonizing & Reinhabiting “normative” STEM & making: what counts as important to make in a STEM-rich making space. We examine how the processes of decolonization and reinhabitation through critical making, and across scales took place and how they were supported by efforts to interactionally leverage community ethnography and Just-in-time STEM activities to inform their making design.

Significance
To promote equity in engineering/making, it is essential we understand who youth-makers are, what issues they care about, and how making can be used as a tool to address injustices in youths’ everyday lives.

Authors

• Keith Miller

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Carmen Turner, Boys & Girls Club of Lansing

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan