Storywork in STEM-Art: Making, Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence

Item

Title

Storywork in STEM-Art: Making, Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence

Abstract/Description

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by engaging Indigenous ways of knowing and being from a sociocultural learning theory perspective. Through analyzing families-in-interaction as they constructed dioramas with robotics that told their family stories, we explore how cultivating consequential learning environments in STEM is intimately intertwined with historicity, knowledge systems, and the agentic positioning of learners to design new technologies. We find that using storywork as the design focus of building dioramas created learning environments where computer programing and robotics became dynamic tools toward family-making, collaboration, and the active presencing of Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices. Living and interrelating with story and its knowledge systems through making were enactments of Indigenous resurgence in everyday ways. From a structure of social practices perspective, this opens up learning spaces for engagement in STEM-Art practices and in relation to other social practices of consequence, such as cultural flourishing and affiliation, collaboration and family-making, and societal repositioning.

Author/creator

Tzou, Carrie

Meixi

Suárez, Enrique

Bell, Philip

LaBonte, Don

Starks, Elizabeth

Bang, Megan

Date

2019

In publication

Cognition and Instruction

Volume

37

Issue

3

Pages

306-326

Resource type

en Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Empirical

Open access/full-text available

en No

Peer reviewed

en No

ISSN

0737-0008

DOI

10.1080/07370008.2019.1624547

URL

Official Publisher's Webpage (Taylor & Francis)

Citation

Tzou, C., Meixi, Suárez, E., Bell, P., LaBonte, D., Starks, E., & Bang, M. (2019). Storywork in STEM-Art: Making, Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence. Cognition and Instruction, 37(3), 306–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2019.1624547

Cited in

The Theory and Practice of Democracy and Community

Item sets

Handbook Chapter 6 Citations

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