Fabricating Fabulous Futures: Designing Speculative Learning in Making and Tinkering Ecologies (Poster 1)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

Abstract

Objectives
Everyday digital technologies play an important role in mediating human activity that is socio-political and humanizing. This poster examines how these mediating tools are used in speculative fabulation that is about fantastical new world-making in times of multiple crises. The work presented builds on previous projects that have examined how everyday cultural practices mediate consequential learning that is transformative for communities of color, specifically in making and tinkering (digital fabrication).

Theoretical Framework
This poster explores considerations in speculative designs of new possible futures that privilege the hopes, dreams, and desires of young learners (Banu, 2015; Mirra & Garcia, 2020), especially on the heels of multiple global pandemic and social unrest. It is in the active design of the kind of world that learners want to see that consequential and powerful learning happens (Jurow & Shea, 2015). Historically marginalized and oppressed communities are especially adept at engaging in what I see as cyborg speculative fabulation, which is characterized by an augmentation of their bodies to carve and craft glimpses of hope and possibility in what Haraway (2014) describes as “worlding ‘naturaltechnical’ worlds [. . .], worlds needy for care and response” (p. 242). Indeed, on the heels of a global pandemic and social rebellion, the world is in need of healing, and in the following I examine how fabulation that is characterized by Cyborg Sociopolitical Technical Reconfigurations are part of the learning and development that non-dominant learners engage in designing toward a healed world and sustainability of its human and more-than-human inhabitants.

Methods
Two social design-based studies (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) draw from ethnographic analysis of two teacher education courses as well as two after-school programs focusing on digital fabrication and making and tinkering. Participants included 22 undergraduate pre-service teachers and 10 middle school students from schools in Latinx communities. The data sources were triangulated using two main processes: (1) analysis of collaborative activity between teachers and youth in a making and tinkering learning ecology, and (2) the generation of open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of observational field notes, writing, and interviews.

Findings
Collaborative activity, where expertise is distributed, emerged as pre-service teachers and youth collectively engaged with everyday socio-political issues via making and tinkering activities. This poster highlights cyborg sociopolitical technical reconfigurations, where learners assembled ideational and material tools to craft objects of learning activity that went beyond those established by schooling and imagined new possible futures.

Significance
Designing learning ecologies for pre-service teachers and non-dominant youth, fosters an engagement with everyday dilemmas in ways that serve as catalysts for further learning and the new world-making of speculative fabulation.

Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder