Becoming a Milling Machine User: Gender Equity in Material and Embodied Learning

• In Event: Learning From Arts-Centered Communities: Possibilities for Educational Justice and Organizational Transformation

Abstract

The explosion of educational making and the maker movement has provided rich opportunities to analyze STEM learning through creative making (Peppler & Bender, 2013). In this context, Vossoughi and colleges (2016) build a framework for equity oriented research on making that centers the need to uncover educational injustices. There is a need for literature that 1) traces learning in spaces where youth creatively make with an embodied focus at the level of interaction, and 2) uncovers where injustices are enacted. This paper builds on the framing of learning as participation in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) with a microethnographic analysis of youth participation on Turing Robotics (all names are pseudonyms), a high school robotics team from a northeastern city. We explore a learning event where newcomers -- Maliah, Santiago, and Lucas -- observe and engage with the work as an expert youth, Jav, uses a 3-axis mill machine to fabricate a part for their robot.
We bring Goodwin’s (2010) concept of multimodal interactions in conversation with Pink’s (2011) notion of experiences as emplaced, or constructed through entangled social, material, corporeal, and historical ecologies of place, to explore how learning happens with bodies and materials. For this analysis we focus on bodily positioning (where are bodies in relation to materials, tools, and each other) and material constructs (the milling machine) as emplaced knowledge in development. We ask how much access is available to young women, like Maliah.
For analysis, we selected micro-analytic moments from one session of activity around the milling machine. We use interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson 1995) and ethnographic data to sketch learning how to use the milling machine as an embodied and material phenomenon. From analysis, we noticed that body positioning of newcomers is a collectively intertwined, and rhythmic achievement. As Jav leans in to view the metal piece being milled, the newcomers lean in to gain a similar sightline. Removing the machine’s milling bit is an embodied learning experience, where the machine provides direct physical and material feedback. Malilah’s ability to perform the task is questioned by Jav and Santiago, limiting her access to progress in the same way Santiago has previously. Faulkner (2007; 2009) describes similar experiences of women in engineering workplaces, where oppressive gender norms shape perceptions of what they can do.
Learning to fabricate a metal part is a creative process. The experiences of coming to know how to fabricate is a collaborative journey of becoming, where the hands, the relationship to the machine, and the body positioning, become part of the knowledge of what to do next. This kind of learning is developed by being with the mill as it is used. Facilitators of learning spaces -- STEM making and other creative practices -- must be reflective about the kinds of access learners have to developing the body orientations and material engagement future work requires. Equity and educational justice requires explicitly resisting the oppressive narratives that dis-place young women (as in this case), and young people of color, from such emplaced learning opportunities.

Authors

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Nyissia Spruill, New York University