Developing Political and Ethical Perspectives on Learning

This project closely examines the pedagogical interactions, emerging understandings and practices in an Afterschool Tinkering Setting that has been designed for equity. We seek to understand the emergence of STEAM disciplinary practices and ways of knowing—including forms of epistemic heterogeneity—that become possible in a making/tinkering environment rooted in a particular set of social and intellectual values. We aim to construct detailed analysis/representation of rich forms of pedagogy, recurring tensions or problems of practice, and key moments of children’s thinking in this setting as a resource for the ongoing development of educators in this domain. This includes representations and analyses that support educators in noticing the intellectual complexity of children’s meaning-making within tinkering/making activities. More broadly, we aim to help expand and deepen how we notice, interpret and theorize learning as a cognitive, social, cultural, political, and axiological phenomenon, with a particular focus on studying the deeply interwoven nature of the relational and the intellectual (i.e. the relationships between subject-subject and subject-object relations).