I was given a pretty cool opportunity last week to think with some pretty cool people about equitable design of digitally-distributed, studio-based STEM learning environments (think makerspaces – but at the same time destroy you idea of makerspaces and rebuild it to mean something more… at least that is what I ended up doing). It was put on by some folks at the University of Arizona and Biosphere 2, where we stayed, and was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The plan was to reflect and write and come away having created some resources – a white paper mainly. It is an awesome opportunity in itself but I was also just humbled to be among the others attending, many of whom are some of my favorite thinkers in our field though I made new connections too – (I’ll save posting a list for fear of leaving someone out or naming someone who would rather not be in my blog post but you can check out #stemequityb2 on Twitter if you would like to see some of the folks who are posting tweets and blog posts about the event).
I’ve never built or run a proper “Makerspace” per se and I can’t even claim to have participated in a “Makerspace” all that much. I suppose I took an old-school photography class back in the day and the lab had that kind of feel. However, I have participated in and even built a few online and face to face learning communities and I have been very interested in how we harness intrinsic interest of students to motivate learning.
It is here where I feel most comfortable – I think this is the idea of the Maker Mindset – tinkering and failing and starting again. I’m new to the more formal theoretical representations of this idea which I believe are tied to bricolage as laid out by Derrida and Levi-Strauss but I feel this kinship in those ideas which seems to also go back to rhizomatic learning for me. I’m still piecing the theory together.
Some resources
So, something feels incredibly spot on in all of this but I also feel a little bit like a fish out of water too. In thinking about all of this in terms of a blog post – rather than diving deep on any particular branch in my thinking I thought it might be best to reflect on some of the shared resources that I got from the gathering. Sort of half blog post half lit/resource review – or perhaps just a really informal lit/resource review – I suppose you will decide. There is no way that I can reflect on all of the resources shared and I’m sure that I will miss several really good ones but these are the ones that I was able to get into a bit enough to have some thoughts about.
Embodied Learning – Michelle Schria Hagerman
I started taking in some of the lit and resources around this trip even before we arrived on site. There was a Slack team created and a channel for resources. Here I became acquainted with Michelle Schria Hagerman from the University of Ottawa and this awesome preprint that she has out about embodied learning in maker environments – which she just released on her blog. This piece has my brain all aflutter about how we think about digital and hybrid spaces and reinforces my belief that all learning is hybrid (nod to Hybrid Pedagogy).
From the piece “You might read this and say: of course our minds and bodies are inextricably dependent on one another. How could this not be the case? Historically, learning scientists have been concerned with higher order cognitive processes such as language, critical thinking, and metacognition, all of which presumably happen in the mind. Proposing that the body is the foundation for higher order thought, that sensory perception is inextricable from abstract cognitive processes, and that humans use the environment to scaffold cognition are relatively new ideas for both psychology and education.”
Technology and Learning: A Provocation – Punya Mishra
Once on ground and on the first day we were presented with three provocations. I have to admit some skepticism going in with the first one, which was by TPACK creator Punya Mishra, if for no other reason that it was going to be delivered via a 14 minute video but then…
… Then Punya went ahead and blew me away!
Seriously, this is an awesome reflection on the evolution of thinking in edtech and social learning over the last decade or so and ends with a call for more attempts to understand broader systems and cultures in our work going forward. Seriously, take the 14 minutes to watch this video – you will not be sorry:
Two Resources from the National Equity Project
The second day of the gathering was our big writing day and after some work to define a few projects we broke out for three hours to write and collaborate in our teams. I ended up on a merged group that were separately proposed by Amon Millner and Sundi Richard which attempted to create a Foundations of Equity and Inclusion document that could potentially be used by those who might be proposing (or evaluating) a project to the NSF that included an Equity and Inclusion component. I don’t want to share the document that we ultimately wrote since we drafted it in just a few hours and it is now in the hands of the project PIs and could go through further revisions but it is basically a list of questions that we drew up using established resources that I would like to share. Both are from the National Equity Project: The Liberatory Design Cards and the Lens of Systemic Oppression. Basically what we did was a journey map of creating a makerspace and then put questions that pertain directly to matters of equity and inclusion to the different stages of development. Some of the questions we made up ourselves but some of them we reworked from these two documents which I found to be a great resource for thinking about .
Random Resource: Phenology
I really love this one so much but it is so random and unstructured I was not sure how to share it other than to simply say it is random and unstructured. Some may say this is not so much a resource but just a passing thought and they would not be wrong. This one did not come from any presentation, conversation, or any shared resource on Slack. It was simply there in Biosphere 2 on several signs and informational kiosks. It is this idea of “Phenology” which is simply the study of the change in life cycle of plants and animals as impacted through seasons (not surprising that stood out to me). It is concerned with questions about why flowers bud and leaves fall etc. but stood out to me in that so many of the learning theories that I’ve come to love are tied to metaphors of nature. Is the learning environment an ecology? Is the story of learning a rhizome? These questions intrigue me but I’m not sure any of them have really accounted for the changing nature of the learner as impacted by a changing learning environment. Could a learning environment have seasons and if so what would that look like and how would those seasons affect a learner depending on where they are at in their own journey? Perhaps that needs to be its own blog post – To every thing…
Several other resources
There are a ton more but I wanted to call out a few really quickly – these were either in the Slack or those that I was putzing around with on my own during this same time that I found overlap with – some of these are on my to read list still yet:
Techno-vernacular creativity, innovation and learning in underrepresented ethnic communities of practice – A dissertation my Nettrice Rosallye Gaskins, Georgia Institute of Technology. Nettrice also gave a provocation about the role of story and of telling the stories of underrepresented populations in makerspaces.
The Inclusive Design Guide from the Inclusive Design Research Center at OCAD University – I posted this one myself after listing to a podcast interview with Jess Mitchell. I love this thing so much as it is filled with practical design perspectives for all kinds of environments. It is a nonlinear resource that you can pick through in all kinds of creative ways.
Making Culture from Drexel University – In-Depth report on makerspaces in K-12 US educational context
Maker Culture has a Deeply Unsettling Gender Problem – from Edsurge
A symposium of four articles in Equity and Excellence in Education called Equity in STEM-Rich Making: Pedagogies and Designs – Paywalled
Two resources: an infographic and a white paper – from Techbridge Girls
From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies – by the Connected Learning folks – I do love the CLAlliance folks in general.
Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Towards Transformative Visions for Educational Equity – SHIRIN VOSSOUGHI, PAULA K. HOOPER, and MEG ESCUD
Cruel optimism in edtech: when the digital data practices of educational technology providers inadvertently hinder educational equity – Felicitas Macgilchrist – Paywalled – again this is one that I personally brought to the experience with me but it is a great look at some of the systemic problems surrounding using technology in education.
