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This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice” and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
ISSN: 1074-9039 (Print) 1532-7884 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hmca20
Relational Equity as a Design Tool Within Making
and Tinkering Activities
Daniela K. DiGiacomo & Kris D. Gutiérrez
To cite this article: Daniela K. DiGiacomo & Kris D. Gutiérrez (2015): Relational Equity as
a Design Tool Within Making and Tinkering Activities, Mind, Culture, and Activity, DOI:
10.1080/10749039.2015.1058398
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2015.1058398
Published online: 06 Oct 2015.
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Mind, Culture, and Activity, 00: 1–15, 2015
Copyright © Regents of the University of California
on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
ISSN 1074-9039 print /1532-7884 online
DOI: 10.1080/10749039.2015.1058398
Relational Equity as a Design Tool Within Making
and Tinkering Activities
Daniela K. DiGiacomo
University of Colorado, Boulder
Kris D. Gutiérrez
University of California, Berkeley
This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth
as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illus-
trates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants.
Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and
tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organiza-
tion of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice”
and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational
relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.
Making & Tinkering (M & T) practices have shown to be a powerful means for engaging and
exciting children around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning
(New York Hall of Science, 2010; Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). M & T activities provide a
context for connecting youths’ everyday interest and practices with new forms of activity and
participation, through engaging youth in an interest-driven collaborative process of (re)design,
(re)production, reflection, and remixing (Barron, 2006; Ito et al., 2010) in activities such as solar
car construction or online game design. In addition, making activities are playful and aesthetic,
creating a type of “invitational potential” that holds promise for easier entry into STEM-oriented
practices, such as a projects that require circuit building or 3D modeling (Vossoughi & Bevan,
2014). Because of the playful, imaginative nature of many M & T activities, the traditional notion
that “science is for scientists” begins to dismantle, as children discover that they too can engage
in scientific pursuits. M & T environments have recently been lauded not only for their ability
to engage children in STEM learning, such as figuring out what materials conduct electricity
or how to create a circuit, but also for their ability to provide a reimagining of what learning
Correspondence should be sent to Daniela K. DiGiacomo, University of Colorado, 248 UCB, Boulder, Boulder, CO
80309-0249. E-mail: daniela.digiacomo@colorado.edu
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2DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
can look like. To be sure, M & T practices can open up new spaces for students to develop a sus-
tained engagement with learning processes (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013; Washor & Mojkowski,
2010). However, the research around what potential M & T can have on creating more symmet-
rical teaching and learning relations and designing more equitable learning ecologies remains an
area for growth. Toward this end, we explore the ways in which M & T activities can create the
conditions for more symmetrical relations within a learning context of preservice teachers and
elementary age students.
More symmetrical relations and the purposeful shifting of expertise among teachers and learn-
ers, or experts and novices, has long been considered a productive direction for the design of
learning environments (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978). However, we
extend this argument to suggest that more symmetrical relations, or relational equity, should
rightly be considered both a tool and an outcome of designed learning activities. As sociocultural
learning theorists, we understand learning to be socially and relationally constituted, and as such
we propose the need to consider how adult–youth relations necessarily impact the ways in which
participation in activity takes shape. As sociocultural learning theorists committed to promot-
ing equity through the design of learning environments, we explore the ways in which particular
types of youth–adult relationships have the power to trouble the traditionally asymmetrical power
relations of intergenerational learning environments (Halpern, 2005; Kafai, Desai, Peppler, Chiu,
& Moya, 2008; Tabak & Baumgartner, 2004).
We respond to Tabak and Baumgartner’s (2004) call for “research that is directed at consid-
ering teacher-student interactions in terms of the ways in which they might foster symmetry,
identification and access” (p. 429) and propose that the instantiation of M & T activities in edu-
cational environments has the potential to engender relationships that are characterized less by
the traditional teacher/student power dynamic to which we have become accustomed and more
akin to the valued partnerships known to be crucial to equity oriented social practice (Gutierrez
& Vossoughi, 2010;Lave,1996).
