Designing Critical Recoding Artifacts as an Art-Based Method for Exploring Research Positionality (Poster 2)

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

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of arts-based methodologies in the learning sciences and education-related research as approaches “for radical, ethical, and revolutionary research that is futuristic, socially responsible, and useful in addressing social inequities” (p. 71, Finley, 2008). Given that Finley (2008) positioned critical arts-based research as useful for exposing oppression, targeting sites of resistance, and outlining possibilities for transformative praxis, this paper proposes drawing from artistic ways of knowing and being in order for researchers to reflect on and explore their positionality. Drawing from restorying research (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), I propose researchers creating “critical recoding artifacts”—artifacts that use computing technology to reimagine or “recode” dominant, sociocultural norms, languages, and designs about new technologies—as an arts-based methodology for understanding how researchers’ social positions interact with such “sociocultural codes” (Shaw, 2022) and shape the design and analysis of a study. Drawing from the historical tradition of African-American women’s quiltmaking as a medium for counterstorytelling, identity expression, and creating coded messages (Lavender, 2019; Davis, 1998; Cash, 1995), I describe the process of designing interactive, electronic quilt patches (hereafter, e-quilts) as “critical recoding artifacts” for exploring research positionality. Due to dominant forms of academic writing that value a positionless voice as a means to recreate authority, position, and power, texts that separate the self from the world tend to be valued more than personal accounts (Ball, 2008). However, as an arts-based research method, quiltmaking allows researchers to weave together linear and nonlinear ways of thinking and explore how different types of perceptions can engender new knowledge and understandings of experiences (Ball, 2008).
This paper is situated within a larger dissertation study aimed to support adolescent Black girls in examining the political and ethical dimensions of computing learning, for I codeveloped and facilitated a workshop in which sixteen, 14-15-year-old participants from an informal STEM program at a local science museum used electronic textiles (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg, & Kafai, 2013) to design e-quilts that “recoded” narratives about computing technology. As a Black woman, former science educator and artist, my myriad experiences have resulted in unique tensions regarding my onto-epistemological orientations toward learning with computing technology. For example, despite seeming innocuous and neutral, new technologies in the context of computing education have been shown to uphold “The New Jim Code” by reflecting and reproducing existing systems of power and injustices across society (Benjamin, 2019). Due to the ways Black women and girls are uniquely marginalized by computing technologies, the study design drew African-American women’s quiltmaking as a pedagogical model. Through engaging in the process of designing an e-quilt, this paper hopes to highlight how creating “critical recoding artifacts” provides a novel approach for exploring researcher positionality. Within the context of the dissertation study, I discuss my process of creating a quilt that (1) analyzed the dominant, sociocultural norms, languages, and technologies embedded throughout computing education based on my prior experiences and (2) “recoded” computing as reflecting the cultural practices of African-American women’s quilting (e.g., collaborative, community-building, and expressing of identity).

Author

• Mia Shaw, New York University
  Presenting Author