Lines of Infrastructuring: Surfacing and Tracing Educators’ Infrastructuring Practices Across Design Implementations (Poster 5)

• In Event: Advancing Methods, Theories, and Conceptualizations of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Objectives:
Infrastructuring, or the process of dynamically renegotiating infrastructures (Karasti, 2014) gives us one lens to start to understand the complex work of educators to create equitable STEM-rich learning environments — and the conditions that support this work. We present a tool called “lines of infrastructure” as a way to understand how infrastructuring work evolves over educators' long-term design practices, how this work is supported and constrained across types of infrastructure, this works relationship to issues of agency and power.

Theoretical Framework:
Building on Azevedo’s lines of practice theory (2011), we aim to show the value in tracing infrastructuring work over time in order to understand how facilitators’ preferences and constraints are shaping their practice. To describe the infrastructuring work of facilitators over time, while taking into account overlapping material and sociocultural factors in their learning environments, we propose the theory of “lines of infrastructure.” Applying this framework to educators’ iterative design practices allows us to make visible the patterns of decision making in this work and categorize how infrastructural factors and facilitators’ own values are impacting the implementation of novel computing activities in their spaces.

Methods:
This paper reports on data collected from an RPP between universities and informal STEM organizations, including a library makerspace network, to collaboratively develop computational tinkering activities. Data included field notes, interviews, and documentation collected from design work from Fall 2020 to Spring 2023. Building on a prior analysis of infrastructures in informal STEM environments (anonymized), we created analytic memos that detailed each educator’s decisions in our design work, which we then coded to surface types of infrastructure being negotiated. Patterns around preferences began to emerge around educators’ design decisions. To define a line of infrastructuring, we identified a series of decisions that reflected continuous negotiation along the intersection of an educator’s preference and their infrastructural conditions.

Results:
This poster will present three lines of infrastructuring that vary in their complexity, range of time, scope, and scale of re-negotiation and re-design work. For example, one case study features an educator who had a preference for making sure that his participation in the RPP directly contributed to his community. After an initial computing workshop implementation with families, he asked our university team to conduct any future development of new computational tinkering activities within his makerspace so that community members could participate in the design process. This move shifted power from the university into his community. However, this move also surfaced institutional issues related to his role as this design and development time butted against how he negotiated responsibilities to support other projects occurring at the same time. ​​In this case, this educator is navigating and designing with his ecology of infrastructures revealing spaces of malleability and agency, as well as examples of resistance or friction.

Significance:
We argue that this analysis gives us a new lens for understanding the complex practices of facilitators, while revealing the realities of entrenched and unjust infrastructures that can restrain the potential for equitable transformation in this work.

Authors

• Ronni Hayden, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ricarose Roque, University of Colorado - Boulder