Co-Constructing Care in a School-Based Digital Design Studio

• In Event: 34.080 - Affective Potentials in Informal, Media-Rich Learning Programs: New Directions in Theory and Design

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
Enthusiasm for making and makerspaces in contexts of education (e.g., Halverson & Sheridan, 2014) have been helpfully tempered by critiques that articulate the ways the maker movement and makerspaces in educational contexts have not adequately explored equity pedagogies and designs nor adequately dealt with dominant views and designs of maker spaces—including those that focus on “neutral” technologies and disregard raced bodies (Vossoughi, Hooper, Escudé, 2016). We gratefully draw on these critiques to consider the premise, articulated by Vossoughi et al., that “equity-oriented design and research must begin with a clear analysis of educational injustices and how they shape the lived experiences and pedagogical needs of young people and their communities” (p. 215). This paper draws from ethnographic data collected over more than two years in a school-based digital design studio in which digital media mentors—working artists who staffed the digital design studio after school—operated on this precise premise that their designs for teaching and learning began with analyses of injustices and how those injustices shaped the lived experiences and learning needs of young people and their communities and worked towards co-constructing care for students’ lives and communities.

Methods and Data
The mentors and their students are participants in a study investigating teaching and learning in a digital media arts studio designed for and built within a diverse, under-resourced urban high school. The studio is open as a drop-in space after school, and mentors direct students towards areas of interest supported by the studio’s resources (e.g., computers and software for digital media production, video and still cameras, robotics kits, a 3D printer). In our ethnographic observations and interviews conducted, we have come to categorize much of the mentorship work as embodied counter-discourses (Author), meaning that the mentors and students co-construct counter-discourses to the dominant discourses of learning, living, and being in their school and community. These counter-discursive pedagogies are built, micro-genetically, from moment to moment through embodied interactions among students and mentors. Ontogenetically, the mentors learn and improve their practice through weekly meetings in which they explicitly review their progress on learning among themselves and with students.

Discussion and Significance
This paper focuses on one aspect of mentoring through embodied counter-discourse: affective mentoring. Throughout our observations and in analysis of video and audio recordings of mentor meetings and student-mentor interactions, we have found and analyzed many instances of affective mentoring, in which mentors, through conversations with students as they work together in the studio, co-construct care for individuals and for the group. Some examples of co-constructing care through affective mentoring include the following: understanding and managing anger, changing homophobic language and understanding people affected by this language, mentor-learning through sharing feelings about mistakes and missteps in mentoring, redesigning future approaches to constructing care through mentor meetings and conversations.
This paper therefore contributes an analysis of intensive efforts to integrate affective mentoring in a digital design studio and makes a case for more affective pedagogies in technology-enhanced learning settings.

Authors

• Nathan C. Phillips, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Virginia Killian Lund, University of Illinois at Chicago