Maker Literacies and Maker Identities in the Digital Age

Learning and Playing Through Modes and Media

Cheryl A. McLean, Jennifer Rowsell, Cheryl A. McLean, Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000222760
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores "making" in the school curriculum in a period in which the ability to create and respond to digital artifacts is key and focuses on makerspaces in educational settings.

Combining the arts with design to give a fuller picture of the engagement and wonder that unfolds with maker literacies, the book moves across such settings and themes as:

• Creativity and writing in classrooms
• Making and developing civic engagement
• Emotional experiences of making
• Race and gender in makerspace
• Game-based play and coding in schools

and draws its case studies from the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Giving as broad a perspective on makerspaces, making, and design as possible, the book will help scholars expand their understandings and help educators appreciate the power and worth of making to inspire students. It is useful for anyone hoping to apply design, maker, and makerspace approaches to their teaching and learning.

1
‘UNRULY RULES’

Using defamiliarisation to tinker with punctuation in creative writing workshops

Hugh F. Escott, Sarah Christie, Jane Hodson and Deborah Bullivant

Introduction

In this chapter we reflect on our experiences of developing and delivering a set of creative writing workshops reimagining punctuation at the Grimm & Co literacy charity in Rotherham, UK. We explore ethnographic data collected during these workshops to situate writing as a form of making, and consider what happens when children’s agency in playing, or tinkering, with language is privileged. These creative writing workshops focussed on children aged 11–13 reimagining, and then developing new, punctuation marks. In order to do this they were involved in various workshop activities, but also specifically in activities that relate to defamiliarisation, a traditional arts practice which we see as of significance for meaning-making because of its generative potential. We reflect on how recent debates and discussions relating to maker literacies throw into relief existing efforts to empower children to see themselves as creators, and look at the complexity of this work in relation to low-tech, traditional, elements of formal literacy-learning. We explore the illustrative potential that a socio-material maker literacies framing offers engagement with print-based literacy practices, by reflecting on the complex assemblage of ‘stuff’ that is involved in constituting both the standard, and the creative, use of punctuation marks by young people in these workshops.

We argue that tinkering with language in a playful, collaborative, resource-rich, environment where recontextualising and remixing are foregrounded leads to children: engaging in complex multimodal design; pursuing the visceral enjoyment of literacy activity, social interaction, and the generation of ideas; surfacing and reflecting on their pre-existing awareness of language; and developing their self-confidence through agentive tinkering with language and literacy. Whilst punctuation is a very familiar aspect of the educational journey of our participants, punctuation is highly political, and as a formal aspect of literacy learning, is often presented as neutral and immutable. This chapter explores what emerges when punctuation is situated as relational, embodied, and fundamentally built on a series of practices that are open to revaluation. Our discussion touches on the complex cultural politics of access to particular learning opportunities, pedagogies, and forms of arts education. However, our focus is on involving our readers in a reflective exploration of what emerged from our attempts to develop opportunities for children to take ownership of language and literacy practices through enjoyable workshops activities. We add to emerging explorations of the potential of making, by considering workshops which also focus on the potential of collaborative play, tinkering, and making, which emerge from a creative writing tradition, and are informed by a mix of arts practice and socio-linguistic heritages.

In the second section we discuss the maker literacies, arts practice, and socio-linguistic approaches that inform our exploration, as well as outlining Grimm & Co’s specific approach to creative writing and workshops. In the third section we outline the nature of the workshops and detail our ethnographic approach to data collection in these workshops. In the fourth section we work through the defamiliarisation practices that shaped workshop activities and explore what emerged from workshop participants’ involvement in these activities. In the fifth section we build on the discussion of workshop activities to situate punctuation within a socio-material approach to writing.

Theoretical background

Maker literacies and socio-material accounts of literacy

Makerspaces and maker literacies invite child-led collaborative tinkering in resource-rich environments. Recent work on maker spaces and maker literacies draws a line between the emerging digital futures, into which individuals will be moving, and heritages of making, and tinkering, that involve varied pedagogies, activities, and practices, in diverse contexts, ranging from institutional disciplinary practices (i.e. design, engineering, fine art), to community-based hobbies and crafts.

The large-scale EU-funded MakEY Project has focussed on making with digital technologies in a wide range of formal and non-formal early years settings, considering the significance that makerspaces and labs offer the development of digital literacies and skills (Lahmar et al., 2017), as well as social qualities such as citizenship (Marsh et al., 2018). In reviewing makerspaces in the early years, Marsh et al. (2017, pp. 26–32) encountered ‘child-centredness; play; social and emotional development, and empowerment of the child to be an autonomous learner’ as key philosophies that informed makerspace provision. Wohlwend et al.’s (2018) research has focussed on the complex digital practices, intuitions, and tacit expectations that early years students and teachers mobilise whilst collaboratively ‘toyhacking, filmmaking, video editing, and remixing media’ (p. 147). For Wohlwend et al., maker literacies are ‘sets of practices for making and remaking artifacts and texts through playful tinkering with materials and technologies’ (2018, p. 148) and so constitute: playful positive collaboration; the manipulating and redesigning of materials; making tangible texts and artefacts that draw on children’s pre-existing knowledge as a significant resource; critical reflection on design choices; the use of resources (whether time or materials) and tools in the development of a text or artefact; and a commitment to the use of the everyday, or at-hand, in new and different combinations and contexts (pp. 148–150). Wohlwend and Peppler (2015) see maker literacies and makerspaces expanding literacy because they, first, involve printless narratives, crafting, and design, which expands the ‘scope of meaning-making practices beyond narrative storytelling in drama and literature disciplines to recognize emerging arts and design’, and, second, because they expand ‘paper/print tools to rapidly changing and increasingly intuitive technologies in fields such as digital media production, coding, and electronics in computer science and engineering’ (2015, p. 24).

Marsh (2017, p. 76) recognises the varied ways in which literacy as a term has had various meanings tacked onto it over the years, and so argues that:

[I]t might be of more value to consider maker literacies within a framework of so-called 21st century literacies, in which multimodal text analysis, design and production are at the heart of practice, practice which also fosters other skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving and communication. A number of models of 21st century literacies exist, each of them reflecting consistent elements of meaning-making, including: communication and creative innovation using a range of semiotic forms; the production and analysis of multimodal and multimedia/transmedia texts; the ability to engage in critical reflection and problem-solving, and the ability to network …. In addition, maker literacies builds on previous work within the literacies research field that focuses on the materiality/(im)materiality of literacy … which outlines the embodied nature of meaning-making, and emphasises the significance of emotion and affect as part of this process.

Marsh draws attention to trends in literacies research that draw making, design, critical reflection, embodiment, materiality, and affect together in the consideration of what literacies are, and should be, in the twenty-first century. Rowsell and Shillitoe’s (2019) work is illustrative of this move as they consider making as a form of activism, or craftivism, which has the possibility to transform pedagogy and learning environments, by creating contexts where students can inhabit agentive spaces of possibility and potential, leading to a greater recognition of the material, embodied, and affective dimensions of literacy and learning. In considering the complexity of the ways in which digital and physical spaces and materials intermingle in the creation of meaning-making (Burnett et al., 2014) literacies researchers have been turning to consider how to ‘recognize the affective, embodied, and material dimensions of meaning-making’ (Burnett & Merchant, 2015, p. 271) through perspectives that can account for how meaning emerges through the coming together of ‘people, places, and things’ (Burnett & Merchant, 2018, p. 67). With this mix of felt, embodied, material, social, cultural, and environmental being seen as constituting the complex networks, or assemblages, of ‘stuff’ through which potentials for making and literacy activity emerges (Lenters, 2016). However, affective and bodily knowing invites bodies and feelings that may be seen as disruptive to traditional literacy-learning environments, as Lenters (2016, p. 286) explains:

Visceral enjoyment of literacy objects does not easily align with the sub-text of many literacy curricula, which hold that literacy is best learned by the body at rest and ready for cognitive acts of encoding, decoding, and comprehending.

