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We report a case drawn from 6 months of ethnographic and interview research in a STEAM Lab. Free to choose what to work on, students acquired difficult skills and demonstrated what school leaders had identified as valued capacities: collaboration, creativity, and persistence. The teacher struggled, however, to apply conventional grading practices to recognize this learning. We analyze the case of Kira, a 7th grader who learned to design and 3D print an original fidget spinner and began to imagine herself as a designer and entrepreneur. Kira’s story came to a surprising and sad end, as she failed to produce the “evidence of learning” required for a high grade. The case highlights the dilemmas of recognizing and assessing consequential learning experiences in project-based environments. 

The problem of sustaining and spreading educational innovations is one that has vexed many researchers. The flipside of this question, equally important, is what leads to the ‘death’ of educational innovations? Here, to shed light on this question, we provide an autopsy on the death of one local implementation of an otherwise successful STEAM exploration program called FUSE. 

Teaching is one of the most extensively studied topics in education research. However, most studies of teaching assume a standard learning arrangement, in which the teacher is the content expert and directs student learning. What happens when this is not the case, when the resources for learning lie elsewhere (online, other students) and the expertise that the teacher brings is in how to facilitate learning rather than convey content? How do teachers navigate the role of ‘facilitator’, and what are the pedagogical best practices for doing so. Here, we address these questions by examining facilitation in one set of in- and after-school making and learning environments, called FUSE. Drawing on student and teacher interviews, classroom observations, and video, we analyze the needs experienced by facilitators and the tools and practices they implemented to address those needs. 

In 1972 Howard Becker argued that “school is a lousy place to learn anything”. However, Becker’s analysis was based on a comparison of ethnographic studies of on-the-job learning with an ideal typical representation of school. This paper revisits the issue of whether and how schools may be a lousy place to learn by listening to and interpreting the perspectives of students themselves. We draw on a sample of 300 interviews with students conducted in the context of researching what and how students learned in a program called FUSE Studios, which we have previously conceptualized as “an alternative infrastructure for learning in schools”. We asked students whether and how FUSE was different from their other classes, and their responses provided us with a unique window into what students think of school as a learning environment. Herein, we share their perspectives and draw implications for future learning sciences work. 

Within the CSCL community and in computing and computational making more broadly, issues of equity continue to be under-researched and undertheorized. Here, we examine how FUSE Studios – a set of in-school, choice-based, STEAM learning environments, based around a set of digital and tangible making challenges – supports equitable access to and participation in making and computing. Drawing on web-log data and video-ethnographic data, we argue that four characteristics of FUSE support equity: the design of the challenges; the diverse ways of knowing and doing supported by the activity system; the specific interactions encouraged by the activity system; and the program’s placement inside school. We focus, here, on gender equity, but also discuss implications and planned research on other aspects of equity. 

This symposium brings together different studies on the adoption and sustainability of FUSE Studios, an alternative STEAM learning infrastructure. Since its launch, FUSE has been adapted successfully in 136 different school-based implementations operating across 18 different states and two countries (USA and Finland). Yet, despite being tailored to each context by local actors, FUSE has largely managed to preserve the integrity of implementation as educational innovation. Each contribution explores a point in the lifecycle of a FUSE adoption and describes local adaptations of the approach in the US and in Finland. In addition to addressing the critical question of how new educational innovations are adopted and sustained, this symposium provides perspectives on how to balance adaptability to local contexts and the integrity (rather than fidelity) of implementation. 

This study examines technology-enhanced STEAM learning among fifth and sixth grade students in one set of in-school makerspaces. It focuses on the learning of one set of meta-disciplinary skills, spatial skills. Prior research has shown these skills to be relevant for STEAM achievement, but they have been underemphasized in our schools and in the literature on learning through making. Informed by a distributed cognition perspective and using a combination of qualitative categorical coding and interaction analysis, this study provides a learning sciences approach to studying spatial thinking and learning. Analyses show that during making activities students engaged in frequent and diverse spatial thinking with a variety of social and material resources and that the sociomaterial contexts of different making activities facilitated different types of spatial thinking. They also show that spatial thinking developed over time and led to problem-solving insights.