The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning

The benefits of teaching art to young people have often fallen into two camps. Children study or practice "art for art's sake" to develop a particular skill. Or they approach "art for academics' sake" to enhance their other studies. But this report comes at arts learning from a different angle: What if learning about or practicing an art could help young people connect more directly to their communities and the world they live in? And how might that change the experience and outcomes for both students and communities? The report, led by Kylie Peppler, an expert in arts learning, and her team at the University of California, Irvine, begins with a connected learning framework. In connected learning, educators seek to create meaningful learning experiences based on young people's interests and then connect these experiences to real-world issues and communities. The authors put art within this context to discover how arts education can help young people build connections with their culture, identity, home lives, communities, professional artists, and future aspirations.

Consensual Assessment in the New Domain of E-Textiles: Comparing Insights from Expert, Quasi-Expert, and Novice Judges

Establishing what constitutes creativity in a domain is something for which we often look to experts—individuals versed in a domain’s history and able to identify timeworn ideas from fresh ones. Such valuations of creative merit are tied to a familiarity with past and present trends and, therefore, opinions of newcomers are often ignored. However, what about domains that build upon new, unexplored practices? This study examines the creativity ratings of judges with varying expertise in the emergent domain of electronic textiles (or e-textiles). E-textiles are fabrics that have programmable electronics such as sensors and actuators embedded in them toward a variety of expressive and functional ends. Judges included domain pioneers (“experts”), individuals with over 20 hr of nonprofessional experience in the domain (“quasi-experts”), and individuals untrained in the domain (“novices”). Each group evaluated the creativity of e-textile artifacts from an online gallery using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). Our analyses found high interjudge reliability within all groups and between quasi-experts and experts, suggesting that quasi-experts could be sufficiently trained to judge the creativity of artifacts on par with experts. Furthermore, larger panels of novice judges may serve as an alternative, but it would be with the caveat that novice scores represent the opinions of general audiences that might not understand technical practices of e-textiles. Findings offer alternative considerations for how creativity is assessed in emergent, technology-rich domains and have implications for judge recruitment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

“We hear everyday, ‘this isn’t me.’” Navigating tensions and opportunities to translate interests toward entrepreneurial making

Out-of-school time (OST) makerspaces are spaces for youth to engage in exploratory practices and deepen STEM interests in personally meaningful ways. Many youth—especially teens—additionally benefit from supportive relationships (e.g., caring adult mentors, peer mentors) in these spaces to help them uncover their interests and translate them into long-term trajectories of maker practice. Using a connected learning lens, this paper focuses on supportive adult relationships at a high school OST program (Sunrise of Philadelphia), and the ways in which practices around interest identification and development within its makerspace entrepreneurship program meaningfully impacted learning trajectories for youth by connecting them to new STEM opportunities, knowledge, and experiences. Through an illustrative case study, we present a portrait-of-practice that shows how OST educators facilitated brokering to connect youth to resources, mentoring, materials, and new communities that transcended their specific program. This manuscript contributes to known practices for translating youth interests in makerspaces, including incorporating youth voice and choice and making cultural connections to entrepreneurship opportunities. This case contributes to an understudied area of entrepreneurship education programs and activities that are needed in educational (K-12) makerspaces

Connected Arts Learning: Cultivating Equity Through Connected and Creative Educational Experiences

This review brings together scholarship from creative educational experiences (CEE) and connected learning to describe a connected arts learning framework, reframing arts education in the 21st century with a focus on connecting youths’ interest-driven art making to opportunities through supportive relationships. Such a framework pushes the arts education field to consider outcomes beyond artistic skill acquisition and academic achievement to include a broader range of opportunities, including those civic- and career-related; promote interest development through targeted exposure to new forms of art making; create and implement professional development and programming to emphasize networks and connections; and draw from culturally sustaining practices to bridge connections between spaces for learning. A connected learning lens applied to what we know about high quality arts education sharpens our focus on how CEE can cultivate equity and social/cultural connection for youth

Observing Empathy in Informal Engineering Activities with Girls Ages 7–14

Empathy is a critical part of the engineering design process. It allows engineers to more deeply understand their clients’ perspectives and design solutions that meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. Studies also show that reframing engineering education to prioritize empathy for others can counteract stereotypes of engineering as impersonal and invite a wider range of identities into the field. This approach can help to address persistent gender disparities in engineering, which reflect a need for engineering education to increase its efforts to include girls’ perspectives. Informal learning environments have developed strategies for framing engineering problems in human-centered ways, but more evidence is needed about how children express empathy during engineering design tasks and how expressions of empathy intersect with and support specific engineering design practices in these settings. The present study involved the development of observational methods for documenting empathy within museum-based engineering activities among girls ages 7–14. Engineering activities used elements of narratives (characters, settings, and problem frames) to prompt learners to think about who they were designing for and why. Data included observations and interviews with 245 girls, and iterative cycles of coding and qualitative analyses to develop a set of observable indicators of empathy and engineering design practices. Indicators defined how multiple facets of empathy were expressed (affective, cognitive, and prosocial, as well as connections to familiar personal experiences) based on theoretical understandings of empathy and its development. Final coding of the dataset with these indicators showed that girls’ expressions of empathy supported multiple engineering design practices as learners defined problems to solve, and as they generated and iterated solutions with the needs of others in mind. We describe connections between individual facets of empathy and specific engineering practices and discuss implications for practice within formal and informal settings

Moving forward : In search of synergy across diverse views on the role of physical movement in design for stem education

Inspired by the current embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences, researchers of STEM teaching and learning have been evaluating implications of this turn for educational theory and practice. But whereas design researchers have been developing domain-specific theories that implicate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, the field has yet to agree on a conceptually coherent and empirically validated framework for leveraging and shaping students’ capacity for physical movement as a socio–cognitive educational resource. This symposium thus convenes to ask, “What is movement in relation to concepts such that we can design for learning?” To stimulate discussion, we highlight an emerging tension across a set of innovative technological designs with respect to the framing question of whether students should discover an activity’s targeted movement forms themselves or that these forms should be cued directly. Our content domains span mathematics (proportions, geometry), physics, chemistry, and ecological system dynamics (predator–prey, bees)

Moving forward : In search of synergy across diverse views on the role of physical movement in design for stem education

Inspired by the current embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences, researchers of STEM teaching and learning have been evaluating implications of this turn for educational theory and practice. But whereas design researchers have been developing domain-specific theories that implicate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, the field has yet to agree on a conceptually coherent and empirically validated framework for leveraging and shaping students’ capacity for physical movement as a socio–cognitive educational resource. This symposium thus convenes to ask, “What is movement in relation to concepts such that we can design for learning?” To stimulate discussion, we highlight an emerging tension across a set of innovative technological designs with respect to the framing question of whether students should discover an activity’s targeted movement forms themselves or that these forms should be cued directly. Our content domains span mathematics (proportions, geometry), physics, chemistry, and ecological system dynamics (predator–prey, bees)