Examining Multilayered, Intentional Storytelling as a Pedagogical Craft Move Within a Liberatory Makerspace

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Co-Designing Educational Justice in Chicago and Evanston: Examining Learning and Change-Making Across Time and Place

Abstract

This paper examines pedagogical design and educator learning within a summer STEAM and storytelling program serving Black and Latinx middle schoolers in Evanston, Illinois. The field of making/STEAM education is increasingly attending to the role of pedagogy and educator learning (Vossoughi, et. al., 2021), including the growth of ideas about learning and teaching that guide educators’ practice. This paper examines 1) the practice of debrief—a 45-minute daily session—across educators and researchers as a form of collaborative pedagogical reflection and planning; and 2) the relationships between interactions and ideas discussed within debriefs and moments of talk and activity within program experiences with children.

We address how ethical attunements to children’s thinking, to one’s own thinking, and to pedagogical mediation can support educators to enact justice-oriented values in interaction (Espinoza, 2009; Vossoughi, Escudé, Kitundu, & Espinoza, 2021). Recent research on community-based educator learning urges us to design environments where educators are supported to collectively dwell in and design forward from the ethical implications of their teaching (Baldridge, 2020; Mendoza et al., 2021). We draw on Goodwin’s (2000; 2018) ideas around substrates and lamination to conceptualize the relationships between educator learning within debriefs and the ways they organize learning with and for children.

The authors are a team of researchers and educators involved in co-designing and studying learning using collaborative, participatory design research (Erickson, 2012; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) rooted in a community-based partnership going into its sixth year. Data is gleaned from a large ethnographic corpus that includes documentation of long-term co-design processes, co-authored ethnographic field notes, audio-video recordings of 25 days of summer programming, student interviews and artifacts, and audio-recorded daily debriefs involving educators and researchers.

Our analysis focuses on close ethnographic interpretation of debrief (audio and jottings) and field notes related to case studies discussed in debrief. We trace and connect this analysis to emergent pedagogical practices that deepened participants’ attunement to learning and possibilities for justice-oriented teaching. These included: intentionally opening space for collective reflection around pedagogy; critiquing and revising curriculum and activity design; holding tensions that emerged between our values and their enactments in pedagogy; and co-reflection on children’s sense-making within verbal and embodied interactions as tied to nurturing educators’ generative pedagogical perceptions (Vossoughi et. al. 2021). We illustrate these practices through case studies of key debrief dialogues that took on the character of workshopping interactions as a team in ways that helped form ideas about how to witness and deepen children’s thinking through pedagogy, work with materials, and participation structures that foregrounded the deeper purposes of activity.

Our focus on debrief contributes a distinct perspective to the literature on research and practice within making environments by elaborating the powerful roles that deliberately mediated educator and researcher reflections play in the emergence of ethically-responsive pedagogy, as well as the conditions that sustained such reflections. We illuminate implications of this work for the axiological and pedagogical design of learning environments where researchers and educators co-construct ideas aimed at nurturing generative learning for youth of color. [498]

Authors

• Paula K. Hooper, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Teyona James-Harris, McGaw YMCA
  Presenting Author

• Melita Morales, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bailey Hartley, YMCA
  Presenting Author

• Arturo Alonso Munoz, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Shai Moore, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author