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
We introduce, albeit briefly, learning sciences research from informal learning environments, in
tandem with M & T research, because these bodies of work overlap and intersect in ways that hold
potential for the design of robust, equitable learning environments built around the development
of relational equity. Specifically, we conceptually bridge Nasir’s (2012) arguments around the
necessary social conditions for learning within informal contexts with Resnick and Rosenbaum’s
(2013) work on the learning characteristics of “tinkerable” activities. As sociocultural researchers
who understand learning to be fundamentally constituted by and through social, relational, and
culturally mediated experiences, we articulate the need to think not only about the types of activi-
ties and contexts in which youth learn and develop, but also about the ways in which youth–adult
relationships inform learning activities and contexts for youth development.
It is important to note here that this investigation of M & T activities could not have been pos-
sible if it were not for the particular context in which these activities were embedded, that is, the
social design experiment of El Pueblo Mágico (EPM). As a Fifth Dimension after-school learning
ecology (see Cole, 1996,2006; Vásquez, 2003), EPM is modeled after its California antecedent
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 3
Las Redes and is designed inline with Engëstrom’s notion of a “change laboratory.”1As such, it
is a social design experiment2the aim of which is to engender transformative learning for both
undergraduate preservice teachers and elementary age youth, and the designed context for learn-
ing is purposefully hybrid in a number of ways (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010). To be sure, the
context of EPM is intended to be a playful environment that stretches the current developmental
level of the children by purposefully designing activities around notions of the co-construction of
the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). These activities, often computer supported,
are embedded within a hybrid environment in which multiple languages, epistemologies, and
intergenerational relationships are privileged and leveraged toward engagement in joint activity.
Although the role of the social design experiment is not the focal analysis of the present article,
it undoubtedly informs the ways in which the M & T activities get organized and taken up by the
participants. Working within such a context that is aimed at transformative learning has deeply
informed our attention to shifting (a)symmetrical relations among youth and undergraduates.
Sociocultural Approaches to the Design of Learning Environments
We champion a view of learning and development that allows for the creation of learning envi-
ronments that supports and builds upon the diverse “repertoires of practice” that all youth bring
to educational spaces (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Seeing learning as a situated, social practice
(Lave, 1996), rather than an individual, static acquisition of knowledge of skills, allows for a
more humanistic approach to the study of complex learning environments in the real world. Our
conceptual orientation to learning has been largely informed by the work of Vygotsky (1978),
who placed a primacy on the social, relational, and cultural nature of learning and argued for
a sincere consideration of the ways various tools (especially language) mediated the develop-
ment of higher psychological functions in humans. As neo-Vygotskians, we are oriented to
more than just the individual learner in a given environment; we are oriented to the social con-
text of development in which the learner is developing, whether in informal or formal learning
spaces.
Informed by her contemporaries in research on informal learning spaces (Lave, 1996; Rogoff,
1990), Nasir’s work also operates under the Vygotskian assumption that learning and devel-
opment are social and cultural processes, heavily mediated by the context by which they are
constituted, and understood as “shifts in ways of understanding, thinking about concepts, and
solving problems and closely related shifts in ways of doing or participating in activities” (Nasir,
2012, p. 17). Her research in informal learning environments such as track, dominoes, and bas-
ketball contexts (Nasir, 2008,2012; Nasir & Hand, 2008; Nasir & Shah, 2011) has provided in
depth analyses of the ways in which informal spaces support the positive alignment of youth’s
1Change laboratories are intended to create expansive learning—“learning in which the learners are involved in con-
structing and implementing a radically new, wider, and more complex object and concept for their activity” (Engeström
& Sannino, 2010,p.2).
2Social design experiments are vehicles for the creation and study of equitable change and are fundamentally about
a remediation of the functional system (Cole & Griffin, 1986; Gutiérrez, 2005,2008; Gutiérrez et al., 2009; Gutierrez &
Vossoughi, 2010), or a disruption in ways the ways that participants of activity systems are coordinating meaning with
their environment.
