Hi everyone. My name is Erin Higgins and I'll be presenting our paper "Investigating an equity
based participatory approach to tech rich learning in community recreation centers"
on behalf of my coauthors. As an overview of my talk, I'll start with previous work, then discuss our research questions,
go over our methods, share our findings, go over the discussion, and finally talk about our future work and limitations.
So starting with previous work since Makerspaces were first popularized, they've been promoted as a space for equity in STEM education.
This is largely due to the fact that tinkering and making is driven by student interest and these spaces are open to most youths.
However, this idea has been pushed back on and research has shown that prevalent making practices are often exclusionary.
The HCI community has called for an increase in equitable participation through maker-based initiatives in technology, design and learning
for the past decade. Much of this existing research has focused on learning outcomes, the physical environment and technology, tools and experiences.
However, educators have been shown to play a very important role in deepening learning outcomes.
This previous work inspired us to ask our research questions.
First,
we asked what equity based localization strategies are used by community educators and informal contacts to engage youth in technology rich learning?
Second, what is the impact of these strategies on educator and youth engagement and technology self-efficacy?
And finally, what tensions and opportunities for program localization do community rec centers offer as sites of tech rich informal learning?
To answer these questions, I'll next describe what methods we used.
So we used participatory design research methods where we developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the rec center administration and staff.
We simultaneously designed, implemented and studied a learning environment,
centering educators direct experiences within the makerspace as impetus for iteration.
This paper describes the first iteration and the project is still currently ongoing.
We conducted pre and post semi-structured interviews with all educators where they reflected
on the program and their observations throughout. Administrators who worked within
the city government participated in one interview about their role and hopes for the future of tech ed in rec centers.
I also used participant observer methodology within the rec centers where, in addition to collecting observation data,
I assisted with teaching during a vast majority of sessions every Tuesday and Thursday for 16 weeks.
We also met on Mondays before each session to go over any questions.
I also spent time getting to know the center staff as well as parents and other youth who didn't participate in our study.
I also led focus groups with the youth to get their opinions on such a change in the next iteration.
But a bulk of the changes suggested were generated from the participatory design sessions.
These were one on one with the educators and admins where we recapped the program and they made suggestions for changes to the next iteration.
These were implemented and iterated on continuously with the educators and admins.
Finally, we conducted youth surveys that proved to be very difficult in this setting.
A large number of people participated in this project. We conducted it in two mid-sized cities in the eastern United States with two rec centers
in each city. All rec centers were primarily minority serving centers
and some or most of the children live below the poverty line. Four community educators implemented the program and five city admin provided support.
50 youth completed some part of the program with 16 completing more than 80% of the sessions. The program implemented was based off of our partner,
Digital Harbor Foundation's Maker Foundation's program, which introduces a variety of maker technologies.
But for more details on the program, please see the paper. Next, I'll share our findings.
So we saw several educator equity based strategies that the community educators we worked with implemented.
A large part of this was identifying and incorporating youth's interests into projects.
Educators who were able to identify these interests could then edit the curriculum on the fly to increase engagement from the youth.
The educators had multiple strategies but creating comfort and encouraging authenticity
by modeling that themselves was a great way to foster a sense of belonging and
help the educators to better tailor the curriculum for their specific use.
The educators we worked with often shared identity markers with the youth and grew up in that neighborhood or similar neighborhoods.
We saw evidence of these markers such as race, culture, age and gender were an important factor in creating a sense of belonging.
The relationships and connections between educators and youth are related to the rec centers and their surrounding social climate.
The rec center became a safe space where kids felt comfort and ability to be authentic.
This led to behaviors such as the image on the slide where the youth felt comfortable coding in front of his class and helping
others to learn. These educators strategies came from a place of deep respect and understanding of the youth they were working with.
In this quote, an educator is discussing a youth who had unique interests and often struggled to engage and pay
attention until this educator started tailoring the lessons towards his favorite horror character,
"Siren Head"
shown here on the right. The educator said about this youth, "I could see [youth 4] being maybe the next Rob Zombie filmmaker or something like that.
It's like you understand their imagination. You don't stifle it."
The educators all felt that these socially based strategies were key to creating youth self efficacy in the rec centers and that social connection
was the most important outcome. These formed social connections led to the youth teaching each other and working together on projects.
