Infrastructuring Learning Opportunities Across Space in Library Outreach (Poster 1)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Purpose
In the last decade, public libraries have increasingly acknowledged structural issues that create barriers [physical, cultural, social] to accessing learning opportunities for historically-marginalized communities. This has prompted increased outreach efforts that take library programs off-site to physically meet people where they are and leverage existing relationships and cultural communities (Halverson et al., 2017; Tzou et al., ​​2018). To support the infrastructuring needed for these efforts, infrastructures within the library and partner sites must be made visible. In this analysis I focus on one public library’s outreach efforts, to understand how nested and intertwined infrastructures may build on each other to maintain inequity and hierarchy, despite the public libraries’ stated intentions for increasing equitable access.

Context and Methods
Data was collected at a public library and makerspace as part of an interpretive case study focused on STEAM learning programs. The library was in a predominantly wealthy and white suburb in the US. It had recently begun infrastructuring to increase off-site programming in an effort to make library resources more accessible, with a particular focus on serving Spanish-speaking recent-immigrant families.
Analysis included fieldnotes of program observations, conversations with staff, and staff meetings. Codes were developed using an informed grounded theory approach (Salovaara, 2018), and drawing on multiple frameworks of infrastructure typologies in the literature (Ma & Hall, 2018; McKenney, 2019; Penuel, 2019). Visual maps were created to flesh out how infrastructures were situated geographically and relationally.

Findings
In this poster I will share concrete examples from the data that illustrate key relationships between material, social, and representational infrastructures, both internal and external to the library as an organization and physical place. For example, these infrastructural relationships impacted both the flow of:
makerspace tools and resources out to communities
community members to the makerspace, where they could access more robust tool and social infrastructures to support learning.
Off-site programs lacked the visibility of example projects and hands-on experience with tools available at the makerspace. Staff struggled to communicate what a makerspace was and what you could do there to people who had never experienced one. Additionally there was no social or material infrastructure to support people in traveling to the makerspace.
Infrastructures at outreach sites, which were often low-income housing complexes, exacerbated these issues. Library staff were constrained by the limits of the physical space they could use for programs. In one case a partner site actively sought to disenfranchise its residents by disrupting social infrastructures key to library staff building sustainable relationships with residents.

Significance
This poster speaks to issues library administrators and practitioners may need to address to disrupt hegemonic power when infrastructuring off-site programs with community partners. Infrastructures have directional paths and spatial and geographical components, pointing people and resources towards some places and not others. For library outreach efforts that seek to support equitable access for marginalized communities, this necessitates infrastructuring to facilitate people’s eventual access to on-site programs, or reallocating time and resources to comparable learning opportunities off-site.

Author

• Sari Widman, University of Colorado - Boulder