Participatory Pedagogy and Play in STEAM: E-Textiles and Gender Identity Formation

• In Event: 34.079 - Interactive Stitch Sampler of Equitable Learning and Teaching With E-Textiles in K–12 Education

Abstract

OBJECTIVE. Maker culture as a movement supports exploration, playfulness, innovation, and skill building using creativity and nonlinear learning styles as ways of exploring self-efficacy and agency. Research has identified them to be concerned with identity production skill development and refinement, participation principles and sharing norms and gender is a key, but understudied, component of identity formation.
PERSPECTIVE. Gender is an explicit dimension of maker culture; as makers create sociotechnical identities that include the opportunities for amateurs to learn in nontraditional ways and to expand their identities as a result through their playful engagements with technology. HCI scholars have not deeply investigated how an examination of children’s playful engagements with technology potentially promote nonbinary sociotechnical gender identities to be both formed and visibly expressed in concert with the attainment of gendered expertise based upon varied skill building with both crafting and programming activities (Weibert et al., 2014; Rode et al., 2015; Marshall and Rode, 2018).
METHODS & DATA
My work examines a collaboration between myself and fellow researchers at the University of Siegen under the auspices of Dr. Volker Wulf during the winter of 2015. I was invited to contribute as a visiting scholar to conduct ethnographic research with children’s computer clubs established at five separate fieldsites; my colleagues in the field included fellow PhD students, master’s students, and undergraduate research assistants. The participants ranged in age from seven to approximately twelve. The computer clubs had varied technologies including e-textiles, graphic design software, and 3D printing outputs. Each of the computer clubs had mixed gender cohorts; that were also ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse. E-textiles and graphic design emerged as loci of communication as well as experimentation; this was particularly evident through the childrens’ exploration and play with digital aesthetic tools and tangible artifacts.

FINDINGS
Gender was a consistent component in terms of both STEAM (Science Technology Education Arts and Mathematics) practices and the implementation of creative principles to computational thinking and making. The participants disrupted masculine and feminine stereotypes with respect to behavior; many times the girls in the cohorts were loud, curious, rebellious, and active during the course of activities. Furthermore, both boys and girls were interested in manual skill building such as sewing, cutting, and aesthetic decision making. Complex contexts of play during the course of my ethnographic research indicated that not only were the participants confident in their explorations of design, technology, and engineering, but that they demonstrated evidence of collaborative skill building that synthesized these three categories in an applied trifecta of STEAM principles.

SIGNIFICANCE
Maker culture supports innovations that allow users to become designers, which permit them to generate new modes of skill building that simultaneously support identity formation. Children as makers demonstrate how their own constructions of skill building, gender identity and maker agency are the crux of our scholarly conversations regarding the design and deployment of participatory pedagogies for the future of STEAM education.

Author

• Andrea Marshall, Drexel University