Retire the Qualifiers (Culturally Relevant/CR): Homecoming of Making Through Cultural Making in and Beyond Context

• In Event: Cultural Making: Practices, Priorities, and Perspectives

Abstract

Rationale and Purposes: The primary activity of K-12 making (opportunities for students to engage in design and engineering practices) grew out of longstanding hobbies and cultural makings like woodworking, sewing, and electronics (Martin, 2015). However, researchers who pursued making through cultural making qualified it as culturally relevant (CR) with a dense focus on equity (e.g., Searle & Kafai, 2015). I assert that researchers developed K-12 making activities from hobbies such as electronics by actually refining ancient cultural making practices (Ada Lovelace developed codes from the jacquard loom, Skovsmose, 2015). Hence, diverting such relevance of cultural making to K-12 making to focus on equitable pursuits seems questionable. I assert that equity and social justice-oriented making is needed, but we should not achieve this with a “renamed” form of making. As aliens, how can we effectively solve the problem within a country? How can we (re)center K-12 making growing from cultural making without the renaming, but revolutionizing the field by cultural groups (CG) and their ways of making?

Theoretical framework and methodology: To activate K-12 making through cultural making in context and beyond, I engage the moral responsibility of CGs to get their hands on deck through social design experiments (Gutierrez & Jurow, 2016). They take ethnographies and home visits to video record and take photos of their cultural making. They transcribe the narratives from the videos and photos (Bang et al., 2013). I refer to this as a cultural-making testimonio. CG engage with their teachers and others globally and locally to dialogue and remediate from it, to innovate new tools, designs, and environments authentically and technologically, as they gain socio-critical and computational literacies.

Data sources & methods: In West Africa, Adinkra, a cultural making from Ghana, is one of the “renamed” and appropriated makings (Author, 2021). Following the methodology above, I engaged three high school teachers from the Ntonso community to recenter this “making.” Also, partly through debugging (Author, 2021), they detected injustice spaces for their material lives (Eglash et al., 2021) to create possible learning environments and tech tools that might sustain it (Bergstrom & West, 2020).

Results: The teachers generated testimonios after home visits on Adinkra making (design for cloth stamping). I analyzed how they remediated this from their dialogue and reconstructed it through coding and making turtle stitches (Figure 1). They concluded that making, maker education, and its renamed practices are all culturally irrelevant and not sustainable. They questioned, as Author (2021), that without the thought processes and language, how can one use computational models to make objects that are free from the imposition of content external to the cognitive repertoire of cultural makers?

Scholarly significance: If we want to (re)member and (re)center cultural making as already a part of making, we must foreground it as context-specific, which can be sustained and used in other places through testimonios (which are stores on a website.) The testimonio must be functional as the pre-planning thoughts and fabric of knowing from cultural making to all with no already made impositions.

Author

• Emmanuel Nti-Asante, Florida International University
  Presenting Author