A Close Analysis of the Pedagogical Architecture in a Making and Tinkering Setting

• In Event: 45.032 - Educational Dignity in Making and Engineering Spaces Developing Close Accounts of Expansive Pedagogy, Learning, and Self-Determination

Abstract

Empirical studies of making/tinkering tend to foreground individual learning processes and outcomes rather than joint activity or explicit analyses of teaching (Author & Colleague, 2014). This tendency suggests that pedagogical structures were minimal, or results from a methodological and conceptual decision to minimize explicit attention to pedagogical design, even if it was a significant part of the learning process. When educators are discussed, they are often framed as “facilitators,” “guides,” or “coaches,” a discourse that tends to treat the practices associated with “teaching” as inherently didactic or problematic (Authors, 2016). We worry that an over-reliance on child centered pedagogies that emphasize the avoidance of direct assistance overlooks the powerful role intentional teaching can play in supporting expansive and dignifying forms of co-thinking and learning (Colleague & Author, 2014) as well as the need to make pedagogical structures visible within research on making.

To attend more closely to the deep intersections between cognitive, pedagogical, and relational processes within making environments, this paper closely examines the pedagogical architecture of the Tinkering Afterschool Program (TAP), a partnership between a science/art museum and Boys and Girls Clubs serving predominantly working class students of color in a large metropolitan area. We draw from architectural metaphors to make visible the intentionality of design, the ways pedagogical structures can open up particular kinds of embodied and spatial experiences, and the significance of the pedagogical “how”—the affective and relational texture of various forms of mediation and assistance. To this end, we ask: What are the specific discursive and interactional qualities of pedagogical mediation in this setting? Which pedagogical practices support intellectually and culturally generative experiences with making, and with one another? We pursued these questions through a systematic ethnographic and interactional analysis of data set that includes 20 extensive fieldnotes, audio-video recordings (80 hours), interviews with students, educators and parents, photographs of children’s artifacts and activities, and daily recordings of debriefs among program staff.

Our findings elucidate 1) The precise and often artful language used to ground scientific/artistic explorations and encourage wide forms of “disciplinary talk”, as well as how these forms were picked up by children further downstream in time; 2) the significantly high number of instances in which educators made efforts to better understand children’s ideas and goals before suggesting ideas or courses of possible action; 3) the consistent co-occurrence of pedagogical acts that reflected the value placed on epistemic heterogeneity (Roseberry, et. al., 2010) with codes attending to educational dignity, or the subjective experience of value and worth on the part of students (Colleague & Author, 2014); and 4) key instances of direct assistance or explicit teaching that opened up new forms of engagement and intellectual joy—a finding that problematizes common pedagogical binaries (e.g. adult vs. child centered) in the field. We conclude by exploring what becomes possible when educators in makerspaces come to think of themselves and the participants with whom they work as architects of learning, makers of experiences.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Ava Jackson, Northwestern University

• Arturo Alonso Munoz, Northwestern University

• Ruben Echevarria, Northwestern University