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1. Emergent Bilingual Middle Schoolers’ Syncretic Reasoning in Statistical Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681221104141  

   Radke, Sarah C.; Vogel, Sara E.; Ma, Jasmine Y.; Hoadley, Christopher; Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura (May 2022, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education)

   Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use. 

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2. Making Makers: Tracing STEM Identity in Rural Communities

   Nixon, J. (January 2021, Journal of precollege engineering education research)

   null (Ed.)

   In this article, we describe efforts to reduce barriers of entry to pre-college engineering in a rural community by training local teens to become maker-mentors and staff a mobile makerspace in their community. Following Nasir and Cooks (2009), we bring a communities of practice frame to our inquiry, focusing on inbound and peripheral learning and identity trajectories as a mechanism for representing the maker-mentor experience (Wenger, 1998). Through a longitudinal case study, we traced the individual trajectories of five maker-mentors over two years. We found that maker-mentors who participated in mentorship training activities, collaborated with their peers on making projects, and co-facilitated events throughout the community were more likely to follow an inbound trajectory. Maker-mentors who participated in training activities and collaborative making projects, but only facilitated one or two of the twelve community events never moved beyond the periphery. We offer lessons learned from including a mentorship component in a pre-college maker program, an unusual design feature that afforded more opportunities to create inbound trajectories. A key affordance of the maker-mentor program was that it allowed teens to explore areas of making that were in line with their interests while still being a part of a larger community of practice. Understanding learning and identity trajectories will allow us to continually improve pre-college engineering programming and education opportunities that build on students’ funds of knowledge. 

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3. What Have We "Learned" from Maker Education Research? A Learning Sciences-base Review of ASEE Literature on the Maker Movement

   Weiner, S.; Lande, M.; Jordan, S.S. (January 2018, Review & directory - American Society for Engineering Education)

   Within the last ten years, the Maker Movement has had a significant effect on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. Growing in tandem with the interest in makerspaces, digital fabrication technology, and innovation-oriented curricula has been researchers’ desire to understand the pedagogical value of these efforts. Strategies have included measuring technological literacies, uncovering the links between Maker practices and professional engineering standards, and developing standards to capture the non-technical skills, such as self-efficacy and persistence, that Makers develop. The diffusion of Maker Education research has worked in favor of constructing diverse kinds of knowledge, but at the expense of developing coherent theory, pedagogy, and practice. Even within Engineering Education, the aims, theoretical approaches, and methods used to study Maker Education vary widely. Given that a significant body of literature has been amassed, we believe it is an opportune time to take stock of what has been learned through Maker Education research. As an initial step towards a larger multidisciplinary study, this paper will focus on assessing the state of Engineering Education literature on Maker Education and synthesizing it with theoretical frameworks established within Learning Sciences research. 

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4. Maker identity development: What and how?

   Bawankule, A.; Tissenbaum, M. (January 2023, International Conference of the Learning Sciences)

   Focusing on developing maker-identities, especially for historically marginalized students in the computational field, can empower them to recognize and take ownership of their space in the field. Drawing from identity related literature in maker and computing related fields we identified seven factors of maker-identity - interest and motivation, competence and performance, confidence and self-efficacy, recognition, utility value and meaningfulness, perceptions of community, and external factors. Using this, we analyzed semi-structured interviews of students who participated in our summer makerspace camp to understand how these identity factors manifested in their reflections of the camp. We tie back our findings of positive impacts on maker-identity structures to the design structures of our makerspace such as co-design of the space, use-modify-create strategies, and open-ended design projects. 

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5. Storytelling “in theory”: Re-imagining computational literacies through the lenses of syncretism and translanguaging

   Vogelstein, Lauren; McBride, Cherise; Ma, Jasmine Y.; Wilkerson, Michelle; Vogel, Sara; Barrales, Wendy; Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura; Hoadley, Christopher; Gutiérrez, Kris (June 2023, International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   Blikstein, Paulo; Van Aalst, Jan; Kizito, Rita; Brennan, Karen (Ed.)

   This inquiry is guided by a curiosity around the stories that teachers tell about their students, content, and pedagogical approaches focused on data and computational literacies. We present a form of storytelling with theory as we apply theories of syncretism and translanguaging to empirical vignettes about teachers’ sensemaking. We also present a form of storytelling of theory, drawing on teachers’ stories to help us better understand how these theories are related to each other. We bring two teachers’ stories into conversation: one from the Writing Data Stories (WDS) project and the other from the Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS) project. Both projects utilized translanguaging and syncretism in their conceptions and designs, working with teachers to design for expansive forms of data-based and computational literacies. 

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