Supporting Equity at Home: Making Electronic Textiles in Online Classrooms

• In Event: Moving Making to Online and Homes Spaces: Lessons for Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: Research on maker education has shown that effective teaching practices can broaden participation and support equity in maker activities (Fields et al., 2018; Ryoo, Kali & Bevan, 2016). Yet, very little is known about teacher practices that may support equity in online making. Indeed, at the beginning of the pandemic, moving maker activities online limited common practices such as just-in-time teaching, and making room for casual peer interactions around tangible artifacts (Jayathirtha, et al., 2020). We seek to understand the practices that teachers employed for broadening participation and deepening access to making during the pandemic.

Theoretical framework: We build on previous research on equitable teaching (Hammond, 2008), practices that supported equity in e-textiles (Fields et al., 2018), maker activities (Ryoo, Kali & Bevan, 2016), and the Exploring Computer Science curriculum (Margolis et al., 2015) by analyzing the emergent practices that teachers used to broaden participation and access when making electronic textiles online and at home during the pandemic.

Methods and Data Sources: In Spring 2021 four teachers from two large school districts in California conducted the e-textile unit of the Exploring Computer Science Curriculum (see Litts et al., 2017) online in 11 classrooms. All teachers had several years of prior experience teaching the unit. We followed these teachers and their classrooms over five months. Drawing on weekly teacher interviews, synchronous classroom observations and asynchronous participation platforms, we applied constant, comparative coding (Charmaz, 2006) to analyze and categorize emergent equity practices teachers developed.

Results: Three themes stood out from analysis. (1) Drawing from local familial and domestic resources, knowledge, and expertise to support making physical artifacts. To encourage students to draw from their funds of knowledge and, at the same time, support their making with extra hands and eyes, teachers made room for familial involvement while students made electronic textile projects. Students received help from family members and used common household materials in their projects. (2) Teachers adopted different online tools to scaffold making. For instance, teachers created instructional videos for asynchronous access, used camera angles to improve visibility of crafting, screenshared their live coding, and others. (3) Rendering the process of making visible. Teachers encouraged students to update their project progress on online platforms with in-process pictures and videos and to view, comment on, and even draw inspirations and lessons from their peers’ projects —making the making process more transparent and open for dialogic engagement.

Significance: Teachers’ emergent strategies to support making online show promise for future teaching in in-person settings. Integrating familial resources and practices within computing legitimized student voices and practices. Supporting a broad variety of accessibility approaches while rendering the making process visible through the use of online tools further generated scaffolds for students to document, reflect and share with each other. Teachers are considering how to continue these practices post-pandemic to better support their learners while making.

Authors

• Luis Morales-Navarro, University of Pennsylvania

• Gayithri Jayathirtha, University of Pennsylvania

• Deborah Fields, Utah State University

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania