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Towards Disruptive Maker Literacies Beyond Neurotypical, Gendered Mindsets

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/rrq.560

1936-2722

Cheryl A. McLean, Jennifer Rowsell,

Crafts, Textile, and Design

Reading Research QuarterlyEarly View EditorialFree Access Towards Disruptive Maker Literacies Beyond Neurotypical, Gendered Mindsets Cheryl A. McLean, Corresponding Author Cheryl A. McLean [email protected] Search for more papers by this authorJennifer Rowsell, Jennifer Rowsell [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9062-8859 Search for more papers by this author Cheryl A. McLean, Corresponding Author Cheryl A. McLean [email protected] Search for more papers by this authorJennifer Rowsell, Jennifer Rowsell [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9062-8859 Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 July 2024 https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.560AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Makerspace research has been around for some time now (Marsh, 2017). From its inception, maker orientations to research and scholarship asked researchers and ultimately educators, children, and young people to design and make through DIY practices, hacking, and experimenting with tools, technologies, materials, and craft methods to make meaning across formal and informal teaching contexts. Makerspaces rose in popularity and take-up during the 2000 years (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Kafai & Burke, 2016; Peppler & Bender, 2013) and their popularity continues today, albeit with a dip during the pandemic when the world had to socially distance and engage less in participatory, hands-on practices and physical spaces. Nevertheless, the world is and feels different now in 2024. In a world beset with precarity, conflict, polarity, and betrayed hopes, children and young people often turn to design and making to make a stance (Rowsell, 2020). Back in 2021, we co-edited a collection entitled, Maker Literacies and Maker Identities in the Digital Age (McLean & Rowsell, 2021) featuring 10 chapters that explored different interpretations of makerspace research inside and outside of mainstream schooling. These international research studies were less about the technicalities and tools of design and making and far more about what making does for meaning makers: how it makes them more aware of themselves through the act of making. As we say in the book's introduction, the focus of the book is not necessarily on arguing for maker literacies as repertoires of design practices; rather it is more about what making does for learner agencies and "how much can be gained from getting up close and personal with makerspace learning [as researchers]" (McLean & Rowsell, 2021, p. 2). In this special issue, we return to this work on maker literacies in our pursuit to refine conceptions of making and makerspace pedagogies and practices by expanding our understanding not only how learner agencies get thrown into relief through making, but also how much we learn as researchers by closely observing, listening to, and even co-designing with children and young people. So it is that this Reading Research Quarterly special issue on Gender and Maker Literacies as a part of a Wiley journal super issue on Gender and Education explores makerspace research from a disruptive and hopefully transformational lens. There are four articles that approach gender and maker literacies from different vantage points, all equally disruptive: (1) McLean's article on gender, and the platformization of maker literacies on social media by four female influencers; (2) Morales, Franklin, Vossoughi, Carroll, Lansana, Bang, & Mayed's abolitionist makerspace stance through research on ways to forge equitable social futures through making; (3) Lemieux's LGBTQ+ maker literacies practices featuring research with young people who become through matter and making; and, (4) Rowsell, Keune, Buxton, & Peppler's pursuit to carve out languageless moments in school days so that learners who struggled with mainstream, operational approaches to learning find a voice and ways to communicate through making. Such is the nature of our special issue: it disrupts to reboot, rejig, remake, reimagine what making can do for us and with us for new educational futures. It is a special issue that examines gender, but it examines it through intersections that cross technology/digitality with pedagogy and creative methods with postqual theory. These intersectional lenses challenge (or so we hope) the primacy of Eurocentric/White supremacist discursive, pedagogical, and research approaches that reinforce stereotypes/biases and inequitable practices related to gender, communities of Color, neurodivergent learners, LGBTQ+ framings. There is no one-size-fits-all, autonomous way to make and design—making demands a surfeit of difference and diversity in orientations and stances. In this way, the special issue is a call to action for educators, researchers, children and young people, and communities to engage in making practices that are resistant and yes, disruptive. As editors of the SI, it has been gratifying for both of us to move into the center of this disruption. Together and separately, we strive to make a shift away from the primacy of print, the privileging of socially mediating certain groups over others, the propagation of cis-heteropatriarchy and White supremacy, and the positioning away from dehumanized binaries. Moving into her own culture and heritage, Cheryl found her way into social media. Less immersed in social media, Cheryl could step back and recognize the power and possibilities of social media to make identities sharper and as anchored within commitments, dispositions, and disruptions. Together, Jennifer and Cheryl sought to use the SI to make space for plural and diverse voices, perspectives, and to frame making across all four papers as hopeful and as something that fuels passions and anchors convictions. There is something important about how the four papers cohere to reframe making, makerspace research, and maker literacies as what Morales et al. call an abolitionist stance. Making is and can be an empowering space and an act of resistance to what and how we should be or ought to be (e.g., White, cis, affluent, and Western contexts). A golden thread across SI articles is this seeking out of plurality through making: making social media; making wordless design; making feminist abolitionist pedagogies; making affectively driven designs. Viewing digital maker literacies and gender through "influencer" culture—particularly