Making and Tinkering: Creativity, Imagination, and Ingenuity as a Fundamental Human Practice

• In Event: Connected Learning: Evidence in Support of an Emerging Model for Learning Across Settings Among Nondominant Youth

Abstract

The newly emerging Making and Tinkering movement in the U.S. is increasingly engaging youth in practices that connect their interests with innovation and creativity (Martinez & Stager, 2013). The study of youths’ practices and the role of new media technologies in extending and connecting youths’ repertoires is critical to understanding the affordances of these practices in and of themselves, but also to understanding how to leverage the repertoires, dispositions, and practices across ecologies, including school. Notwithstanding the expanded contribution of participating in Making and Tinkering activities, the commodification of Making and Tinkering as a movement has made such practices available to many youth, particularly those who have regular access to resources and technologies that enable sustained engagement and the development of expertise.

Of relevance, questions have emerged from the field asking whether Making and Tinkering practices could engage youth from non-dominant communities. Our empirical work and long-term experiences working with and studying learning ecologies populated by non-dominant youth, have helped us understand that ingenuity, creativity, and imagination are fundamental human practices. We argue that making and tinkering practices are “indigenous” practices to non-dominant communities, particularly to communities in “tight circumstances” (McDermott, 2010). As Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) note, “there is a long tradition of tinkering in many cultures around the world” (p. 165) that has sometimes arisen out of economic necessity, where communities improvise with the materials at hand in order to go about their everyday lives.

We employ the analytical concept of “inventos” (Jacobs-Fantauzzi, 2003; Schwartz & Gutiérrez, in preparation) or the ways in which nondominant communities engage their creativity and ingenuity to create everyday objects, as well as new inventions that expand the possibilities of current circumstance. The frame of inventos emerges from the ways in which Cuban hip-hop artists expand the resources and perspectives available to them through imagination, collaboration and creativity; such practices necessarily draw from the rich lineage of cultural hybridity, diasporic history, and experiences of struggle in the Cuban context. Importantly, Making and Tinkering as inventos is accomplished in joint activity with others, and through the distribution of expertise and resources.

This poster draws from multiple contexts of Making and Tinkering with non-dominant students at a program called El Pueblo Mágico and the Exploratorium After-school Tinkering Program, where undergraduates, high school students, and k-8 youth participate in intergenerational ensembles. We present the trajectories of focal students across several Making and Tinkering activities, from producing potato batteries and “squishy circuits” to designing solar cars and “sewn circuits.” We discuss how different forms of mediation presented opportunities for participants to extend their STEM practices, take on new roles and identities and engage affective and cognitive dimensions of learning. We also identify the forms of assistance that emerged among undergraduates and children, including the relationships, tools and discourse that best supported participants’ Making and Tinkering process. By fomenting opportunities for youth to perform as creative engineers with an array of social and material resources, these social design experiments present exemplar cases of “connected learning.”

Authors

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Lisa Hope Schwartz, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University