Educator Learning and World Making Through a Feminist Abolitionist Lens in a STEAM Middle School Program

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Creating Spaces of Inclusion Across Disciplines (Table 37)

Abstract

Researchers have highlighted how makerspaces can reinforce oppressive practices and hierarchies of race, gender, and class. This paper considers what an everyday pedagogy of intersectional and feminist abolition looked like in a community-based maker space. Our data sources are drawn from a six-week summer program serving Black, Latinx and South Asian middle school youth, grounded in expansive disciplinary learning across coding, music, writing, engineering, and artmaking. Analyzing educator reflections, design decisions, pedagogical moves, and the student sense-making they supported, we found that student and educator sociopolitical learning emerged together. We explicate what this interwoven learning and becoming looked like across three cases that show how such pedagogies offer lived models and creative languages for practicing restorative and just social relationships.

Authors

• Melita Morales, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Mya Franklin, Northwestern University

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Samuel Carroll, YMCA

• Onam Lansana, Northwestern University