Youth-Designed Makerspaces: Embodied Expertise Toward Making for a Purpose

• In Event: Youth Co-Design: The Possibilities, Affordances, and Challenges of Including Youth in Educational Design

Abstract

Objectives & Significance.
Makerspaces are increasing in public libraries, science museums, and afterschool clubs as a way to support greater access to STEM knowledge, practice and social networks (Peppler & Bender, 2013). However, unless these spaces more fully incorporate youth, they will not serve this equity goal. Despite the growth of the makerspace movement, makerspace participation and culture have been dominated by white, middle-class, male adults (Kafai, Fields, & Searle, 2014). We present an analysis of two youth co-designed makerspaces housed within a) a regional science center, and b) a community-based club, which had the explicit goals of reversing these trends.

Framework & Methods.
Our study is grounded in youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). YPAR challenges traditional ideas of who has the authority to produce knowledge and whose knowledge is deemed valuable. By deliberately inverting who frames the problem, who constructs research designs, and who interprets the findings, YPAR empowers youth who have been historically excluded to deconstruct the deficient views, oppressive systems, and subjugating discourses affecting their daily lives.

We worked with two youth action research teams to co-design making spaces/activities with the goal of fostering youth-centered equity-oriented making.
1. Community Center: 16 youth (ages 11-16; 13 African-American/3 white; 4 boys/12 girls)
2. Science Center: 17 youth (ages 8-16; 9 white/5 African-American/1 Latino/1 Indian American, 1 Hmong American; 9 girls/8boys).
Both groups of youth conducted 40+ hours of research/development over 12-18 months (2015-2017). Qualitative data include: participant observations, fieldnotes, conversation groups, interviews, and artifact collection. Data analysis followed a grounded theory approach, and included member checks by participants.

Findings.
Across both sites, we found two primary commonalities in how youth co-designed for equity-oriented making. First, youth foregrounded a playfulness that legitimizes: a) embodied expertise; b) accessibility through activities that bend norms of being/becoming; and c) sharing of ideas through non/traditional channels such as YouTube stations, making “rough draft work” visible, and opportunities for movement and voice. Second, youth worked toward a space and activities that allowed local knowledge to be valued as they a) learned/made with a purpose, and/or b) educated others on their making projects.

However, we also found that youth in the community center makerspace emphasized the importance of porous boundaries -- extending their “making space” informally to a wider range of spaces through workshops, sharable kits, and community-based activities, whereas the youth in the Science Center makerspace emphasized design concerns that would broaden access to the actual space, such as museum memberships, alignment with bus routes/hours, and opportunities to work there. These differences, however, illustrate youth’s efforts to understand and respond to how space shapes access concerns and strategies. These insights from youth co-design connect to socio-political, cultural-historical environments encountered and negotiated daily by youth who seek a place in STEM. They also connect to youth expertise about community, and how STEM knowledge and practices are acquired through navigating many communities of practice. In our paper we draw upon narratives of youth co-design to develop these themes.

Authors

• Youth Researchers, Impression 5 Youth Researchers, Impression 5

• Youth Researchers Boys and Girls Clubs of Lansing

• Micaela Balzar

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Day W Greenberg, Michigan State University

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro