Fri, April 14, 9:50 to 11:20am CDT (9:50 to 11:20am CDT), Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel, Chicago, Floor: 1st Floor, Atlantic E
Abstract
Purpose
What do we mean when we say that agency is a goal of an educational makerspace? In a prior research effort, we answered this question by aligning our definition of agency with the designers of our focal makerspace, namely that agency is the socioculturally-mediated ability to make independent choices and actions (Authors, 2022). However, we started questioning how well this definition fit the vision of agency evoked by other maker educators, researchers, and participants (e.g., Letourneau, 2021; Quinn & Bell, 2013; Sheridan et al., 2022). To pursue this question, this study examines maker educators’ professional vision around agency.
Theoretical framework
We rooted our analysis in the construct of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994; Sherin & Van Es, 2009), which refers to the trained - formally and informally - ways of seeing the world that generate shared in-group interpretations of an event/data. We also root our analysis in frameworks that attend to moment-to-moment shifts in power (Philip & Gupta, 2020; Shah & Lewis, 2019) including how individuals position themselves or others as agentic and respond to those positionings. Intertwining these frameworks, we examine how professional vision shapes what researchers and educators view as maker agency, including what circumstances they consider to be extending or constraining maker agency.
Method & Data sources
We conducted video-cued interviews with 11 informal maker educators in May 2022, recruited through online maker education forums. The interview included questions regarding their maker education experience, views on maker agency, and pedagogical practice. The interview also focused on viewing and interpreting video clips of public goal announcements identified and analyzed in the larger study. Our focal clip (excerpt in Figure 1) was selected because the group - one child and two adults - engaged in extended conversation about what to make. After viewing the clip, maker educators were invited to narrate what they noticed about the clip and then reflect on how agency was or was not related to this moment.
Maker educators’ interpretations of this video clip and views of agency varied. First, maker educators held heterogeneous definitions of maker agency, ranging from the ability to make change in a community to learning tool-use for future agentic action, and with some maker educators, multiple definitions were held simultaneously. Second, maker educators tended to perceive the child’s emotional state as “overwhelmed” and describe the adults as “scaffolding” the child toward making an independent choice, and thus interpreted maker agency as extended in this focal clip. However, three of the maker educators noted the unpursued possibility of collaboration, which the child had highlighted multiple times as their preferred goal selection process. In conclusion, participants in a maker space (parents, children), maker educators designing a space, and researchers studying these spaces may hold conflicting visions of agency; this is not a problem but an opportunity to embrace complex notions of shared constructs. Embracing this heterogeneity is an essential part of resisting reductive visions of agency, such as solely prioritizing the child’s independence.