The discussion around maker literacies draws into focus the potentials of collaborative play, and the complex assemblages of material and social elements involved in the realisation of both digital literacies and print-based literacies (as well as the intermingling of the digital and physical). Below we outline the creative writing provision of Grimm & Co, to position it in relation to discussions of maker literacies. We also explain our rationale for reimagining punctuation.

Playing, making, reimagining, and tinkering at Grimm & Co

There is significance placed on the positive impact that makerspaces and engagement with maker literacies can have, whether simply because they encourage play, or because they engender improvisation and critical redesign. Grimm & Co is a space which shares the key philosophical points that Marsh et al. (2017) outlined as visible in diverse maker spaces: they take a child-centred approach, with play at the core of provision, and they focus on the social and development, and independence in their workshops. Grimm & Co focus on working with children between the ages of 7 and 18.

Grimm & Co are based in an apothecary on Rotherham High Street that caters to magical and mortal creatures. Instilling awe and wonder in children is central to what Grimm & Co do, and so once children enter the shop they are immersed in narratives relating to the shop as a magical space (such as children’s writing being a source of energy for magical creatures) and the writing centre itself is hidden away behind a secret doorway. Grimm & Co take a child-led approach to workshops where the focus is on exploratory play and the enjoyment of generating ideas. They see the development of technical school-based aspects of literacy learning as being fundamentally supported by children identifying themselves as someone who writes and reads, and they promote the long-term social and emotional benefits of individuals reading and writing for pleasure. Workshops involve children in games, crafting, writing, and performing, in a context where there is a high adult–mentor to child–mentee ratio. Grimm & Co do work with digital technologies, in some of the ways that Wohlwend et al. (2018) discuss above; however, the workshops explored in this chapter are predominantly focussed on print-based literacies. Jornet and Pahl (2017) explore the complex relationships between diverse and numerous approaches to creative arts and maker spaces. For Jornet and Pahl (2017, p. 67) ‘[a]rtistic practice and approaches privilege process-focussed work that is concerned with emergence, open outcomes and knowing by doing’. They also draw attention to how both creative arts and makerspaces privilege ‘teaching [and] learning in which intellectually knowing and affectively and bodily knowing are no longer divorced’ (p. 66). Grimm & Co’s commitment to knowing through doing, and privileging of intellectual and embodied knowing through a focus on process, situates them in the intersection between the broad spheres of creative arts and makerspaces.

Defamiliarising inherited meanings and values

The starting point for the development of these workshops was our shared interest in Object Dialogue Boxes. Object Dialogue Boxes are artefacts created by the artist duo ‘sorhed’ (Kimberly and Karl Foster, who were previously called ‘hedsor’) that contain dialogic objects, and have their origin in the development of participatory learning in museums with collections. The idea of the Object Dialogue Box involves taking familiar objects, combining them to create unfamiliar new objects, and then asking individuals to respond to this strange item when interpreting museum and gallery spaces and artefacts. The new unfamiliar object acts as a ‘compass’ guiding individuals to create connections that operate along different dimensions to the concerns of curators, curriculums, and funding bodies (Foster & Foster 2012; Foster, Foster, & Davies, 2014).Through this means dialogue with collections...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Towards a notion of perceptual making
• 1 ‘Unruly rules’: Using defamiliarisation to tinker with punctuation in creative writing workshops
• 2 Play in the making: Developing a range of literacies through making and game-based activities
• 3 (Re)mediating the everyday: Examining young children’s remediated personal narratives as maker literacies
• 4 Re-configuring the early childhood classroom as a multimodal makerspace
• 5 Arts-based practice: A tactical pedagogy
• 6 Makerspaces in K-12 schools: Six key tensions
• 7 Making futures, composing worlds: Examining young children’s making as speculative design
• 8 The sociomaterial ecology of emotions in a school’s makerspace
• 9 For a fugitive game studies: Female life’s break from game culture and black–queer–neurodiverse–postcapitalist revaluations of game study
• 10 Crafting stories and cracking codes in a Canadian elementary school
• Afterword: Dwelling on making
• Index