Making It Social: Considering the Purpose of Literacy to Support Participation in Making and Engineering

Publications

Digital literacies for disciplinary learning explores intersections of digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts such as community makerspaces and schools and examines learning across disciplines including the arts, engineering, science, social studies, language arts, and math. Columns will address work with both youth and adults, both in school and out of school. Digital enhancements will encourage interactivity with readers and will provoke questions, comments, and connections.

Read More

All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Matter

Publications

This is a story about learning STEM content and practices while making objects. It is also a story about how that learning is contextualized in one young man’s disruption of racism simply by trying to learn how gears work. Our project, Investigating STEM Literacies in MakerSpaces (STEMLiMS), focuses on how adults and youth use representations to accomplish tasks in STEM disciplines in formal and informal making spaces (Tucker-Raymond, Gravel, Kohberger, & Browne, 2017). Making is an interdisciplinary endeavor that may involve mechanical and electrical engineering, digital literacies and

Read More

Opting in and Creating Demand: Why Young People Choose to Teach Mathematics to Each Other

Publications

Access to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields serves as a key entry point to economic mobility and civic enfranchisement. Such access must take seriously the intellectual power of the knowledge and practices of non-dominant youth. In our case, this has meant to shift epistemic authority in mathematics from academic institutions to young people themselves. This article is about why high school-aged students, from underrepresented groups, choose to participate in an out-of-school time program in which they teach younger children in the domains of mathematics and computer

Read More