Sewing STEM Solutions: E-Textiles and Crafting as Vehicles for Improving Next Generation Science Standards–Based Science Instruction

• In Event: Making the Future: Addressing Critiques, Transitions, and New Challenges in Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives: The Maker Movement (Peppler et al., 2016a,b), in which youth engage directly with STEM content through the design, prototyping, and creation of objects that are relevant to their interests and needs (Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014), has emerged as a promising avenue for engaging youth in STEM content and developing their problem solving skills, especially when two or more disciplines are integrated, such as science and computing. While Halverson and Sheridan (2014) initially conceptualized the making landscape in terms of makerspaces, making activities, and maker identities, additional research has elucidated further nuances. Engaging maker technologies in core content classrooms offers new opportunities for improving educational access and equity not afforded educators working in alternative contexts. Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, is one maker technology with a substantial track record of providing that broadened interest and shifts in self-concept around STEM ability (Kafai et al., 2014; Tofel-Grehl et al., 2017).

Emerging research examines the professional development required for inservice teachers to teach new disciplines like computer science and to integrate hands-on Making activities (Fields at al., 2018). However, little research has examined the impact of Making in classroom settings (e.g. Tofel-Grehl et al., 2017). In this paper, we examine several teachers engagement with e-textiles in their classrooms. We focus on the ways in which teachers engaged e-textiles projects to tackle the challenges of the learning objectives they seek to teach. Our discussion explores the ways in which teachers of e-textiles projects maintain the spirit of the maker movement while managing the real-world classroom constraints of time and standards obligations.

Methods: Using a mixed methods cross case analysis, we find indications that most teachers felt anxious about supply and classroom management while they felt confident about their ability to teach content through these projects.

Results and Significance: We share the cases of Brad and Marti. Brad, a high school physics teacher with 5 years teaching experience; Brad was able to engage students in coding to develop a new metaphor for teaching electric potential. Marti’s case examines the challenges for a new teacher over the first three years of her career as she engages making in her 8th grade physical science class. Findings across cases include noteworthy changes from curricular and instructional standpoints. Firstly, making afforded teachers an access point to content topics otherwise perceived as inaccessible to k-12 students. For example, using e-textiles, physics students were more able to “see” changes in electric potential. Secondly, teachers and students reported that making with e-textiles afforded them the opportunity to model scientific phenomena for richer experiences. Teachers articulated the ability to integrate the cross cutting concepts of the NGSS and focus student effort on modeling and data analysis. For example, while working with the temperature sensing lunch box, students were able to explore questions of thermal heat transfer and determine what insulators created the optimal environment for storing food at school. While classroom work resulted in concessions of the openness of the making process, it also afforded wide reach to students across schools.

Author

• Colby Tofel-Grehl, Utah State University