Democratizing What: A Case Study of How Mentors in a Public Library Makerspace Organize Toward Expansive Possibilities

• In Event: 45.032 - Educational Dignity in Making and Engineering Spaces Developing Close Accounts of Expansive Pedagogy, Learning, and Self-Determination

Abstract

“Making” is often cast as an interdisciplinary STEM practice through which people develop their ideas into some physical or digital form (Sheridan et al., 2014). The democratization of making through public library makerspaces reflects its rising prominence as a new form of learning, entrepreneurship, and community engagement (Willett, 2016). This paper is an ethnographic case study of a public library makerspace in a large metropolitan U.S. city that employs working artists, most of whom are white, as mentors to racially diverse youth. We explore how these mentors and teens wrestle with the nature and purpose of making in moments of interaction, reflection, and in relation to larger economic, political, and racial ideologies of STEM learning. This analysis directs attention to possibilities and persistent entanglements that arise as mentors manage, on one hand, their inclination to support teens in expressing their agentic, curious, and artistic impulses; and on the other, the state-sanctioned need for public institutions like libraries to inject “more STEM” (i.e., STEM career preparation) into minoritized communities.

These data draw from a six-week study of mentorship in a public makerspace (n = 10 mentors): three week-long no-cost summer camps (cardboard Cosplay, music video production, music production/songwriting) and three weeks of drop-in open access making. Through qualitative analyses of fieldnotes, video and semi-structured interviews, we identified two pedagogical practices recurring in mentors’ talk and action: 1) an exalting of teen creativity and voice through pedagogical moves that decoupled making from STEM and strengthened its associations with artistry; and 2) a recurrence of prolepsis in mentors’ talk which presupposed teens’ future selves – as professional poets, or drummers, or engineers – which further loosened the purpose of making from its neoliberal framing as participation in “the new industrial revolution”.

Moving analytically between micro-analyses of pedagogical moves, reflections on practice, and broader discourses that enmesh making with individual liberalism and racialized capitalism, we find the beginning articulations of a pedagogy of dignity (Colleague & Author, 2014; Author & Colleague, in press). Specifically, in talk and action mentors manage the broader discourses of making as a means of technical career preparation for minoritized youth and making as an expression of love, passion, and “art for art’s sake”. And yet, we argue that what emerged was a beginning articulation because deficit ideologies about teens and their possible futures were never far from some mentors’ reach.

These findings concern ideas that are fundamental to democratizing making in the public domain. Indeed, what distinguishes this analysis is its recognition of public libraries (and by extension, their makerspaces) as institutions of learning tasked with mediating the relationship between state and personal desire (Jaeger et al., 2013). By surfacing the political and cultural dimensions of making in these ways, this analysis demonstrates the catalytic potential of public library makerspaces and artist mentors to redefine making in the public domain as learning that draws on the “strengths, struggles and aspirations” of minoritized youth (Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2018) in ways that enliven their rights and capacities to define their futures.

Authors

• Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Vanderbilt University

• Lauren Vogelstein, Vanderbilt University

• Corey Brady, Vanderbilt University

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Vanderbilt University