Abstract
The maker movement advocates hands-on making with emerging technologies because of its value for promoting innovative and personally meaningful transdisciplinary learning. Educational research has focused on settings that primarily serve youth from dominant groups, yet we know surprisingly little about making among minoritized youth and the kinds of resources that support their making. This study sought to better understand the extent to which maker practices are present in the lives of minoritized youth and the network of resources that support their engagement. In this study, we analyzed survey responses of 52 youth from an urban, under-resourced community in Chicago and conducted an inductive thematic analysis of 20 interviews through a model of connected learning. Findings showed these youth participated in a diverse range of interest-driven, low-tech maker activities in their own homes more often than in school, after school programs, or through online resources and communities (i.e., YouTube, Internet, social media). Many youths displayed different levels of participation with intergenerational support, as parents and extended family members supported youth in their hands-on making. This work opens up pathways for fostering connected learning opportunities within minoritized communities by building on existing learning experiences within home settings and supportive relationships.
Highlights
Over the last decade, the maker movement has reinvigorated widespread interest in do-it-yourself (DIY), hands-on craft production practices through a combined use of low- and high-tech materials and tools, such as textiles, woodcrafts, 3D printers, and microcontrollers [1]
Our overarching research question addressed in this paper was: to what extent and under what conditions do minoritized youth engage in maker practices? For the specific analyses included in this paper we broke down this overarching question into targeted questions we could answer with data
To investigate (1) the extent to which youth engaged in maker practices, we pursued the following detailed subquestions: (1a) What types of making are of interest to youth and to what extent they are engaged in making? (1b) Where does this making primarily take place? (1c) What resources do minoritized youth draw upon to engage in making? To explore (2) the conditions under which these youth engaged in maker practices, we asked the subquestions: (2a) Why are they drawn to this type of making? (2b) How do relationships support and connect youth to making opportunities and future learning pathways? (2c) What opportunities and learning pathways are made possible for youth as a result of their making?
Summary
The maker movement has reinvigorated widespread interest in do-it-yourself (DIY), hands-on craft production practices through a combined use of low- and high-tech materials and tools, such as textiles, woodcrafts, 3D printers, and microcontrollers [1]. The enthusiasm for the educational promise of the maker movement and its associated practices (commonly referred to as making) has centered on how making can be leveraged to support learning across contexts by bridging young people’s passions to disciplinary content valued in schools [2]. 12) and argue that more concentrated efforts ought to be made to explicitly connect learning across the multiple social and cultural communities of which young people are members. Understanding how learning is shaped in out-of-school contexts such as communities and learners’. Homes, as well as how that learning might be translated to more formal learning contexts, has been part of an effort to improve learning experiences for children and young people for many years [3,4,5,6].
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