Becoming a Bracket: How Powerful Entanglements Constitute STEM Learning Spaces

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Learning With New Qualitative Methods in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Purpose: Robotics teams, like other places of making (Vossoughi, et al, 2014) are rich sociomaterial learning spaces for youth that can provide access to important experiences in STEM related practices like designing and fabricating a specific part of the robot. This paper draws from posthumanist theoretical arguments (Barad, 2007; Devellennes & Dillet, 2018; Braidiotti, 2018), and the indigenous ontologies they stand on mostly without acknowledgement, (Eglash, et al, 2020) to explore the practices of a youth robotics team, Turing Robotics. Specifically I follow the creation of a bracket for the team’s robot – and its failure to do what was originally imagined – to explore the more-than-human agency as indelible to the production of Turing Robotics as a learning space.

Methodology: This qualitative inquiry interrogates what it means to center a microethnographic analysis of moment-to-moment practice (Erikson, 2004) on the emerging intra-action of particular entanglements that come to matter as the bracket goes from design, to physical artifact, to part of the robot. In pursuing this kind of inquiry, I build a notion of Intra-action Analysis from the tradition of Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) by focusing the microgenetic review of previously generated video data on the tracings of entanglements – not the relations of previously bounded things. Learning is a production of entangled agency where specific boundaries are made, remade, and reconstituted to engender what matters or what is cared for (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Following these sociomaterial “agential cuts” (Barad, 2007) as laminations (Goodwin, 2017) elucidates how specific relationalities become powerful.

Results: The bracket started clamped onto the cutting area of a 3 axis Mill, ready to have the slots on one side milled out in order to offer space for bolts to connect to the robot in the future (Figure 1). Jav, Lorenzo, Bob, worked with various manifestations of the imagined final bracket (Whiteboard diagram, and model on Laptop) to make decisions about how to engage with the Mill to cut the slots. The next day, the bracket proved to not fit with the intended configuration as Jav and another student tried to attach it onto the robot. In this breakdown, the bracket, itself, laminated the previous designs, the Mill, and the youth as unsuccessful: surfacing questions of what knowledge was missing, what was the source of the “mistake,” and what needed to be learned across the entanglement. This specifically includes the power relations of expertise: Jav’s coordination with the Mill as an expert, for instance. Eventually Jav made the bracket work in a new way on the robot. Rectifying the mistake was a specific agential cut by him with the bracket that laminated some invisibility to the previously exposed entanglement for the rest of the team.

Significance: This analysis offers an example of microethnographic analysis that explores the sociomaterial positioning that crafts agencies for some, and not for others. It informs what justice can look like in STEM learning: addressing material relations that limit minoritized youth from becoming entangled because of oppressive racialized and gendered narratives.

Author

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, University of Colorado - Boulder