It also led to them inserting themselves into their projects, as seen in the image here,
where one youth chose a black princess that represented her to appear next to her on the screen of a game she created in Scratch.
The educators also showed an increase in self-efficacy throughout the program.
One educator went on to be promoted due in part to his excellent work in getting this project moving.
Another educator considered adding a teaching minor to her computer science degree because
of how much she loved working with the kids. In regards to his teaching strategy,
one educator stated, "It's like a chain reaction.
Once you get them interacting with each other, no matter how silly it may sound, they will start talking because they're comfortable with their peers.
Once you're at that level with the kids, you'll see [youth 1] gets up to help somebody. [Youth 2] helps [youth 3].
You know, [youth 4] doesn't mind saying whatever comes to his mind because where he's at during the school day, he'll be judged for it.
But now he's here."
This educator really showed how the creation of comfort and authenticity leads to self-efficacy, ownership and social connection in this space.
Overall, rec centers had many strengths and some weaknesses for tech education.
They're very welcoming and domestic spaces, which increase comfort and authenticity.
They have long term relationships and are deeply ingrained in the communities which generated educators who related to the youth very well.
But they were consistent lack of resources as well as staffing and training issues that made implementing higher tech ed programs a struggle.
One admin stated that his dream for rec centers is "...you start when you're ten years old.
We get you to programing sufficiency by 16. Now we're working with you to get you into one of the local universities.
We get you at a local university, you major four years of computer science.
You then come back into the ecosystem working at Google and you mentor back at the rec center that you grew up in.
That would be a full circle, perfect, 'We did our job'
for me." This highlights a lot of the community engagement and educator identity marker sharing that we found to be really important in these spaces.
So now I'm going to move on to our discussion based off of all these findings and more that you can see in the paper,
we generated this preliminary descriptive model of equity-based technology-rich learning in community settings.
There's a lot of information in this model.
I encourage you to visit the paper for full details, but I'm going to show how one story kind of shows how we can move through this model.
So at the program design level, every educator participated in equity based-pedagogy training with us at the start of the program.
We pulled mainly from the work Escude,
Vossoughi, and Zang and we worked through examples, scenarios, we did activities with the educators to prepare them to implement this sort of pedagogy.
This led directly to the educators inquiring into the youth's interests, embodying signals of authenticity and actively sharing their interests.
For example, this educator said, "I'll come in with certain colors.
I come in with certain t shirts. I had my One Piece shirt on the other day, which is an anime.
The moment my boys see me and they saw Luffy on my back, they could not stop.
Like, What else do you watch? Do you do that?" This educator used fashion to signal his interests and encourage authenticity in the space.
I'm going to focus on a specific example, however, with Youth 4 that I mentioned previously.
So this youth was not as engaged and didn't as actively share their interests.
So this educator more actively inquired into his interests by allowing him to
watch YouTube and allowing him to share his favorite videos with the class.
When he learned that this youth loved horror movies,
especially a character called 'Siren Head', he then incorporated that into all the activities that he did with him.
Once 'Siren Head' was on the table this youth was so engaged, every project was 'Siren Head' as shown here on the left.
We saw earlier. Because he wanted to make his own 'Siren Head' doll,
he learned the basics of CAD. He then also felt comfortable telling everyone stories about 'Siren Head' and sharing
these stories that he would make up about the character through Scratch.
And he started to feel like he belonged in the classroom and got more engaged with the tech.
While he started off by being a little bit more quiet and less engaged.
This educator implemented a strategy to encourage comfort and authenticity that helped this youth to develop ownership over his projects,
a sense of self efficacy with the tech projects,
and comfort in talking with his peers and working in a team. For tech education within community spaces,
we discovered a lot of considerations that are important to the HCI community.
But with the limited time, I encourage you to visit the paper to look at them.
So finally, I'm going to really quickly go over limitations and future work.
This was just a first round of a participatory design project and we're actively iterating and re-implementing.
We just finished our second round and the third one is starting soon.
We will work to develop a localization kit for individuals who want to do this in their own rec centers.
And we're currently exploring alternative interactive survey tools for youth in informal environments.
I didn't have time to get into it, but surveys really didn't work.
So we're iteratively creating interactive ways for surveying and implementing this in our third iteration in the spring.
Thanks for listening to my talk. I encourage you to look at the paper. 10 minutes isn't enough to cover everything in there, but yeah.
Thank you for your time.