Multiple Relationalities in Critical Making Research (Poster 1)

• In Event: Practice and Positionality: Critical Instantiations of STEAM Education and Research

Abstract

Objectives
STEM education in the US is built on cultures of whiteness and dominance that reproduce persistent marginalization of people of color (see McGee, 2021). One approach to counteracting dominance is to adopt “withness-thinking” (Shotter, 2006) in STEM education research. We present research from a project focused on examining how teachers and students (re)negotiate their relationships to STEM learning through computational making (Authors, 2022)--emphasizing attunements to “rules” describing the behaviors of what participants make (Knight & Stiny, 2015). We share approaches for learning together–researchers, teachers, and students–by weaving together the multiple relationalities that constitute participatory design research.

Theoretical perspective
We view learning as the continual renegotiation of relationships–to what we learn, the materials we use, and the people we engage with (Nasir & Hand, 2008). Learning constitutes shifts in constellations of relations and practices (Nasir et al., 2006), for both participants and researchers alike, within particular learning ecologies (Lee, 2008). Participatory approaches are adopted in design research (e.g., Bang et al., 2016) as decolonizing methodologies (Smith, 1999). We present critical relationality (Authors, 2020)--interrogating dominant and oppressive dimensions of learning in disciplines, schools, and the world–as grounding for reimagining participatory approaches across the continuum of design-research activities.

Methodological Innovations
We present methodological advancements articulated through vignettes of design activities from the [project]. We developed a model for professional learning through computational making that encouraged re-making relationships to STEM teaching and learning (Authors, 2022). We present (1) the co-development of a framework to guide teachers’ relational explorations of STEM disciplines, tools, and materials, the ”computational making practices”, through collective, iterative data analysis of teachers’ own participation in making activities; (2) guiding principles for a “co-making, co-learning” summer program where teachers and students engage together as learners alongside researchers, developing projects that address needs in their communities; and (3) collective, participatory analysis with youth to deepen and expand interpretive stances toward research (Authors, 2016), described here in more detail:

In a science classroom intervention, three middle school youth built an automata that expressed their views on #BlackLivesMatter. They built a dynamic artifact that mediated discussions about race, power, and visibility. The researchers' initial interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) yielded one interpretation of students’ participation. The youth, now in high school, were invited to participate (two joined) in the analysis, offering guidance on reading and coding transcripts, after which they wrote their own analytical memos expressing their interpretations. We explore tensions in the interpretations made by researchers and students, and how those led to reflexive renegotiations of themes related to identity, creativity, student-centered projects, and social movements as contexts for learning science.

Significance
Researcher and participant relationalities are entangled in the ecology of the learning environments we design. Our methods must attend to and embrace this heterogeneity and multiplicity (Warren et al., 2020). The significance rests in developing approaches that ignore the allure of “truth seeking” in favor of developing designs, theory, and analysis with participants that are responsive and reflexive to the shifting relationalities ever-present in critical forms of making.

Authors

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Maria C. Olivares, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Amon D. Millner, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
  Presenting Author