All right, good evening everyone.
I'm Cindy Pasmoor.
I'm the former chair of the graduate group
in education one of the two sponsors
of the distinguish educational thinker
series and I'm here on behalf of
NIcole Lander who is the current chair of
the group to introduce the introduction.
[LAUGH] The speaker series is something
that the School of Education and
the Graduate Group of Education have
sponsored now for several years,
quite a number of years,
bringing in some of the best and
brightest thinkers in education
to share with us their thoughts.
And each person who comes in has a faculty
sponsor, and this time it is my pleasure
to introduce Heidi Ballard who will
introduce our speaker this evening.
Thank you all for coming.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Avoid the stairs and go for it.
Thanks everyone for coming.
I'm so honored to be able to introduce Dr.
Angela Calibrase-Burton.
And I thought I would just tell
you a tiny little bit about her
because she kinda goes deep
into one of her projects.
So she's professor of science education
at the Department of Teacher Education at
Michigan State University.
And has been there for
about ten years and before that for
about ten years was at
Teachers College at Columbia.
I first met Dr.
Conaway Burton at my first nurse
conference at the National Association for
Research in Science Teaching.
But I think an important
memorable experience for
me was quite a few years later,
being a part of our workshop that she
pulled together at about 20 people at
a community science shop in san Francisco,
where she brought together the most
amazing group of people working with youth
and informal science education settings
to talk about equity first and foremost.
And these were people that work in
museums, people that work in these small
local workshops where kids come and
the room was filled with all this
stuff that it turns out is very
important for science learning.
All kinds of tinkering and
making and things like that.
And some education researchers.
And so
the goal is to talk about equity and
science education and though in
the room there were a lot of positive
stories about young people who had
navigated obstacles to take up science for
themselves and use it on their own
terms but there were also a lot of
stories of youth feeling powerless or
unable to overcome these obstacles so.
The key thing about that is, that it
was researchers, and practitioners,
in the room grappling with that together,
explicitly, focusing
on equity in science education, and equity
wasn't an afterthought, it was central.
And practitioners weren't in a fishbowl,
or on a panel, but were explicitly
co-creating and co-learning researchers
and practitioners together.
So the room was grounded in practice and
it was everybody's practice.
And that's the kind of engaged
scholarship the research, R plus P,
the research plus practice
collaborative research,
however you want to call it,
that I think is what Dr.
Calloways Barton is transforming the way
people think about science education.
She does that by taking deep looks
at STEM, science, technology,
engineering and math learning and
practice with critical theory,
encouraging those areas in a way that
I think not too many people are doing.
And to do this, as I said to you,
dives really deep into,
it means long, deep engagement with
youth in the places they live and
go to school, and tinker and play.
And it means working over years and years
with after school educators and teachers,
who, I can't believe the number of years,
who work with those youth listening and
learning from their experiences and
triumphs and struggles.
She also was the editor of the top
science education journal in the world,
Journal of Research and
Science Teaching, for about five years.
She has authored books and
co-authored books titled things like
Teaching Science for Social Justice and
Democratic Science Teaching,
Building the Expertise to Empower
Low-Income Minority Youth in Science.
And currently, she has a WT Grant's
Foundation Distinguished Fellow for
2015 and 17.
And the title of that project that
she's working on right now, I just
wanted to make sure cuz I know there might
be some people in the audience interested,
the Makerspace Movement, sites of
possibilities for promoting equitable
opportunities to learn and
pursue STEM among underrepresented youth.
So she'll be at the exploratorium for
a few days after this.
So I, it is truly my pleasure
to welcome Dr.Calabrese Barton.
And I'm so looking forward to
learning from her tonight and
I'm sure we all will, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you for coming.
All right.
So thank you Heidi, Dr. Ballard, for
that wonderful introduction, and Dr.
Passmore for
the introduction of the introduction.
[LAUGH] And so,
what I want to do today is to focus
on how do youth imagine pathways
towards becoming in STEM.
And, in particular, towards becoming,
as you can see in this title here,
community STEM experts, and I use this
term, imagine, to capture, as might say.
The places where expectations can
become dissettled, generating
new practices grounded in the world as it
is now and in the world as it could be.
And I take the stance in saying that,
and also across my talk today,
that youth are co-designers of their own
trajectories and futures within STEM.
And we have a responsibility
to learn alongside them,
to figure out exactly what that means.
So, Community STEM Expert.
This term is not one
that I created on my own.
It actually originated from
the youth with whom I work and
I use this term because it's theirs.
And it captures a way of being in
the world and in STEM, the position,
youth with the agency to know, to do and
to be in ways of good value who they
are and what they bring to the stem table.
I also pick a capture so we hope for
all of our student and did for
our citizens race assign to
the moderate people as stand as,
there are a picture 11 years old stated.
A community STEMs expert is someone
who does things that are good for
the community because of what we know.
We know a lot of science and
we also know a lot about our community.
Who else can put these ideas together?
So to help contextualize this point,
before I delve into the specifics of my
talk, I'm gonna tell
you a story about Fall.
And, I wanna share this brief story about
Fall, because I think it's an interesting
story with which we initially think about
this point of community sound expert.
Fall, right now,
is currently a 10th grader, but
I first met her in the 5th grade
at the boys and girls club.
And over the last five years Fall
has shifted from not having any
particular interest or disinterest
in STEM, just sort of it is what it
is to in eigth grade thinking that she
wanted to work in a green hair salon.
To now in tenth grade considering
a possible future in engineering.
All the while, Fall has struggled
with being labeled as, quote,
as her seventh grade teacher said, a girl
in the background, or someone who her
mother described as, quote, if she
would just get Ds, I would be happy.
And while she's had an IEP all throughout
school and has been a struggling reader,
this past year in tenth grade,
she's established herself as a, quote,
STEM blogger extraordinaire, with readers
of her blog from all around the country.
And as part of a larger study,
we interviewed Fall over time to ask
about what are her pivotal
moments in her own STEM pathway.
And she mapped out seven key
experiences which you'll see here.
But I wanna talk about one
very briefly right now,
that of Little Free STEM Library.
So Fall and her friend over five
months conceptualize, designed, and
built a Little Free STEM Library
at the Boys and Girls Club.
So let me just, quick show of hands,
how many of you are familiar with
the Little Free Library movement?
Okay, so most people in the room.
So she and her friend had to research
little free libraries, styles and
wood types, determine size
requirements for this library.
Then she drew up blueprints by hand, and
then she redrew them up in
a 3D sketching program.
She cut and assembled the wood.
Later she and her friend decided to add
a door to protect what was inside their
library, and a lighting system
powered by a hand cranked generator,
which in her words would be fun for
kids to do, and would get them curious
enough to come over and look and
see what was inside the library.
When Fall talked about this library,
she talked about how access to STEM books
would be really important to help
kids practice their reading,
an area that she struggled with.
But it would also help them to learn
science in case they weren't getting
science in school.
But in addition to books, she also wanted
to put in her Little Free STEM Library
mini-maker kits for kids to take home,
so that they could, quote,
make the things that she had
a chance to make at the club.
She describes designing and
building this Little Free STEM Library as
one of the things she's worked
on the hardest ever, and
one of the things that
she's most proud of.
Her blog posts kept during the time,
and here's one of them,
you can go to getcity.org to
see some of her blog posts.
Her blog posts during this
time remind the reader
of how hard she's worked,
how important access to STEM is,
how important the library is, and
how much others appreciate her work.
And Fall's STEM knowledge was crucial
in building this Little Free STEM Library
in order to even imagine its possibility,
to construct it with an alternative light
source, and how she would power it,
and in her design of the paper circuit
kits that she put inside of it.
Her knowledge of community
was also essential
to even set up the idea that this was
something needed in her community, and
where it should go, its location at the
Boys and Girls Club, and what she should
populate this library with, so that kids
could, quote, get to where she's gotten.
Fall describes these experiences as
pivotal, because she could use science
to solve actual problems that kids have,
and for her, being
an expert meant more than just knowing
something, although that was important.
It also meant learning what she needed
to know, teaching her community, and
doing things to make a difference.
She said it helped people to see
her as a girl who worked hard,
a girl who was smart,
a girl who could get things done.
So Fall's becoming in STEM is about so
much more than these actions I've
just described, and about so
much more than the seven pivotal
experiences you saw in the previous slide.
Her teachers, both in school and
after school, her family, and
her peers all played important
roles in opening up and for
closing her potential pathways into STEM.
We have to also remember that her
work takes place against a social
historical backdrop, where as a white girl
growing up in multigenerational poverty,
she's positioned both with and
without power.
Fall's story urges us to develop more
robust understandings of how, when,
and why youth seek to become in STEM
in equitably consequential ways,
and supports that they need
along the way as they do so.
And so I ask these questions that
I'll attempt to answer tonight.
How do youth imagine and then author
new pathways towards becoming in STEM,
and in particular,
towards becoming community STEM experts?
What ideas and
practices do youth take up while engaged
in STEM across the spaces of their lives?
And in what ways do youth practices
inscribe their spaces of doing STEM
with possibilities for
becoming experts in STEM with the agency
to make a difference in their lives?
So I want to back up for a moment and
set the stage from a research standpoint,
examining crucial intersecting problem
spaces that frame access, opportunity, and
engagement in STEM.
And so they're in the center, first I
think we absolutely must acknowledge what
Ladson-Billings refers to
as the education debt.
She argues that focusing on the
achievement gap between students of color
and white students, while very real,
is misplaced attention and
also deficit oriented.
The education debt instead focuses
attention on the outcomes
of accumulated historical,
sociopolitical, economic and moral
policies impacting communities of color,
who've long been marginalized and
inadequately served in education.
Inequitable access to resources, school
funding, quality teachers, instruction,
role models, cultural barriers and
stereotypes, and the list could go on.
The long-term education debt has
substantial consequences for
broadening participation in STEM, and
we have to see the problem space that way.
Just some examples.
Lower income communities of color
experience the greatest levels in
environmental injustice
with the least voice and
STEM related decisions
affecting their communities.
We need to look no farther than Flint,
Michigan, my own backyard,
to see this lived reality
played out now in the moment.
And yet equitable opportunities for
meaningful engagement and
success in STEM affects opportunities for
empowered democratic participation.
Or, many students of color in the US
are succeeding in STEM and school science.
That's not what the dominant narrative is.
But we have to remember that even when
many youth of color are succeeding in
STEM, they're choosing not to pursue
STEM as careers because they're not
feeling welcomed in the STEM community.
And they're not being recognized for
the assets that they're
bringing to the STEM table.
And again, equitable opportunities to
engage in STEM, and to be recognized for
what you bring to the STEM table,
opens up viable routes to personal and
community economic advancement,
but, in equally important ways,
can transform the field of STEM itself,
so that it is more welcoming.
We see the realities of that
education debt playing out time and
again in the stories that youth tell us.
Take James for example, who suggested
having a perfect grade in math,
a 4.0, is a secret that he wants
nobody else to know about for
fear that he'll be bullied by his peers.
Take Boss Doss, who's worried that
teachers will not see her as scientific
just because she cool and fun.
School is boring because I can't be me.
My teachers only see what I can't do.
Or take Cathy Cathy notes,
that she feels like and
imposter because she doesn't have the
prototypical experiences her STEM peers
have, such as science camps and
family lineages in STEM.
She says quote,
it makes me feel like an imposter
to call my pathway a STEM pathway.
These stories remind us or should
remind us how youth from low income and
communities of color are unfairly
positioned as non-experts and
outsiders to science and engineering.
How people are positioned and
by home because of what they know and
who they are shape opportunities
to learn and become.
And so I take a critical sociocultural
view of learning where I see learning and
becoming as taking shape
dialectically in practice.
And I refer to this dialectic between
learning and becoming as identity work.
Identity work focuses
analytic attention on how
authoring oneself in STEM always
takes place in the moment.
With the ways and which people
figure themselves and are figured or
related to what they know they can do
such as disciplinary knowledge and
practice as well as one
zone funs of knowledge.
How they use that knowledge to take
action in their lives in meaningful ways?
And how they recognized by others for
such.
This moment so
are shaped by both local and
broader cultural narratives such
as disciplinary narratives.
What is it mean to be scientific?
Education narratives.
What does it mean to be a good
science student in this classroom?
And the answers to both those
narratives are not always the same.
Or cultural narratives,
what does it mean to be a girl?
What does it mean to be a boy?
What does it mean to grow up white or
grow up African-American or so forth?
And so, while identity work
takes place in the moment,
it also projects across scales of
activity, including time scales or
the real, virtual, and
imagined spaces of ones life.
Or the vertical and horizontal dimensions
of learning and for me this is where
the possibility of thinking about identity
work, being trans-formative resides.
For example, in the moment actions and
how those get made sense of can reshape
how one reads what has happened
to them into the past and
how one projects into the future.
Or how a person's actions get recognized
by others for being scientific or
not, can open up for
for-closed opportunities for others,
both in the moment and again over time.
So, identity work is an equitable view of
learning in becoming because it shifts
the focus from fixing
the individual to re-mediating and
transforming the system as
individuals interact with practice.
And so,
with this framing in mind and those
research questions as a jumping off point.
I wanna use the rest of my time
to unpack three main claims.
Which I think respond to those questions.
First, becoming a community science expert
is one form of identity work that is
equitably consequential, transforming
the boundaries of participation in STEM
in-the-moment and over time.
Second, STEM practices of CSEs
are rooted in community, and
reflect deep and critical knowledge
of the needs communities face.
And third as youth engage in rooted
STEM practices over time, in-the-moment
actions serve as critical pivot points for
deeper learning and becoming in stem.
To unpack these claims in the remainder
of my talk I'll share with you stories of
youth engaging in STEM in community.
These stories, which are shared as stories
to think with about these main claims,
and the larger data sets in
which these claims are grounded,
emerge from these three projects here.
Get city, which was an ITest project,
it involved cross-city partnerships in
support of tech rich investigations.
"Club 2 School" which is the most
excited ethnography of identity work
of girls across the middle grades and for
cities and making for change which is
a user project focussed on pretespotory
design and of Equity Oriented Makerspaces
each of these projects leverages
multi-setted critical ethnography and
participatory approaches allowing us to
spend hundreds of hours with the youth
to learn with them across settings home,
school, community,
after school and over time primarily
between the fifth and ninth grades.
And I'm happy to delve more into the
specifics of these projects at questions,
if you would like.
So let's now look at
this first main claim.
And to do so I'm gonna share
you an in-depth story or Quahn.
And I share Quahn's story in
part because he asks me to.
I've known Quahn since
he was in the 5th grade.
And collaboratively we've
compiled a comprehensive
case of his experiences in and
out of school.
Last year in the 9th grade he combed
through those data and he wrote his STEM
story for a chapter which is now
published in a book by routledge.
And he begins this chapter by reminding
the reader that as an African American
young man he's constantly confronted
with stereotypes as he says,
quote, I heard from my teacher that
African Americans are less smart than
whites in science and engineering.
I was not surprised to hear those
stereotypes from my teachers.
I hear them all the time
no matter where I go.
There are many negative racial
stereotypes in the movies and on tv.
African Americans are not smart in science
on tv they're never be the scientist on
the show, they're trying to make the show
funny but really it's a stereotype.
So the first slide here in LaQuahn's
story is a letter that LeQuahn wrote to
his fifth grade teacher six
months into the school year.
[COUGH] So think about it, he's been in a
self contained classroom since September,
he wrote this letter in January.
And he states in the first paragraph
this is your student Quahn,
the first one in the second row.
This should remind us, just how
much many youths feel marginal and
even invisible in science class.
We look at the third paragraph.
This points to the creative ways that
he is engaging in science at home and
in the community that he wants
his teacher to know about.
I do things out of school and
out of Get City that involve science.
I went door to door and
ask adults if they use CFL lights.
The majority of the adults
did not use CFL lights.
I will try to decease the amount of
people who use incandescent lights.
I did it on Wain Wright Ave.
I did it because people's bills are up.
In the last paragraph though he
reminds us and he reminds his teacher
that his success requires others to
recognize and value his efforts.
As he says, it's not so much for energy
that I get attention at school, but for
being funny.
I'm recognized for that,
for being a smart Aleck.
But I think that should be good.
So then, okay.
Let's move on to sixth grade.
So in sixth grade, produce a 60
second public service announcement
as part of his work in that city.
He wanted to make ideas around energy
consumption and it's connections to
climate change accessible and
salient to members of his community, so
that they could both save money and
help the environment.
I'm gonna show you the video in a second.
But what I want to point out is
that later in the school year,
so he made this in
an after school program,
he decided that he wanted to bring this
video into school to show his teacher.
Because as he said, it's the movie
that changed how people thought of me.
Mainly I was excited to show my teacher
because he saw that I could do it,
that I got it done.
And that I know a lot.
So let's watch the video.
>> What's the [INAUDIBLE] [NOISE]
Power
sucking pigs!
[NOISE]
[MUSIC]
[LAUGH]
>> More electricity than all other
countries, except for China.
Did you know that solar panels can reduce
your electricity bills significantly.
Some people don't even
have utility bills because
their solar panels are people provide
all the energy that they need.
You can start saving
energy by turning off and
unplugging electronics when not in use.
>> You.
[MUSIC]
All right, so it's important to know that
at the time that Quahn showed this video
with his teacher, when we would visit
him in school we often found him sitting
outside of the classroom
in the hallway for
having being sent outside of class for
clowning around.
Quahn saw this punishment was unfair as
didn't think he was clowning around he was
just a funny person So,
later in the summer when
LaQuahn was participating in a summer
program at the local university.
LaQuahn noticed that the stairwell in
the education building was overly hot.
And so he had finished some of his work
early and so he took it upon himself to
investigate how hot it was, and
what might be the causes for that heat.
And he ended up making a four-minute video
providing evidence of how hot it was and
explanations for what impact he thought
it was having on the local university and
on planet Earth, and he asked us to send
that video to the person in charge of
the building so that they would understand
what was going on and fix things.
So we did.
Before I tell you what happened, I'm going
to show you a 50-second clip from it.
>> This one is 69 degrees.
[INAUDIBLE]
It's so hot in here.
[SOUND] This one is 145 degrees.
[LAUGH] We just turned it off.
Turned off the heat.
So, that's acceptable and
it's so beautifully down
[INAUDIBLE]
>> So, the university positively responded
to the video and actually took
immediate action to solve the problem.
Gotten an e-mail response the engineers
for building said quote, the students
are correct that stairwells do have
an issue with solar gain in the summer.
And it looks like there was a mechanical
problem with the heating valve leaking.
What's interesting to me is that
the heater had enough functioning for
months prior to action and nobody, myself
included, had done anything about it.
So, he says, quote,
being recognised by other people makes me
feel like I've accomplished something.
At school, my teachers now know
that I'm a science person.
At NSU I feel like I'm known for
being smart and helping save energy.
I feel that I did more that
other college students that walk
through that hallway everyday.
And he's right.
All right, so
that was the summer after sixth grade.
So now let's go to seventh grade.
At the end of seventh grade Quan
learned about a state wide contest for
entrepreneurs through one
of his friends at school.
And so on his own time,
he borrowed a computer and
conceptualized a youth-centered video
game to teach about climate change.
In an interview at that time
he said this about his game.
I wanted to create a video game that
teaches other kids about climate change.
One game that I like and that lots of
other kids like is Grand Theft Auto.
This game is about taking missions
from masters and completing them.
It's kinda violent, but it's fun.
It's popular.
I like taking missions.
So my climate change game will be like
this but it would not be violent,the
missions will about doing things to help
CO2 from not building up each mission you
have to know more or learn more about
the causes and effects of climate change.
So Grand Climate Change Game engages his
community members in broad environmental
issues related to the everyday
practices of lighting and driving.
As you can see in both mission one and
mission two and yet
at the same time he's deeply aware of the
precarious nature of these practices for
the people in his community.
Electric cars are expensive so are CFLs.
Somebody's economic livelihood might
be in selling incandescent lightbulbs.
These concerns are a part of this game.
Grand climate change supports his
community in developing their own local
understandings and arguments regarding
climate change and human behavior.
As he wrote in his game description,
you have to think of all the reasons
why somebody might care.
You need to think about this strategy
because the more angles you hit,
the better you do.
So in authoring this game desynthesizes
information from various domains.
Including community in pure culture,
video gaming culture,
video gaming infrastructure.
And content understandings about
the different issues salient to climate
change, in order to make the game
accessible to those in his community.
So there's several other events I
could tell you about Quan's story but
I won't for the sake of time.
But his story does help us, or me anyway,
to unpack this first main claim
that identity work as a community STEM
expert is equitably consequential.
Transforming the boundaries of
participation in STEM in the moment
and over time.
As Quahn said, I never imagined
that I could have a job in STEM.
However, I began to change
my mind about my future.
I look back at it now, and I think,
wow, I really have done a lot.
I made a difference in how people think
about climate change, and their actions.
So by equitably consequential I suggest
that Identity work is forward directed and
transformative for
both the self and the community.
Acts of learning in
the cunning can tribute to and
help to legitimise an ever expanding
range of ideas, tools, resources and
ways of being Quahn leverage is his humor,
his community activism, his care for
his community, his care for Earth as forms
of capital with which to engage in STEM
and with which to make STEM accessible and
salient to members of his community.
Yet, Quahn was often in trouble for
his humor and just simply unrecognized for
his care at school.
This should not be surprising,
although it should be disturbing,
given the sociohistorical narrative that
unfairly positions young black males
who clown around as deviant
in school settings.
Yet Quahn was still strategic in
how he used his humor and his care
to disrupt both these local and historical
practices, at least in the moment,
in order to author a chance to engage in
STEM, and to be recognized for his effort.
It would be a mistake to think that Quahn
could transform the system on his own or
that even his small in
the moment disruptions,
undo the systemic racism that he
experiences as he tries to engage in STEM.
This is for
me where the great metaphor breaks down.
You've need allies in this
process across spaces and
over time, who helped push back against
all aspects of the education debt.
When the energy engineer at the local
university, an ally, took Quan's movie
seriously, and wrote a memo describing
the need of repairs based initially on
his investigation, she positioned him as
scientifically powerful and important.
When post-its were placed
on the broken vents,
literally by the end of the day to
indicate that repairs were in progress,
Quan's actions were further
made public to the community.
When Quan's teacher took his video
seriously and then showed it to other
teachers in his school to talk about what
they might be missing with this young man.
He opened up new dialogue in new
spaces on youth becoming in STEM.
Each time allies broke her
connections with her four youth,
across these potentially deep chasms,
they helped to break down marginalizing
binaries, such as insider, outsider,
expert, non-expert, successful,
unsuccessful Making access to STEM
potentially equitably consequential.
They can help to rewrite our
understandings of actions in the moment
and how we project them on
to what we think we know and
the understandings of possibilities for
future in STEM.
So now I wanna shift my attention to these
other two claims to look more closely at
STEM work that you do to
make sense in the ways and
which the STEM practices as
CSEs are rooted in community.
And to do so I'm gonna tell you two
more stories of youth I have known over
the course of three years although this
slide here shows a work over two years.
The first is a story about Samuel,
an 11-year-old who joined this Makerspace
Club in the middle of sixth grade.
And that's him in the upper left hand
corner, then bottom right hand corner.
And he joined the Makerspace because he
just kept seeing what other kids were
doing, and he wanted a chance
to do something like that too.
And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about
how Samuel design a light-up football.
While working in his Makerspace 2 to
3 days a week over the course about
five months.
So his light-up football, so get a picture
of this football has LED tube lights that
wrap around the ball that provide maximum
lighting with minimal added weight,
friction, or power expenditures.
And because the lighting was so efficient,
it didn't burn the little hands
that were using the football.
The lights are powered with
rechargeable batteries.
That can be recharged at
an external solar docking station,
limiting environmental impact and
saving money.
The football itself is constructed from
Nerf material to further minimize added
weight and to reduce the possibility of
injury if one were to be hit in the head.
And the batteries are stored in
a pocket at the center of the ball,
accessible by a small door to
keep it weighted properly.
And to minimize their potential
contact with rainwater or sweat.
So what I'm gonna do right now is show you
a two-minute clip from a longer movie
that Samuel made about his football
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC]
>> Now what are you gonna
do with that football?
Let's find out.
>> [LAUGH]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
Cool.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> [INAUDIBLE].
>> Okay, we can show more
of the video here, if you want.
So this idea for the light-up football
grew out of Samuel's desire to
make something that would be
helpful to people in his community.
>> As he states,
I really care about people.
And I could do stuff in the community.
Some kids really don't play football,
don't have no friends and
stuff, so I will find people
to help out a little bit.
But Samuel's idea of care is nested in his
understandings of the needs that
young people in his community face.
Few street lights in
this neighborhood work.
Football is the positive peer activity
that can help you make friends and
keep you out of trouble.
Most families cannot
afford expensive toys.
As Samuel noted in his interview,
his light-up football was an idea
that he thought and thought and
thought about for months while
home at his grandmothers house,
unable to find transportation to the club,
nor able to play outside after dark.
And Samuel was proud of his efforts.
As he stated, quote,
I was really proud cuz it
just made me feel good about myself, so I
could acknowledge people what I could do.
However, a light-up football
presented Samuel with many challenges of
both technical and social consequence.
I'll talk about only one for
the sake of time,
how lighting a football requires power.
As Samuel noted,
powering the lights costs money.
His solution was to use rechargeable
batteries because it saves money and time.
Mine's rechargeable batteries so
we can see all the time.
But you won't have to keep going back
to the store and buying batteries.
And rechargeable batteries addressed
another concern that he had,
environmental sustainability.
As he said, make the world greener.
When you throw batteries away t hose
critters can get inside your trash,
like the raccoons can like
take your batteries out.
But having a football, like a real
football in terms of size, shape,
weight and
aerodynamics were the most important.
And that really challenged Samuel
as he sought to power his ball.
As we can see, and I'll just show
a little bit of the short clip.
Two batteries did not light
the ball well enough, but
more than two batteries made
the football too heavy and expensive.
So he had to spend a significant portion
of time investigating different kinds of
lighting systems and their affordances.
>> My problem was how to make sure that it
can, the football will be light enough to.
So you can see it light.
So we had used like two battery,
two lights.
We had two lights.
And one of them wasn't that bright.
Wasn't that bright.
So
>> So you did that?
>> I chose this one because it's
a tube and you can stretch it
around the whole football.
So what I did was, I had it made
[INAUDIBLE]
>> All right so
Samuel finally got his lights to work but
then his cousins Kaden and DeMarcus,who
play for a local community team,complained
to him that his ball was too wobbly.
As they said.
I should've made it so
the battery wouldn't be hanging out,
cuz if it hangs out,
it kinda makes it heavier on one side.
So when I went back and tried to do it,
I made sure that when I cut it,
I made sure that it would be deep enough
so it won't make it so heavy on one side,
so it could be just right.
So like a real NFL football.
And so Samuel then needed to consider
the weight of the football and
the location of the weight, just to
get the ball to work aerodynamically.
Eventually, he figured out how to get
the batteries at the center of gravity.
And then also, I don't know if you
noticed it when you saw the movie,
how to wedge those LED
lights into the ball.
So the need to light a football reflects
Samuel's experiences in the world,
and how through his developing stem
knowledge, he was able to engineer in ways
that positioned him with agency
over the concerns of his life.
And we'll return to Samuel's
story in a moment, but
I will tell you another quick
story about Jennifer and Emily.
Also sixth graders who
designed a heated jacked that
would keep their peers warm and
also keep them from being bullied.
Jennifer joined her after school maker
club because she wanted to use the club's
computers.
She was quite proud of her abilities
with technology as she stated
on many occasions,
I am good a jailbreaking stuff.
In fact, sometimes when we needed to get
past the firewall of the club because we
had to get on YouTube,
she was our go to person.
Emily joined the club
because Jennifer joined, and
they'd been best friends
from an early age.
And she didn't wanna hang out at the club
in a different space without Jennifer.
So from October to May, Jennifer and
Emily designed a heated jacket.
So let's let them explain their jacket.
>> What was the process
of me doing this project?
In the process we learned about heating
pad, solar panels, and how to sew.
[MUSIC]
This is [INAUDIBLE] jacket, so
now I have to sew it back together again.
[INAUDIBLE]
>> All right, so
the girls came up with this idea.
Not like Samuel who came in after
months and months of thinking and
knowing what he wanted to make.
They didn't actually know
what they wanted to make.
They ended up spending four
weeks surveying peers and
community members about the safety
issues that they cared about.
And from graphs that they
made of their survey data,
they had got [COUGH] excuse me,
62 responses.
They noticed that commuting [COUGH]
was a major safety concern,
identified by 74% of respondents.
And that when they looked more closely at
the open ended comments on this point,
they noticed that the youth respondents
were more concerned with walking in
the dark and bullying, as opposed to the
adult respondents who were more concerned
with car transportation issues.
So, they decided based
on this information,
that they ought to move ahead
with a heated, lighted jacket.
And the girls described this jacket as
one that would be quote, warm, bright,
lightweight, and glamorous.
But the aesthetics of this jacket carry
much deeper meaning than just beauty.
The girls were concerned about
inappropriate exposure and
being bullied for appearances.
As Jennifer stated.
She stated.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> I
don't know why that
wasn't at the beginning.
So anyway, she was saying, I was gonna
give you something beautiful, but
with casual in it so
that you don't expose yourself.
Like a jacket that goes all of the way
down and has beautiful light up things.
My idea could change things.
People make fun of you.
And then you hear her say that.
Why are you wearing that?
You're ugly.
There are stains on your clothes.
And so the jacket was meant to push back
against these negative peer relations,
in addition to keeping people warm.
So the girls on road into making
this jacket was a bit rocky.
But their interest in fashion and
their comfort with computers got them
through another initial rocky phase.
Their initial design sketches
were full of fashion detail,
but lacked a lot of technical
clarity on where they might start.
And so they began their
investigation by spending hours and
hours on Pinterest, where Jennifer
had her own page with fashion ideas.
And they made their own page on Pinterest
where they had detailed ideas for
the kinds of materials and
fashion they wanted.
They wanted the word cool spelled
across the front, so looked for
lots of things that had that.
They wanted a hood,
they wanted trim down the zipper.
And it needed to be soft and
it definitely could not be bulky.
And this is where Pinterest
explorations became interesting.
Because with the extensive amount of time
they spent on the Internet looking for
heated jackets, what they found was,
that quote, all the heated jackets are for
hunting and construction, not for casual.
And they all have those big heating
parts and that would be heavy.
So it gave an immediate place to begin
to delve into the technical part
of the exploration.
So the girls went in search of different
kinds of non-bulky heating pads and
different heating elements that they
could find around their maker space.
And after testing four different
heating pads that were non-bulky, and
finding the one that they thought
would heat their jacket just right,
did they need to figure how
are they gonna power it on the go,
cuz you can’t stand there with
your jacket plugged into the wall.
And so, working with a mentor,
they conducted a few experiments and
some calculations, but then this ended
up also causing enormous frustration for
the girls.
As Emily stated, I like this heating
source but we can't use 110 batteries.
We don't even have that many batteries.
And the sweatshirt jacket
would be just too heavy.
Here's where tapping into
community networks played
critical roles in helping these
girls over this and other hurdles.
One of the mentors, when Emily was upset
about the power requirements, reminded
the two girls of a funny video post
that they had made earlier in the year.
Where Jennifer had told a story about
insulation around the fireplace at home
that her dad made.
Remembering and
reminding the girls that this story
led to girls to begin to start
thinking about insulation.
And thinking about how they might get way
with using a smaller heating element,
if they could find a way
to insulate their jacket.
As she said about that video blog, that
silver lining, as a kid I've seen a lot of
it, cuz we had to put it,
we had something in our fireplace.
We had to put silver lining around it so
the heat would stay in.
And in another instance when,
that's Jennifer right there,
cut too deeply into the jacket
as we saw in the previous video,
that actually sent Emily
out of the room crying,
because all that hard work was for
naught after that jacket was destroyed.
One of their peers thought of the idea of
going to get one of the staff members at
the club who does a lot of sewing to
fix up the clothes to teach them how to
use the sewing machine.
So it seemed like with each new, cool
fashion idea that the girls came up with,
led to technical challenges that were
complicated and frustrating for them.
Another huge one being how to power
the jacket with solar energy.
Because in their words,
solar panels were ugly.
And while I don't have the time to go into
the detail of that piece of the story,
I'll add that part of the solution
resided in using the sewing
machine to make a cool stitch to get
a flexible panel stitched into the jacket.
So what can we learn from
these two different stories?
All about the football and the jacket.
Well even with the little free library.
First I think that,
you know we can argue that youth STEM
practices are rooted in community and
are reflections of deep and critical
knowledge of the needs communities face.
And such rootedness can help youth
endure some of the challenges they
face as they engage in STEM.
In our studies, the youth often position
themselves inside the urban ecology.
Their rooted stem practices draw an expert
knowledge inside to these spaces such as
their funds of knowledge.
And their insider positioning status that
they have granted them access to networks
that we as teachers or
researchers don't always have access to.
For example, knowledge over street
lights have historically not worked,
who is bullied,
the importance of football and
positive peer activities, what books or
maker kits might help young people.
How to work with one hands to build,
knowing what staff members know how to
use a sewing machine, and on and
on, all reflect their insideness,
their membership and experiences in
community spaces that they inhabit.
As Samuel stated on the importance
of reaching out to his cousins in
the football star, quote, I know how
to find people who know how to help.
How the youth drew upon their insider
knowledge and positioning across spaces
reflects their efforts to author
interconnecting corridors for
traversing between these community spaces.
And their stem infused work.
But there are notes of criticality
in their rootedness that we have
to pay attention to.
And such criticality pushes you
to engage more deeply in stem
with a sense of both urgency and hope.
These include economic,
making designs affordable, environmental,
supporting local ecologies, social, such
as fostering positive peer relations or
community ownership or
preventing bullying and gang activity.
And urban infrastructure, like providing
lighting and warmth on cold, dark days,
which we have a lot of in Michigan.
In addressing these concerns the youth
refuse to over look the complex
multi-facade dimensions of potential
solutions as they integrated this
concerns into their design work humanizing
what it means to engage and in stem.
Each note of criticality push the youth to
consider new technical factors that had
not been previously considered.
These domains, too, however, importantly
challenge stereotypical assumptions about
what youth of color care about.
Or what youth from low income
communities care about.
As one of the youth said, quote,
African-Americans are stereotyped in
the media as people who do not care for
the earth.
And yet we see that care stretch
across all the work that they do.
So the second point is that as youth
engage in such rooted practices.
Their in the moment actions serve as pivot
points towards deeper engagement in STEM.
And here I use Holland's use of the word
pivot to refer to, mediating or
symbolic devices not just
to organize responses but
also to shift into the frame
of a different world.
Pivots can include tools, these could be
conceptual tools, like funds of knowledge.
They include relationships, such as
Samuel's ties to his peers and cousins.
But they also include
the Innovations themselves,
such as the little free STEM library for
supporting reading, making, and STEM.
And I wanna talk just a little bit
about the different roles that these
pivots play.
First, as I've already noted in
the stories, the youth leverage their
insided-ness as navigational indicators
for launching into STEM work.
Their insided-ness provided secure
directions when the way forward in
STEM was unclear.
It also gave them directions for
where within their social networks
they might rely for help.
But secondly,
specific community concerns and
stakeholder perspectives
raised in the moment,
provided a safe way for youth to be
critical of their design efforts.
To view their design
efforts in critical ways.
Opening up spaces for
them to actually functionally break
down their design work into reasonable
bits from a technical standpoint.
As Paul stated we need to feel safe when
we're learning these things, meaning we
need to feel safe when we have to dig
into the stem that we don't understand.
And so as community concerns initiated
more complex design conditions
the youth had to turn to science
to consider the best ways to both
maximize tradeoffs as they sought
to optimize these designs.
For example, Samuel switched to Nerf
material to reduce the weight and
to make cutting into that ball easier but
in talking with his mom,
he also realized that introduced
an important safety feature.
Jennifer and
Emily actually drop the lighting
from their jacket to prevent
additional bulk in power expenditures.
But at the same time expanded the types of
test they conducted on the heating systems
to attend to more complex understanding of
how they wanted the heat to work in their
jacket.
They added the skin test, the time test,
the fabric and the mylar test,
and the location test to ensure
that intersections of comfort and
technical success of their design.
False switch from a solar powered to
a hand cranked generator when the peers
around her convinced her that her
library was better kept indoors.
So there are many ways that these pivots
expand in possibilities from becoming
a stem as well.
For example,in their
after school club,they
positioned engineering
as an inside practice.
And something co-owned by the community.
As Samuel walked through the club with
his football, kids gathered around him,
asking him where could they buy one,
and when could they use it?
Quan's video game embraced
the complexity of his community,
in building arguments around that
relationship between climate change and
human behavior, and
what was possible in their community.
But these pivots also transform
the playing fields of STEM both real and
imagined.
The youths practices served as tools
to expand the purposes and goals for
engaging in science.
At the heart of each youth's design,
is an effort to work at the intersections
of science, and the public good.
As a way to transform both,
all while acknowledging and
challenging the powered boundaries
of race, class and gender.
As, what we see is youth engaged
in a process of taking back and
reclaiming the space of STEM
in ways that recognize and
care for their rootedness in community.
As Jennifer explained, quote,
I feel like it will be super cool.
People will love it.
They'll say, who made this?
It was me.
Then they'll ask me, the tiny person
always in the background did this?
I'll say yeah I did that,
this girl knows how to have fun,
how to get down and smart when she
really needs to, this girl can be fun.
She could build things, she could
make the world a different place and
help everybody else learn how to have
the type of fun she has and stuff.
Little kids can do ginormous work.
So how do the ways in which youth
author themselves as community STEM
experts matter?
For many youth, gaining access to
STEM is a constant uphill battle.
Their STEM pathways are not
neatly laid out for
them, as the term pathway suggests.
And their efforts involve
accessing ideas and resources and
ways of being not traditionally
legitimize in stem education spaces.
Many of them have literally had to hack a
way forward sometimes through unclear and
unfriendly territory with the hope that
they'll be recognized for what they do.
The youth across our studies often work
to author these new paths within very
small and safe spaces, such as supportive
after school clubs, or small peer groups.
But they also have to take the risks,
with the help of allies,
as they move their ideas and practices
from these safe spaces to unknown and
potentially unsafe spaces,
as they try to build a trajectory forward.
Youth authored pass though,
I wanna make the point though that
youth authored pass though in more
than just interest-driven ways.
And there's a lot of talk right now
within the connected learning movement,
that we have to think about the ways
in which pathways are interest-driven.
And I think that's true and important, but
the point I wanna make here is
that while interest matters, so
do the ways in which such interest are
forged within sociopolitical histories.
Where issues of power, and privilege,
and location deeply shape identity
work as they forged ahead
with their lives in STEM.
And so I wanna close on this point that
youth need, and we must design for,
multiple on-ramps and tools for
hacking new ways of becoming in STEM.
Because these are things we can design for
in STEM education.
I think just in the stories that I've told
today, we have good evidence that using
the tools of ethnography,
with youth in their after school programs,
enable them to more systematically and
deeply leverage their insider knowledge,
while supporting them, more precisely
engaging in engineering design.
We have evidence that
structured opportunities for
recognition through multimodal
artifact production, and
sharing of research finding across
authentic communities of practice,
affords increasing opportunities for
identity work.
We have evidence that tools that support
the hope and urgency youth bring to doing
STEM in community can recreate more human
spaces for learning and becoming in STEM.
But to design well, we also need to be
open to youth experiences in the world,
STEM and otherwise.
And we have to be willing to respond to
the educational debt that they have lived
across generations.
And while we need
a plurality of approaches,
I hope I've also made a case here for
a more central role for
youth participatory design work, that
takes place across setting and over time.
We need to be able to see the world from
the vantage point of the youth we hope
to serve.
And they own the right to have their
voices a significant part of this process.
And so it's on that point, that I would
like to give the last word to the youth.
And so I'll close with a short clip
from Samuel, three years after he made
his football, that speaks directly to
this point on participatory design and
equitably consequential
opportunities to become in STEM.
>> Here goes, [INAUDIBLE] about the topic.
Little kids, and then,
just think about the little kids in there.
Think about the teachers, think about how
the teachers is going to help everybody,
everybody in the class, in the schools,
or through community sightings.
Think about the teachers
that just sit there and
let us read out of the science book.
Think about the teachers that barely have
hands-on projects, before our tests.
We don't know how to do this,
we have to go outside on our own time and
find places where we can go and
learn how to do projects.
And learn how to engineer and build
things, and we shouldn't have to do that.
We need to make sure that schools and
teachers, you gotta help them,
you gotta explain to them
the work out in the community.
We need to tell them how to do it,
we need to tell them why we do it, and
we need tell them all of that.
Helping people is a good thing to do,
helping our community is helping us too.
That's coming from one person
that's helping everybody.
>> So, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> So-
>> I guess it's Q&A?
>> Q&A time.
Do you people have,
I mean, yes, sir, please.
>> Can I just, I wanted to thank you so
much for [INAUDIBLE] inclusion.
>> Thank you.
>> [INAUDIBLE] My question is
the youth you selected,
all of them are very smart,
very talented.
I don't want to say very intelligent,
because I don't believe in the concept
of intelligence in general, and
it's done for just creating social class.
[INAUDIBLE] you know exactly
what I'm trying to do.
So, but at the same note,
they are highly motivated.
>> Mm-hm.
>> How can we find these kids to be
highly motivated to do all these things?
Because without motivation, they will not
be able to actually produce [INAUDIBLE]
>> Yeah so, I think one of the things to,
I'll say remember, but I never even said
this to you, [LAUGH] so I'll tell you now.
[LAUGH] So the programs that I drew
these cases from take place at community
centers where kids go after school
every day because that's where you go.
There's really no other place to hang out
in town, and so they join our after school
programs because they're hanging out,
and then they have nothing to do.
Or they're there because
their friends are there.
We don't self select for
kids who have an interest in STEM.
So, like you saw with Emily,
she was there cuz her friend was there.
And I'm making that point because these
are ordinary everyday young people,
who when given a space to take action
on the issues that they care about,
have motivation to do something
to make a difference.
One of the things that Samuel says, later
on in that interview that I showed at
the end, is that when you start on
a project like this, you have to succeed.
You have no choice but to succeed,
because you owe it to the people in your
community who you've committed to help.
And so, that doesn't mean that
on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and
Thursdays when we're the boys and
girls club.
They see as at the door and
they come running in and
start working really
hard on their projects.
It doesn't really work that way for
many of you who've worked
in out of school programs.
They come running up and
come in cuz we have great snacks, and
they can get snack and
then there's social time.
But a lot of times, there is lots of
deep frustration, and kids will leave,
and then they'll come back.
We have this one group that worked
on the Timmy which is a boot.
And they would work for like 15 minutes
and they would just go leave and
play basketball cuz they were like,
we're done, we're out of here.
But we had an undergrad mentor
who is an engineering student,
who was working with
that group in particular.
And he decided after about a week, which
I thought was a really smart move on his
part, to go to the gym and
just start playing basketball with them.
And he would, he played basketball for
30 minutes until the open court was done.
And then,
he'd coax them back into the room to get
into work just a little more on the Timmy.
And it took four months, but
they got their boot to light up,
they got it to work.
And having that success I think in that
moment, then expands opportunities for,
or expands understandings of
what's possible in that space.
So they're willing to come back and
maybe try a harder project, other kids see
that success and they wanna have it too.
So I don't know.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that,
in terms of motivations,
there's a wide range of
different kinds of motivations.
But it's partly about how you design
that learning environment that
supports young people in doing and
being in ways that they care about so
that they not only feel that
their work is legitimized,
their work is actually legitimized.
So, wonderful talk, thank you so much.
I really like the concept that you
laid out about educational debt,
and taking it from just
the individual to more system.
And I'm wondering if you might draw that
concept through a little bit more since
the examples you gave were wonderfully
evocative, but individually based.
And didn't quite get at to the larger
systemic context that those
experiences were happening and
how you're working with that.
>> Okay, yeah.
I've tried.
So one of the things that I think is
really important to think about across
these examples and others in our project
is how the practice of engineering is
co-owned in community, and
co-shaped within these community spaces.
And I think that's a really essential
theme because it pushes back on power
dynamics in terms of who has the authority
and the right to be in engineering.
And so carrying that across not only
how we design, we as teachers and
researchers design for
experiences and that space.
So for example, adding in the tools
of youth as community ethnographers.
I think is one way to
promote dialogue in community
to position the engineering
agenda in that shared space.
I think that's one example of how
the individual work that kids or
groups are doing is part of this broader,
narrative that pushes back.
I think another way in which we see that,
and again,
this is sort of Jack's opposing the
individual or the team against a broader
piece, is this idea regarding
what it actually means to
engage in STEM, in maker spaces or
in after school clubs.
What kinds of talk can happen,
what it means to be in these spaces.
So one example that we write about
in a different paper that's in press
right now at Teacher's College Record,
is an example of a group of
girls who had been worried about
issues of rape in their community.
And they had done all this research in,
I have to go back and
ask them because I'm not sure it
was tied to a school project or
just something that they
were doing on their own.
But they were deeply worried that, that
they fit the demographic that there were
the most percentages of
rapes in their community.
And they viewed being having this
opportunity to work in the maker
space as a chance for
them to take some action on that topic.
But to do that, meant that they came into
the space and then we're talking about
rape which is a traditionally, I would
argue, taboo topic in a STEM classroom.
And so again, thinking about the kinds of
pedagogies that we engage in this space,
what topics are legitimized,
what topics are not.
I think is a part of how we think about
narratives around what it means to do
STEM, what it means to engage STEM, what
are the motivations for engaging STEM and
so forth.
I don't necessarily think we address
issues regarding structural inequalities
regarding funding, cuz well,
we do have an NSF grant, but
beyond that we're kind of broke [LAUGH].
And it's really interesting I think trying
to institute a community-based maker
space in a boys and girls club where they
are really strapped for space themselves.
Boys and girls clubs across the country
offer many different services, but
also operate on a shoestring
budget themselves.
And so we can't necessarily ask for
dedicated space in the club.
But we can be given a space that we
can consistently use across time.
And so, and maybe in some ways
it does push back against this.
Because it is strategizing both with you
and collaboratively with staff at the club
to, how do we make this space
feel like our own space?
Like, what can we keep permanently and
this multipurpose room
that doubles as a maker space at times,
where can we store stuff?
How can we showcase work that young
people are doing and transform
that larger space of the club, even
though we're working on a limited budget?
So take the Little Free STEM Library,
for example.
That sits right now at the entry
way of the boys and girls club.
And it was very strategic on the part
that of a particular group because they
are very aware that,
if you don't have your club membership,
which costs $10 a year for
a youth to be a member of the club, and
if you forget your membership card,
then you have to pay 25 cents.
We can critique that but that is reality.
And so you can come in and then realize
I forgot my car, you have to leave.
But if the little Free Library
is there before the desk,
then kids can have access to that.
And so again, while this is a project
of two young people, it's an effort for
them to engage broadly with the community
that they're apart of as a way
to change that space so that there
is greater access to the tools and
resources that one might not
have access to in school.
It might sounded like Samuel was critical
of his teachers like, we have to read and
we don't have the stuff.
But one of the things I clipped out,
really only for the sake of time,
was a really interesting talk that he was
having with the young woman next to him,
Fall, about how teachers care.
Teachers care, their school just
doesn't have the stuff for them.
Teachers care about our learning, but
they don't necessarily care
about our communities.
Because they're not from our communities.
They don't live in our communities.
And so, I think that incorporating
this critical dialogue around
how young people are positioned
by others in society and
opening up spaces for them to push
back against those positionings.
I think is an important
part of this as well.
>> I'm wondering [INAUDIBLE] the suites,
but
I'm wondering what can,
so I trained also as
a vocational teacher, so
all of this makes total sense.
But I'm wondering, let's say at the middle
school or elementary school level,
what you're finding here be
transposed into those classrooms?
And what kind of training might be needed
and what would people need to let go of?
That's a great question and one we're
actually trying to tackle right now.
We have a DRK-12 from NSF where we're
taking some of the approaches that
we've used in this out-of-school
programs and creating tools to support
teachers in the context of engineering
design challenges that would support
the kinds of consequential identity
work that I’ve been talking about today.
And this engineering challenges
are grounded in this kind of an essence of
making that cuts across them, but
also grounded in an engineering for
sustainable communities approach because
that approach, pushes on and asks for
co-ownership of the agenda,
co-ownership of the design process,
co-ownership of the outcomes.
And so, it's a real challenge though,
thinking about what do these
teachers tools look like,
how can we co-develop, we're
co-developing them with teachers, and
with young people Because they're asking
teachers to be in the classroom space
in a way that's really different from
anything that's been expected of them.
We're asking teachers to support
young people in engaging in dialogue
with community members as a part of
what's going on in the classroom.
And we're asking teachers to support young
people and developing designs in response
to these design challenges that they can't
necessarily predict what they'll be.
It's not like everybody is gonna make
a bridge, it's not like everybody is
going to make a dropper that makes
30 drops in a minute or whatever.
But they'll be tackling questions that
are core constructed in
dialogue with community.
And so these tools that we've generated
to support young people in engaging in
community as community ethnographers in
these out of school spaces are a part
of what we'll be using with
teachers in classrooms.
But right now we're at the phase in
that project where we have teachers and
young people working together
in out of school spaces.
Classroom teachers and young people
working together in out of school spaces.
And the goal is hopefully by next spring
we'll be Fully piloting that in sixth and
seventh grade classrooms in schools.
So, to be continued, [LAUGH] I'm
a little bit nervous but excited.
Go ahead.
>> So these are gonna be, I mean they're
interesting samples and stories and
I have students after school spacers 20,
30 kids.
For how many of those
kids does this not work?
Even despite your best efforts
you can't engage them, and
what is your thinking about why?
>> Yeah, so my worry in giving this talk
is that people would walk away thinking,
Angie only told us success stories, right?
And that would be a fair critic.
But I think what is really
important to think about is
what does it mean to be
successful in these spaces?
And I honestly I'm gonna get
around answering your question.
Because one of the things we
look at is how can we open
up this idea of what are important
outcomes in the space?
And so, important outcomes include new
forms of participation, engagement, and
STEM that one might not have had before.
It might be just engaging and
playing around with an engineering or
STEM identity that one was maybe too
afraid to play around with before.
Or it might be learning some new content
or some science or engineering practices.
And so we really try to take
a stance that we want to
start with young people
where they're at and
help them to move in as
far long as they can.
So let's take for
example this one group Barbara and Philip.
And they wanted to make a backpack that
lit up and they wanna use pizo pads.
So moving vibrational energy to
electrical energy to get it to light up.
And they got really frustrated and
Philip stop coming.
Barbara kept coming, and bizo pads,
it's a challenging technical issue for
them to work with.
And so kinda corks Philip to come
back after a few weeks and so
we started doing some investigation and
we're like,
how are other people using pizo pads,
what can we learn?
And so
we spent a lot of time on like looking for
videos on YouTube because pizo pads
are not my expertise see they're in.
We can only get certain engineers out
at the club every once in a while.
It's not like they're
here every week with us.
So what they ended up deciding was
that there is nothing out there on
YouTube because they wanted video.
They really wanted to see how this work
that would teach us about pizo pads.
So they decided to put
that project aside and
they ended up spending a few weeks
making their own short YouTube clip
on just exactly what pizo pads are and
how you might use them.
So yeah, they were not at all successful
it did not make their light up backpack
from that vantage point.
But with some coaxing and
getting them back, they did end
up making a short video that was by kids,
for kids, teaching about pizo pads.
So I would call that successful.
What pushed them away initially,
that the technical challenge that
they picked was really hard.
That they wanted to make something that
ultimately ended up being too hard for
them to do.
For other kids,
the challenge is really social.
Like you're asking me to come to this
makerspace thing and be here for
at least one day a week, hopefully
a couple days a week over months.
When I could be in the games
room with my friends.
When I could be in the gym
playing basketball.
Or where I could just be chilling,
or whatever, in the teen room.
And that's actually a real challenge.
And so thinking through different
strategies that we can employ that
help young people to create movement,
really fluid movement,
between these spaces I think is one way
in which we do support young people
in creating time and space to or making
the time space to be in the maker space.
But the other are some
young people who start and
leave the program and we can't ever quite
figure out what would help them come back.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> There are young people who I would
argue who would say I actually put this,
I should have put this quart up there.
They would say, I'm not a scientist.
I'm not an engineer.
I'm not a STEM person.
But I do community science.
And in fact if you
notice I could flip back
to false pivot critical moments.
She and another one of her friends
came up with the term fiance.
Because they don't like science at all.
They only fcience, which is F-C-I-E-N-C-E.
Because for them that captures, so okay,
that's the contraction
of fun plus science.
But in a follow up interview where we got
them to really unpack what fcience was
Actually, it wasn't,
I mean, fun is important.
Like I'm having fun, I'm laughing.
I'm feeling good.
But it was also like it was
doing something that mattered.
Like if that was the bottom line for
them, I wanna do something that matters.
I don't wanna do that struct
experiment because it doesn't matter.
I wanna do something that matters.
And so, maybe it means making a video.
Maybe it means building
a little free library.
And for fall, this is really interesting
in terms of your question earlier Herald.
She within or get city program for couple
of years and then get city kind of ended.
And then we did this other thing and
she didn't really comeback to that.
And then she started coming back honestly.
Because she was interested in the snack.
And she said it, I want snack.
I'm here for snack.
I'm like, okay, why don't you stay.
You can help out.
You're an expert.
You're a get city graduate, come stay.
So she stayed, but
she didn't really help out.
She just stayed and watched.
And she started writing.
Cuz we have a blog she just
started writing these blog posts.
And then she begin to be identified
by others as the blogger.
Pau, write that in the blog this week,
Pau, get a picture of this.
And then if you actually
trace then you could do this,
you can go in the Git City and
trace her blog post,
you'll notice that actually her accounts
are pretty ethnographic in nature,
which is really interesting, but
you'll notice after a while,
Students start to put pictures
of ourselves,actually blogging.
Because it took that long for her to
begin to see herself as that blogger.
And so for me it kinda raises the question
of like what kind spaces are we creating
for young people like what wide
range of spaces are recreating for
young people in this after school program
so that they feel like they belong?
For Pau she did not wanna
do some of the STEM work.
For her, she blogged for a long time,
before then finally like,
I think I can do this making project now.
I think I'll make this
little free library.
>> So in a way she became
that communities resource.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, mm-hm.
I don't know, who should I call on.
You call on somebody.
>> Right.
And so, Karen [INAUDIBLE].
>> Hi, thank you so much for you Cher.
If I was to create a makerspace what sort
of things would I do to survive like can
you speak to the logistics
of what you did.
Do you have from a paper?
>> Wow, yeah that's a great question.
And very hard question to answer.
So I don't know,
I'm not gonna give you a great answer.
But I'm gonna give you,
gonna try to give you an answer.
Because one of the things that we're
trying to figure out with this project is,
like what are the core
design principles for
an equity oriented
community based makerspace.
And it's really important that I
say community based makerspace.
So I'm not talking about
a makerspace in like making
a studio where you have to pay membership.
Or in a library or in a museum.
Or museum where you might have to
pay an admission fee to get in.
Or in a library which is more likely to be
more sort of drop in for a couple hours.
But in a community center where
case are hanging out already, and
are more likely to have
sustained engagement, and
so, we have thought a lot about what kinds
of experiences would you engage young
people into, orient them to the space,
and to ways of being in the space, that's
for who they are and what they might do.
And so as I mentioned earlier,
one of the things we do when
we start the school year,
cuz we do run it like a program is we just
engage in a lot of dialog and ethnography,
you guys community ethnographers
around what issues people care about.
But we also think about literally
the physical design of the space because
we are actually now moving into
semi-permanent room that will be ours
like what do they want the space
to feel like and to look like.
And so we involved a group of
15 youth in a participatory
design action research project
last summer, where we went and
visited lots of different makerspaces
around in Michigan, we took virtual tours
of other spaces that we couldn't afford
to visit because they're in California,
or elsewhere,
that were geared towards youth.
And they had sustained programming,
although some of the ones we visited
were meant for adults,
cuz they're on MSU's campus and so forth.
And what was so interesting to us
was a couple different things.
One of the things was that
they really pointed towards
what they didn't want about,
what they visited.
These spaces are not for
us because, we don't feel welcome
because they're not colorful and bright.
We can't touch everything.
We don't have a space to think and
to work it out.
We want
to be able to do these other things and
we don't see that stuff there.
So for example, now in designing the space
that we have now, they're very adamant
that we have in the corner of the room
like comfy chair and beanbags as you might
imagine, but they also had a dance
floor with a disco ball on top.
Because when you get frustrated
the only option, right now,
is to leave the room,
go down the hall and play basketball, and
maybe come back, but then you're gonna
be so enticed by your peer relations,
that you're probably not gonna come back,
unless you have that really great mentor,
Danny, who's gonna play basketball
with you and bring you back.
And so, this will allow them to
get their frustrations out, and
that all started because we were
working in a university room, and
we couldn't really, during our summer
program, and when you couldn't really go
storming out of that room, so
we were just like stop, dance time.
And that was started by the kids,
like dance break.
And we had dance break, so we're having
a little dance floor in the corner.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Yeah, I don't know about that.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> But they also want a snack station.
Because they've been in school all day and
when you're working you
need to feed the brain.
So there has to be a snack station.
But they also, this is really,
this was so interesting to me.
They wanted a thinking station,
they wanted a rough draft station and
a make it perfect station and
a presentation station.
But they were very clear that tied to
the rough drafts station, they wanted
to be able to have rough drafts showcased
in that space like hanging up like I
want my rough draft hanging up on the wall
so that when other people come in they
will see that what you're doing
here doesn't have to be perfect.
Cuz they were really Intimidated I
would say, by visiting other spaces and
seeing like really cool
perfect stuff hanging up, and
they did not want that other people
to have those same feelings.
I don't know if that
was a really cool idea.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Do you have
a question?
>> I can ask her.
>> Maybe after if that's okay?
Just cuz it's 7 o'clock, and
so I wanna respect your time.
And thank you so much for
this excellent talk [INAUDIBLE]
>> [APPLAUSE] Do I sit down?
>> No, you can sit.
Yeah, I have a little gift for you.
So just wait right there,
I'll give it to you.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Thank you all for
coming, I'm Harold Levine and
I'm dean of the school of education.
And thank you Angie for your talk.
>> Thank you very much.
>> For
those of you who are in education, and
many of you I know are in the room
have been the annual conference of
The American Education Research
Association this past April in D.C.,
and the theme for the annual
conference was engaged scholarship.
And we spent days and I actually to whole
day session with four deans about well,
what is engaged scholarship?
How are you doing?
Can you do it better?
And we've had all kinds of examples and
struggling for a definition which of
course is not possible but
about what engaged scholarship is.
So I'm gonna recommend that
all those deans come and
talk to you-
>> [LAUGH] Great.
>> Because this is a wonderful,
participatory research kind of work
that you do is inherently
engaged scholarship and
the idea of, I mean a lot of engaged
scholarship is really trying to minimize,
not to ignore but to minimize the
difference between an expert and a novice.
Or a researcher and his or her subject.
The observer and the observed.
And this is really the work
that you're doing.
Is really taking this idea,
the core construction of knowledge it is
what engaged scholarship for
many people really is all about,
and then you are sharing your, you are an
expert but you're allowing the kids also
to be experts in their own way and
to develop that and grow that expertise.
It's the notion of
co-construction I think is so
important to this one strand
of engaged scholarship.
I think there's a lot to learn,
I mean there's so
much we're trying to teach people,
and yet there's so much that they can
also teach us, and create on their own.
So, I wanna applaud you for
this kind of work.
I'm gonna make sure everybody in the ERA
is at your doorstep trying to learn more.
I also thank, and I'll, almost close
with this, you talked about safe and
unsafe spaces and I, you know, I have
the feeling that for many kids school
is an unsafe place, so, it's served I
think back to Carrie's question too.
And I think the big question is how to,
how we engage students and
that was the basis of my question, how do
we engage students in their after school
space but how we engage them and
make classrooms safe for them.
And I know there are teachers
out there who do that.
And some of our faculty here try to
work with teachers to make that happen.
But how do you do it on a national level.
So, and I would bet you have
a lot more to tell us about that.
Next time we have you out.
So let me thank you all for coming.
I have a small Gift for you.
So among other things
that is cool at UC Davis,
there's many cool things,
we also make olive oil.
>> Ooh.
>> And so if you have a hand carry,
we'll ship it to you, but if you can slip
it in your luggage and take it home.
Next time you're having your
pasta at home, think of us.
Thank you.
>> I do love pasta.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you all for
coming and have a good evening.
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
