Wayfinding Meets Library App: What Students Want From a Mobile Library Experience

Wayfinding refers to how someone navigates a space. Indoor maps, directories, and more recently, digital mobile maps are used as wayfinding aids

Cultivating Staff Culture Online: How Edith Bowen Laboratory School Responded to COVID-19

Purpose: As educators across the globe are tasked with taking teaching online, this article shares a culture-centered approach to transitioning to education at a distance. Specifically, in this essay, a focus is placed on how one school preserved their collaborative culture among administrators, teachers, and staff. The purpose is to provide guidance to school leadership during this public health crisis. Approach: To ensure trustworthiness in this naturalistic inquiry, a triangulation was made of contributing authors’ perspectives to present theory-informed insights. Findings: This school’s transition to online education was guided by a shared goal to not only move content online, but also a rich participatory culture among staff. Critical forms of participation and community practices are presented that were pivotal in supporting teachers through the transition. Insights equip school leaders and administrators potentially remaining online, at least in part, through the next school year. Originality: New administrator-level insights are contributed regarding the organizational shift to teaching elementary school online, a minimally-researched topic. Practical Implications: Schools undergoing the shift to teaching online should attend to cultural shifts and create conditions in which staff members can collaborate at higher levels

Stitching Codeable Circuits: High School Students\u27 Learning About Circuitry and Coding with Electronic Textiles

Learning about circuitry by connecting a battery, light bulb, and wires is a common activity in many science classrooms. In this paper, we expand students’ learning about circuitry with electronic textiles, which use conductive thread instead of wires and sewable LEDs instead of lightbulbs, by integrating programming sensor inputs and light outputs and examining how the two domains interact.We implemented an electronic textiles unit with 23 high school students ages 16–17 years who learned how to craft and code circuits with the LilyPad Arduino, an electronic textile construction kit. Our analyses not only confirm significant increases in students’ understanding of functional circuits but also showcase students’ ability in designing and remixing program code for controlling circuits. In our discussion, we address opportunities and challenges of introducing codeable circuit design for integrating maker activities that include engineering and computing into classrooms

Exploring a Forgiving Identity: Affordances of a Family Forgiveness Education Programme

Despite peace efforts in Northern Ireland, the country remains contentiously divided. In this paper, I investigate how a 14-week Forgiveness Education Programme (FEP) shapes the identity of parents, who taught the programme to their children, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Using a mix-methods approach and conceptual change theory (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982) as a framework, I found that parents who used the programme to explore their personal belief systems demonstrated a higher-level of practicing forgiveness on the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI). Additionally, the findings reveal that through teaching the FEP, parents are able to challenge and possibly change their own worldviews about how they see themselves and the ‘other.’ Other implications and significant contributions are discussed

Strategies for Broadening Participation in Makerspaces: A Comparative Case Study of Three Youth Makerspaces

As makerspaces proliferate across formal and out-of-school learning environments, researchers and practitioners persistently question the accessibility of these space and the maker practices they support. In this paper, I contribute three illustrative examples of how makerspaces can reach a broad audience by supporting maker identities and cultivating maker communities. I conducted a comparative case study (Stake, 2008) of three youth makerspaces in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: a well-established museum makerspace near city center (Makeshop), a semi-established afterschool makerspace in a low-income neighborhood historically stigmatized for high crime rates, (Assemble), and a newly founded library makerspace in a blue-collar neighborhood (Millvale). Findings highlight strategies for broadening participation in makerspaces at the maker-level and space-level.At the maker-level, these youth makerspaces support identities of “maker” by encouraging young makers to take ownership of making. Makeshop’s signage and rhetoric situate youth as makers. The design of the space and the facilitation style of the staff support young makers in the process of making; facilitators want youth to embody the process as something that is ‘theirs’. Both Assemble and Millvale aim to position making as an accessible practice youth can own. Through connecting experts with young makers, the director of Assemble resolves to break the “I don’t feel like it’s for me” barrier often preventing youth from identifying with a given making practice. Millvale adopts a similar approach by focusing on pragmatic skills (e.g., repairing bikes or sewing) that youth can utilize in their everyday lives. Not all sites work toward overtly building kids’ identity as “maker,” yet they do empower youth to own making.At the space-level, each site espouses a slightly different ethos. Makeshop embraces the family-oriented ethos of the Children Museum and they are dedicated to exploring best practices of supporting parent/guardian-child interactions through the making process. Moreover, Assemble functions as a community platform connecting experts and young makers throughout the Pittsburgh area. With this ethos, Assemble seeks to change the surrounding neighborhood more locally by equipping youth to see themselves as having productive futures. Millvale, as the borough’s first library, implores the neighborhood to use the space as more than just a place for books, but also as a community built, community run neighborhood hangout. Both Assemble and Millvale work for community and neighborhood revitalization by offering a safe space for youth to explore creativity and discover viable life pathways, but offer slightly different examples of how makerspaces can change the communities within which they’re situated.Interestingly, a site’s orientation toward identity does not necessarily mirror its community ethos. Makeshop and Assemble primarily support individualistic identities, though they both embody community-driven ethoses, and Millvale supports a collectivistic identity and a neighborhood ethos. Halverson, Lowenhaupt, Gibbons, & Bass (2009) also grappled with this relationship in youth media arts organizations suggesting that this tension spans across contexts. With this, the youth makerspaces in this study function as three illustrative examples for how to broaden maker- and space-level participation to those who may not feel ownership over making practices or maker culture