those from historically marginalized communities and cultures—McLean's article offers a new distinction in relation to existing perspectives on makerspaces and practices. The article explores gender and maker literacies by looking at the platformized literacy practices of four Caribbean female social media influencers. Drawing on the concepts of literacy sponsorship and creolization, the author illuminates the literacy practices and perspectives that define the influencer-follower relationships across five social media platforms. Findings show that through their advocacy, consciousness, and plural community-building, the influencers strategically use digital-making practices to enact social change related to gender, language, culture. McLean argues for the potential for leveraging such forms of digital making to create space for pluralized and expanded practices and perspectives in our literacy research landscape. In their article, Morales and colleagues tackle issues of gender and equity in the maker context by examining educators' responses to the social needs of middle school youth of Color in a Hubspace STEAM-based summer program. The researchers situate gender in makerspace research by applying theories of feminist abolitionist pedagogies, restorative justice, and political-ethical becoming, to examine how the students' and educators' pedagogies offered lived models and creative languages for practicing restorative and just social relationships. Looking across three makerspace cases the authors explore how and where the constructions of gender are central to the pedagogical interactions, educator reflections, and students' sense-making. The findings illustrate how educators' restorative and abolitionist practices of critical reflection and responsive pedagogical and curricular decisions collectively become spaces for relational educator-student self-and-world-building. Using critical affect theory, Lemieux examines maker literacies through the prism of affect and gender to explore the possibility of coexisting truths in the relationalities between researcher's queer positionality, adolescent girl participants, and the makerspace processes. Through fieldnotes, interviews, Canadian adolescents' digital ClayMation video compositions, and posthuman vignettes Lemieux's attempts to de/construct the sites of tensions of gender binaries with/in maker literacies by attending to the girls' affective positionalities. Lemieux argues that the digital making space and process ignited these tensions or "little sparks" where adolescent girls confronted, acknowledged, documented, and navigated the entanglements of gender roles/expectations, their contributions to makerspaces, and their self-representations. By bringing together issues of gender, affect, and makerspace research in STEM, the article highlights the need for what Lemieux calls "more vulnerable ways of tackling and de/constructing the notion of gender, acknowledging positionalities that guide girls in feeling recognized and humanized in maker literacies". Disrupting the normativity and primacy of language in maker literacies, Rowsell, Keune, Buxton, and Peppler's international research project challenges us to consider the notion of language-free pedagogical makerspaces in STEM in which verbal and written communication are absent. Taking a posthumanist perspective, the authors use materialist ethnographies that spotlight the varied nature, scope, populations, and subject domains represented across three vignettes: the game-making process of 15-year-old Jorge; 14-year-old girl Tracy's crochet making; and 12-year-old male Tobey's designing with recycled materials. Asking what happens when language is removed from making, the vignettes illustrate how the "act of making is far more co-constructed between maker and the physical world" than language can accommodate. The authors argue that within such wordless relational makerspaces, the focus on tools, technologies, materials, and creative thinking-and-doing allows for more agentive, equitable, and divergent design and meaning making. Making and makerspace approaches to meaning making allow people, through tools, texts, arts, crafts, and technologies, to give form to their thoughts, hopes, vulnerabilities, and deeply held beliefs. Making does not always have to be as profound as this; it can also be a simple way to escape the present, to play and have fun, or to not even think about anything at all. In this way, making can be mindless and mindful at the same time. To grow and sow hope, making offers children and young people a fluid, dynamic, multimodal, disruptive way to actively experience, communicate, and create. Under the right set of circumstances, spaces and environments, tools, and pedagogical framings, makerspace education gives learners and makers a way to talk about, create, and show their lived and their desired realities. At the heart of making and makerspaces is the reminder of our diversity, our unity, and our humanity. Conflict of Interest None. Funding Information None. Biographies Cheryl A. McLean, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA; email: [email protected] Jennifer Rowsell, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK; email: [email protected] References Halverson, E. R., & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 495–504. 10.17763/haer.84.4.34j1g68140382063 Web of Science®Google Scholar Kafai, Y. B., & Burke, Q. (2016). Connected gaming: What making video games can teach us about learning and literacy. MIT Press. Google Scholar Marsh, J. (2017). Maker literacies. In J. Marsh, K. Kumpulainen, B. Nisha, A. Velicu, A. Blum-Ross, D. Hyatt, S. R. Jónsdóttir, R. Levy, S. Little, G. Marusteru, M. E. Ólafsdóttir, K. Sandvik, F. Scott, K. Thestrup, H. C. Arnseth, K. Dýrfj, A. Jornet, S. H. Kjartansdóttir, K. Pahl, … G. Thorsteinsson (Eds.), Makerspaces in the early years: A literature review. University of Sheffield: MakEY Project. Google Scholar McLean, C., & Rowsell, J. (2021). Eds. Maker literacies and maker identities in the digital age: Learning and playing through modes and media. Google Scholar Peppler, K., & Bender, S. (2013). Maker movement spreads innovation one project at a time. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(3), 22–27. 10.1177/003172171309500306 Web of Science®Google Scholar Rowsell, J. (2020). "How emotional do I make it?": Making a stance in multimodal compositions. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(6), 627–637. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1034 10.1002/jaal.1034 Web of Science®Google Scholar Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation