Understanding Mediation Anew in Virtual Making and Tinkering With Teachers and Youth

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies of the Fifth Dimension: Designing Intergenerational Learning Ecologies During COVID-19

Abstract

Vossoughi, Escudé, and colleagues (2021) describe embodied actions to support student learning as the “physical, gestural, artifact- mediated— dimensions of learning interactions” (p. 2). In this regard, what is emphasized are the symbolic qualities of movement and gesture that are improvised in a situated activity. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic we are experiencing situated activities virtually which take on a new form of embodied interaction between the adult educator and the student. This paper examines a shifting understanding of what constitutes mediation and embodied action in virtual making and tinkering activities.

We base our analysis on a virtual making and tinkering club that has a primary goal to design activities that foster relational equity between teacher and youth (Digiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016), that is characterized by careful relationship building that is mediated by side-by-side use of shared tools. During the COVID-19 pandemic we were confronted with the following research questions: How does the adult educator navigate mediation virtually? How do adult educators distally mediate learning and co-construct with children? How do virtual collaborative interactions develop agency and a expertise in youth?

Participants of this Social Design-based study (Gutiérrez, 2018) included 7 undergraduate novice teachers from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as majors including cognitive science, engineering, business, and computer science. Participants also included 5 elementary and middle school students from schools that served a Latinx community. The study draws from 75 hours of after-school program video data (recorded from zoom sessions), 15 hours of interviews, and 112 digital artifacts produced by 24 participants. Data also included data analytics from a custom-designed digitized learning management system. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews transcribed, and digital artifacts analyzed using multimodal analysis (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Through our analyses we witnessed interactions reliant upon digital media (i.e., youtube and Tinkercad), digital maker tools (take-home simple circuits and craft supplies), and distal human interaction that required innovative negotiation with such tools. Through mediated reflection (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), teachers came to understand the importance of offering guidance and engaging in shared thinking rather than “taking over” with their hands; an affordance facilitated by distance. We further observed how multi-stepped activities that were present in our virtual making and tinkering club required shared materials (via take-home making and tinkering kits) as mediating artifacts (Cole & Wertsch, 1996) and pedagogical talk (Vossoughi, Davis, et al., 2021) that was guided by the adult educator’s close observation of the student’s engagement and paying attention to youth’s levels of frustration and joy as they engaged in remote joint activity. This work has implications for how educators design for “side-by-side” learning in remote learning environments.

Authors

• Adria Padilla-Chavez, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author