Tinkering With Futurity: Leveraging Storytelling in Virtual Intergenerational Maker Spaces

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

Abstract

In our current context of a global pandemic and social and political unrest, social imagination is needed now more than ever (Roy, 2020). Particularly, we are in need of imaginings of more liberatory futures, namely for nondominant communities who have found themselves disproportionally disillusioned in a reality continuously undergirded by erasure and white supremacy. This paper aims to center imagination, dreaming, and how, with the help of digitally-mediated storytelling, non-dominant students in a Fifth Dimension (Cole & Distributive Literacy Consortium, 2006) virtual maker space called EPIC Futures get to manifest the futures of their dreams. Dr. Stephanie Toliver (2018) reminds us that students of color, particularly young Black girls, rarely get to see themselves in stories of the future that ask “what if'' or “what can be,” rather they deserve more diverse windows and mirrors through which to read and imagine their complex futures. Inspired by this necessity to develop these windows and mirrors, the questions guiding my paper are: How can we design the a maker space ecology for non dominant students to more deliberately engage in imagining the possible futures, tools, and learning of their dreams?; and how might teachers and youth leverage Afrofuturist frameworks and digital fabrication to concretely manifest these dreams?

As a Social-Design based experiment (Gutierrez and Jurow, 2016) the design of the EPIC Futures Maker Club was animated by equity-centered principles that leverage historicity towards the design of more just futures. Moreover, in leveraging the design lineages of the Fifth Dimensions I privileged saturating our maker space environment with a variety of tools (ideational and material) for engaging in speculative practices and narration of just futures for students of color (cf. Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019).

This study is further guided by the story work of Pinkard et al. (2017) with young black girls that positions stories as agentic tools for nondominant students to see themselves in STEM careers, and the work of Gutiérrez et. al (2019) that situates youth’s everyday practices as agentic tools in imagining possible futures.

Participants of this study include 6 undergraduate student teachers and 4 youth who participated in our EPIC Futures virtual making and tinkering club. Data included field notes generated by me (the coordinator of the program and researcher) and those generated by our student teachers. Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997) and were used to identify key moments where youth were narrating possible futures both in micro-interactions and in their digitally-fabricated artifacts.

My findings indicate that engaging in the creation and telling of stories around non-dominant youth’s everyday practices and future aspirations, deliberately creates portals for dreaming of possible futures, possible selves, possible future tools and desires. Furthermore, when nondominant students were asked to craft and share narratives around their everyday experiences as “content creators,” they began to see themselves as “experts” and started imagining possible futures in which they could build on and leverage their existing knowledge.

Author

• Ashieda McKoy
  Presenting Author