Exploring Making as a Pathway to Meaningful Engagement in and With STEM Disciplines
Shulamit Kapon, Flávio S. Azevedo, Pratim Sengupta, Marie‐Claire Shanahan, Apoorve Chokshi, Basak Helvaci Ozacar, Angela Calabrese Barton, Day Greenberg, Edna Tan, Melissa Perez, Cassia De Oliveira Fernandez, Tatiana Hochgreb, Paulo Blikstein, Tal Peer, Shulamit Kapon, Brian Gravel, Ezra Gouvea, Timothy J. Atherton · Proceedings. · 2023
The goals of this symposium are to explore Making as a pathway to meaningful engagement with STEM disciplines and meaningful disciplinary engagement within a STEM discipline, how Making can enrich and transform scientific practices, and the tensions involved.Making experiences will be examined from perspectives such as equity and justice, personal relevance and affect, the role of materiality in scientific practice, disciplinary engagement, educational reform, and the role of teachers.These issues will be explored in different informal and formal US and international settings, and in terms of the diverse identities of the participating adults, teachers, children, youth, high school and undergraduate student Makers.Together, these rich and diverse perspectives and contexts will provide an in-depth and broad discussion of Making and its promise for STEM education.© ISLS 1631 simulations of complex scientific and socio-scientific phenomena in informal spaces.The second presentation is situated in an afterschool STEM Making community and examines how and why a group of Black youth extensively iterated on a "name plate" project, how this expanded iterative process disrupted normative power hierarchies and the emergent tensions.The third presentation discusses a science reform project at district-level in a Brazilian city, and examines the work of a group of collaborating science teachers who employed a Making environment to create and personalize instructional resources (science kits) for their students.The fourth presentation examines how students' disciplinary authentic engagement in physics was facilitated and emerged from Making that was incorporated into the formal instruction of physics in high school.The fifth presentation examines the connections between making, materiality, and disciplinary learning to explore how making deepens and extends students' engagement in a computational physics course at the undergraduate level. Significance and contributionTogether, the presentations address the goals of the symposium from multiple perspectives: equity and justice, personal relevance and affect, the role of materiality in scientific practice, disciplinary engagement, educational reform, and the role of teachers.They explore these issues in various contexts and settings in terms of informal and formal education, in the US and internationally, and the diverse identities of the participating Makers -adults, teachers, children, youth, high school and undergraduate students.In doing so, the presentations collectively uncover different axiological and epistemological dimensions of the affordances and challenges in transforming Making experiences into meaningful disciplinary learning.The rich and diverse perspectives and contexts reflect different perceptions of 'meaningfulness' that problematize and provide in-depth and broad overview of Making as pathway to both meaningful disciplinary engagement in and/or with STEM disciplines. FormatThe symposium will begin with a brief introduction to the session (2 min), followed by a presentation of five papers (10 min each).The discussant, Flávio Azevedo, will examine themes and juxtapositions across the papers, flash out and raise question about the implications of the collective work (10 minutes), and open the floor for a discussion with the audiences (13 minutes).