Materiality in Making With Minoritized Youth

• In Event: Materiality and Sociomaterial Practices in Learning, Designing, and Making

Abstract

Purpose
Making has been regarded as an accessible mode of STEM engagement because it promotes designing and building with everyday materials. However, neither materials nor the historicized relationships people have with them, are always benign. Materials are infused with meaning, as they “reflect consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (Prown, 1982, p. 1-2). Relations to materiality structure how and why people make sense of and work with objects (Bajaras & Bang, 2018).
We consider minoritized youths’ relations with materiality as they engage in STEM-rich making (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2018). Research questions include:
What/how do minoritized youth engage in practices of materiality when making?
What relationships to materiality are relevant to minoritized youth’s making process and made artifacts?
Perspectives
We draw from material culture studies (Prown, 1982; Miller, 2005) which consider objects as reflexive of cultural expressions and human activities. We further consider mobilities of learning (Leander, Philips & Taylor, 2010), focusing on youths’ STEM engagement spatially and temporally, to explore the movement of particular ideas, practices, and meanings that are embodied in material objects and one’s historicized relations to/with them. Juxtaposing materiality with mobilities allow us to “plot a trajectory for things in their ability to move in and out of different conditions of identification and alienation” (Miller, 2005, p. 7).
Methods and data sources
Longitudinal critical ethnography was employed across two community making spaces serving middle-school aged, low-income youth-of-color. Data included fieldnotes, interviews, and artifacts, analyzed via open coding and constant comparison procedures (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).
Results and substantiated conclusions
We highlight cases of maker’s engagement in materials as they imagined, designed and refined artifacts in response to community needs over the course of 7+ months in response to community needs:
Youth co-opted, disrupted and retooled materials towards (a) re-inscribing new positionalities and (b) re-structuring relationalities to made artifacts.
The movement of co-opted/disrupted/retooled materials/artifacts over time, shifted the onto-epistemological boundaries of making in the youth communities, foregrounding the cultural and political dimensions of making.
Consider two African-American boys, Kelvin and Peter, who over 7-months, hacked a two-paneled tension-baby-gate to create one with a motorized movable panel, intended for elderly, less-mobile relatives who babysit toddlers. When presented with the snap-together electronics maker-tool littleBits, both rejected this material, and their positionings. As Peter explained, “I won’t be able to touch these in school. I can name the kids who can play with them, but it would not be me.” Peter’s father, a carpentry expert, shared advice on how to take the gate apart; the youth then co-opted/retooled a range of materials including dead-bolt rivets, wheels, motors, fishing line and LEGOs, to iteratively refine a workable design.
Scholarly significance
Insights from how youth frame materiality in making are used to offer implications for the design of equity-oriented making spaces for minoritized youth.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan