STEM Literacies in Makerspaces

Implications for Learning, Teaching, and Research

Eli Tucker-Raymond, Brian E. Gravel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351256704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Providing an original framework for the study of makerspaces in a literacy context, this book bridges the scholarship of literacy studies and STEM and offers a window into the practices that makers learn and interact with. Tucker-Raymond and Gravel define and illustrate five key STEM literacies—identifying, organizing, and integrating information; creating and traversing representations; communicating with others for help and feedback during making; documenting processes; and communicating finished products—and demonstrate how these literacies intersect with making communities. Through careful observation and analysis of multiple case studies, the authors highlight the impact of research and practice to support teaching and making in a variety of environments. Using a nuanced, engaging framework, they examine the necessary skills required to develop and foster makerspaces in formal and informal contexts for all students. Grounded in cutting-edge research, this volume paves the way for future study on supporting making and literacies in STEM.

1
STEM Literacy Practices

Making activities are replete with literacies, particularly as they relate to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (and Arts) fields (STEM or STEAM) across professional, school, and informal making spaces (Gravel, Tucker-Raymond, Kohberger, & Browne, 2017). This chapter outlines our framework for identifying, understanding, and supporting STEM literacy practices in making spaces. We explain what literacy practices are and why we use them as a focal unit of analysis. Next, we present our STEM literacy framework that we used to begin our analyses of the spaces.

What Are Literacy Practices?

Many people think of literacy as the ability to read and write written language. This book treats literacy more broadly. We define literacy to be one’s use of, and facility with, representations, or texts, to make meaning and communicate with others. It includes both consuming (e.g., reading) and creating (e.g., sketching) with a variety of representations. Second, we understand there to be multiple literacies: for instance, knowing how to write a legal brief for a court proceeding is one literacy. Creating an attractive and easily navigable website is another. There are diverse literacies in use for diverse purposes in making spaces. To help us understand STEM literacies in making spaces we build on extensive work in literacies scholarship that foreground social practices (Heath, 1983; Street, 2003) and multiple literacies, or multiliteracies (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) to understand and support learners in multiple contexts. Taken together, we make the argument that literacies are best understood as multiliterate social practices.

Social Practices

This book is not about how individuals engage in making. It is about what happens in making spaces. The focus on spaces necessitates our analytic lens at the level of social practice. A social practice perspective describes and analyzes how individuals and communities relate to one another and organize, reproduce, and transform ways of living together (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1995). Within a social practice framework on literacy (Barton & Hamilton, 2000) people work together in social groups to produce representations that communicate ideas and act as tools to think with (Vygotsky, 1978). What people learn is a part of the valued institutional and community practices involved in the contexts in which they are participating. People also draw on their own “repertoires’ of practice,” or ways of engaging in activities, drawn from past experiences in multiple communities, each with their own traditions (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). Through literacy practices, people communicate what knowledge is valued in a particular social and cultural setting as they use and create shared repertoires for meaning making and frameworks for interpretation (Dyson & Genishi, 2005).

Literacies are contextually constituted by the purposes, identities, and tools, including ways of communicating, valued in that particular place and time (Gee, 1996; Street, 2003). One can think of literacies as occurring at different grain sizes: events, practices, and ideologies and structures. Literacy events are time- and space-bound interactions in which one or more multimodal texts has a central role (Heath, 1983). For instance, an individual subway commuter surfing the Web on their phone while on the way to work Monday morning is a literacy event. Literacy practices connect literacy events with broader social and cultural values about reading, writing, and communicating (Barton & Hamilton, 1998) in ways that are mediated by local values and purposes. Surfing the web on the way to work becomes a literacy practice because it is something that this commuter, and many others like her, do regularly. The infrastructure that has enabled wifi or cellular service on subway cars, and thus the practice of surfing the web while moving in a crowded container through underground tunnels, is a part of larger ideologies and structures, ones that assert people need to be connected to information at all times.

Thinking of and approaching our understanding of literacy at the level of situated practices allows us to make connections between what people do in making spaces, the ways in which they use representations, and the larger value structures surrounding and embedded in the spaces they work. It enables us to connect the makers’ use of representations to the values, ideologies, political and economic structures, and physical spaces of the making space and the larger social milieu of which it is a part. Literacy practices, then, allow us to see the ways in which people communicate and make meaning through texts in different spaces with different ideologies and different relationships between knowledge and power. Methodologically, it helps our analysis to understand powered relationships between spaces and practices, how literacy practices are similar and different in different spaces, and how different parts of participants’ other experiences and communities come into play. As part of pedagogical design, understanding literacies as practices helps educators and learners understand how, why, and when texts are produced and consumed and by whom. Because there are social norms and rules about who can produce and read texts, limiting or giving access to information, literacy is intimately tied to power. Supporting learners’ literacy practices helps give them access to that power. In the next section, we theorize the multiplicity of literacies as multiple.

Multiliteracies

Different practices, values, purposes, languages, and modalities lead to different kinds of literacies. The contemporary connected world requires that individuals be literate in multiple domains. Literacies manifest through “increasing local diversity and global connectedness” (New London Group, 1996, p. 64). There is not one way to be literate. Every community values different knowledge, different relationships to power, and different forms of communication. Because different communities co-exist and intermingle with one another, these forms also co-exist and require people to be literate in multiple ways (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Multiple literacies, or multiliteracies accounts for literacy practices as a part of cultural and institutional practices that differ in different communities (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Gutiérrez, 2008); as having differentially powered relations to texts (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007); as existing in multiple modalities (Kress, 2010; Rowsell, 2013), and we argue, it supports an understanding of literacy practices as linked to intersectional identities (Kirkland, 2013; Winn, 2010). We discuss the central dimensions of multiliteracies, including attention to the historical production of literacy practices, multimodality as it relates to making spaces, shifting landscapes of digital media production, and the tightly knit relationship between multiliteracies and identity.

Earlier, we discussed how literacies are part of social practices. As social practices in communities, literacy practices are differentiated by purpose and stratified by value. Communities are also historical entities. To maintain continuity and cohesiveness, they rely on practices that have been reproduced through time, including what one does with texts. Different literacies are valued in making spaces than are valued in schools. To learn the literacy practices of a given community is to give one access to cultural and symbolic capital that one can use to establish one’s legitimacy in a community, with a history and its own social norms (Bourdieu, 2003). In the case of this book, we are concerned with making spaces as institutions in their own right, making spaces as part of schools, and schools as institutions in their own right.

A second part of multiliteracies is that there are multiple kinds of representations. Representations can take any form as long as they are symbols that mean something to somebody. Those representations include written or spoken language; mathematical notations; images both moving and static, photographed and drawn; annotated schematics; design software; and gestures (Kress, 2010; Rowsell, 2013). What is more is that these representations can exist together, such as the words, images, and videos found on a website or a microchip schematic with electrical symbols, notations, and drawings of circuits. The characteristic of multiple representations is known as multimodality and helps to understand the breadth of representations that people create and use in making spaces. Different spaces, such as making spaces and schools value different configurations of modalities. It is important for makers using electronics to be able to read technical specification sheets (spec sheets) that contain written language, abbreviations, symbols, diagrams, and technical attributes of a given product. Learning to read a spec sheet is not a valued practice in K–12 schools. Instead, schools often value written and spoken language that explains or argues.

Perspectives on multimodality in literacies increasingly draw on work in digital domains (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Kress, 2003; Mills, 2010). Of particular interest to our work are the studies that focus on multimodal production (Kress, 2010; Miller & McVee, 2013), remixing and digital media production (Erstad, 2008; Peppler & Kafai, 2007), and participation in social media networks (boyd, 2014; Knobel & Lankshear, 2008). Positioning learners as producers of multi-modal texts transforms their relationships to representations of knowledge, from knowledge consumers to owners of that knowledge. Remixing and digital media production rely heavily on connected networks of wide access to open source information and resources of social media and other platforms. Digital literacies not only make it possible to produce digitally fabricated objects, but also connect the worlds of do-it-yourselfers together so that people can learn from one another, no matter how far apart they are. It makes it necessary to understand literacy practices in making spaces as related to other places and spaces in the world. What places and spaces, and what sources of information making spaces are connected to, can indicate the social, ideological, and relational commitments of different making spaces. One of the most important contributions of scholarship on digital literacies is the notion that what is required to be literate is always changing because forms, relationships, and purposes are always changing (Leu, 2000).

Lastly, a theory of multiliteracies recognizes that literacy practices are tied to people’s identities (Moje, Luke, Davies, & Street, 2009). The literacy practices that people engage, the informal and formal languages that they use, the technicality of their drawings, and their gestures all constitute and signal self-, assigned-, and imagined-identities. Identities are representations of types of people, recognized by others in social settings (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). As socially negotiated representations, identities become a part of symbolic capital. Multiliteracies also recognizes that people participate in literacies and identity work in multiple places in their lives (at home, at school or work, in church, during sporting events, or political actions) and bring these literacies and identities with them to the making space.

Thus, the literacy practices of making spaces are mediated by what else people know how to do and how else they present themselves, and are recognized, as kinds of people. Making spaces, and their practices, are permeable. Their shape is subject to the people who move in and out of them each day (Massey, 2005). However, their institutional histories and relationships to particular literacies and identities also shape who participates. A making space may foreground work on electronics for some members, but when those same electronics are embedded within a focus on hip hop music production, we expand the entry points for different literacies and identities and invite new members to participate.

In this book we are most concerned with those multiliteracies related to STEM fields. In schools these have been classified as disciplinary literacies (e.g., Moje, 2007, 2015; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008), or as encompassing the literacy practices of certain subject areas in school and their relations to fields of study (e.g., mathematical literacy). In making spaces, the disciplines are not so clearly defined, and practices exists within and across intersections of different disciplinary traditions. For instance, nearly everything involves some kind of technology or tool, digital or not. In the next section we discuss what we mean by STEM literacies.

What Are STEM Literacies?

There has been a recent focus on disciplinary literacies in studies of schooling (Manderino & Castek, 2016; Moje, 2015). By disciplinary literacy, we mean more than subject matter, more than just knowing how to read a science textbook or follow the steps of the engineering design process. This perspective positions disciplines as sociohistorically situated and constantly negotiated, producing their own kinds of practices, including the ways in which they use texts (Bucciarelli, 1994). Disciplines have historical ways of doing things and literate habits of mind (Moje, 2007; Wineberg, 2001). In science for instance, literate habits of mind might include documenting results of controlled experimental trials, or learning how to locate quality sources of information for different to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 STEM Literacy Practices
• 2 Learning in a Professional Context: LMNPO Case Study
• 3 Space Mediates Communication: Artisan’s Asylum Case Study
• 4 Identifying, Organizing, and Integrating Information: SETC Case Study
• 5 From Fluency to Fluidity: Representations in Making
• 6 Online Sharing Genres: How-Tos, Crowdsourcing, and Blogging
• 7 Teacher Learning in Making Spaces: “By Design I Realize”
• 8 Implications for Practice and Research
• Appendix A Methodology
• Appendix B Sharing Genre Scaffolds
• Appendix C Meshwork Mapping Protocol
• Appendix D STEMLiMS Object-Oriented Interview Protocol
• Index