Leveraging Mobile Media to Transform Peace Education

In this paper, I delve into what it means to use technology as a tool to facilitate an agenda of peacemaking. Taking a design experiment approach, I explore the affordances and constraints of mobile learning in peace education, particularly in deeply divided societies. More specifically, I use the Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) platform to investigate potential role of locative, interactive situated documentaries in the peace process in Northern Ireland. I take up a narrative and identity focused framework to discuss the implications of this design experiment for history teaching, peace education, and education in general

The Design Stances of Experienced Young Makers

The maker movement is fundamentally changing the way educators and educational researchers envision teaching and learning. This movement contends making—an active process of building, designing, and innovating with tools and materials to produce shareable artifacts—is a naturally rich and authentic learning trajectory. Even more, learning through making intuitively “makes sense” to educators, parents, researchers, and kids, but we lack empirical evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness and, even more, how the maker movement is impacting education. Thus, I empirically investigate the connection between making and learning guided by the question: how is learning demonstrated in makerspaces? Specifically, taking a design experiment approach (DBRC, 2003), I examined making as an activity that demonstrates learning.In this design experiment, five experienced young makers at three makerspaces in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, completed a 90-minute making activity: make flow. I defined experienced young makers as 10-17 year olds who either identify as a maker or are actively involved in a makerspace. Further, the three makerspaces were intentionally each selected to represent the types of youth makerspaces emerging from the maker movement; one is situated as an exhibit within a museum, another is a pop-up or mobile makerspace at a library, and the other is an after-school community space. Throughout the making activity, I tracked (through observation and photographs) each participant’s making trajectory through 15 minute snapshots of their process and interviewed participants about their process and final artifact immediately after they completed the making activity.Drawing from metarepresentational competence/representational trajectories (diSessa & Sherin, 2000; Halverson, 2013) frameworks and employing bidirectional artifact analysis (Halverson & Magnifico, 2013), three design stances (aesthetic, functional, and pragmatic) materialized as a useful lens through which we can understanding the learning that happens in makerspaces. Each design stance exhibited yielded unique practices and skills throughout the making activity. Young makers who took up an aesthetic design stance articulated goals of making something that aesthetically represents and/or communicates something; exhibiting artistic practices and skills. Those who adopted a functional design stance expressed a primary goal making something that works well; using engineering practices and skills. And those who adopted a pragmatic design stance communicated their chief goal as solving a specific problem; drawing on both artistic and engineering practices and skills. Collectively, these design stances also proved to be project-centered not learner-center; that is, through interviews, participants described different making projects through which they adopted other stances. In this paper, I further discuss defining features of each design stance and how this is related to the makerspace-context in which they made.Findings of this study have direct implications for how we understanding learning in makerspaces and how we assess learning in making activities. Cooperatively assessing learning according to the design stance they exhibit ensures that the measurement aligns with the intended goals of the learner, and supports a key characteristic – pursuit of personal interest – of makerspaces