Making futures, composing worlds
Jon Michael Wargo, Melita Morales · 2020
As a conceptual prism for rendering ways of knowing, being, and being known more visible, making and the larger maker movement are shaping contemporary educational places, practices, and discourses. Whereas efforts to expand access to making and makerspaces often treat it as an ahistorical practice, more critical efforts and frameworks are starting to explore making as a means for culturing and equity. Thinking with theories of speculative design, this chapter offers a conceptual framework for making as worlding, one that is rooted in engaging children and youth as speculative designers working toward preferable, not solely possible, futures. Drawing on data from a series of empirical investigations exploring making in early childhood settings, this chapter zeroes in on how children, and one young child in particular, used the contemporary affordances of digital and analog technologies to “make” a difference. Making, as this chapter documents, provided opportunities for children not only to practice new forms of civic engagement and participation but to question and deliberate preferable futures for social activism and community building.