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4DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
learning and social identities. This body of work suggests that learning environments that pro-
vide safety and a sense of social belonging enable youth to engage in sustained, meaningful
learning practices. In particular, Nasir’s (2012) work illustrates how certain informal spaces
are organized to support four necessary conditions of learning: consistent feedback, a sense of
social belonging, room for personal contribution to the practice, and the availability of mul-
tiple roles for learners. For the purposes of the present analysis, which conceptually bridges
research on activity and context design, we emphasize the first condition, though we under-
stand the inclusion of each of the four to be equally as important in the design of any learning
environments.
In the social organization of learning activity, “consistent feedback” is a critical aspect of
the learning practice (Nasir, 2012). Consistent feedback speaks to the availability of supportive
feedback from undergraduates in moment-to-moment activity, guidance/assistance when needed,
opportunities for observation and modeling, and multiple chances to try again. To be sure, this
type of relational feedback from the learning context promotes room for the ongoing formative
assessment known to be critical for good practices of teaching and learning (Bransford, Brown, &
Cocking, 1999). In addition, receiving feedback in a repair-friendly context (e.g., not in a testlike
setting) allows learners to feel safe to try again, engendering potential for sustained engagement
in the practice. However, because we are interested in both the context for learning activity and
the learning activity itself, it is necessary to discuss what is known about creating contexts for the
emergence of this relational feedback in tandem with what is known about activities that support
productive feedback through the material activities themselves. It is to this discussion of feedback
from activity that we now turn.
Designing for “Tinkerable” Learning Activities
In M & T, students can take ownership over their own learning processes, and the design of the
activity facilitates immediate feedback, open exploration, and fluid experimentation (Resnick &
Rosenbaum, 2013;seeFigure 1). Fluid experimentation, for example, has been articulated as
important for creating STEM activities with low barriers to entry, for example, learners can read-
ily engage in activities that are “easy to start” and “easy to connect” (Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014).
Although each of these three facets of “tinkerable” activities are equally important, we restrict our
subsequent analysis to a discussion of “immediate feedback” in an attempt to illustrate the con-
sequential and dynamic role of feedback from activity and context in creating more symmetrical
relations among undergraduates and youth.
In designing for activities in which materials allow for participants to both “see the process”
and “see the result” of their work, Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) argued that “immediate feed-
back” from the physical activity itself facilitates meaningful and sustained learning. In Scratch,
for example, students program their own stories, games, and designs and share them on, engaging
in a tinkering process where they “create programming scripts and costumes for each sprite, test-
ing them out to see if they behaved as expected, then revising and adapting them, over and over
again” (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013, pp. 168–169). To be able to test out a pattern or design and
get immediate results is instrumental for learning because it allows the learner to see the conse-
quences of her or his ideas, making one’s learning more visible (Bransford et al., 1999). In its
ideal form, tinkering should be an ongoing process, and activities that promote a “live” quality,
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 5
FIGURE 1 Tinkerability chart (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013).
such that they allow learners to see how the parts of an activity relate the its whole, are especially
important for engaging learners over time (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013).
A Conceptual Bridge: How Feedback from Both Context and Activity Supports the
Development of More Symmetrical Relations Between Youth and Undergraduates
To be sure, the idea that feedback is beneficial for learning is not new (Barron et al., 1998;
Bransford et al., 1999; Wagster, Tan, Biswas, & Schwartz, 2007); however, it is our aim to
broaden the discussion of feedback to attend to both activity and the context within the design of
a learning environment. Through subsequent analysis of illustrative M & T interactions at EPM,
we aim to show (a) how consistent feedback from the social organization of the M & T activities
led to increased relational agency among participants and (b) how immediate feedback from the
M & T activities itself led to the emergence of relational expertise in activity (Edwards, 2011).
The emergence of these two phenomena, we argue, supported preservice teachers in taking up
and valuing the diverse “repertoires of practice” (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) that the elemen-
tary age youth brought to EPM—and supported the development of more symmetrical relations
among teachers and learners.
METHODS
There are many ways to organize learning environments that invite increased participation and
positive relationships among teachers and students. However, in our research in this particular
historically indexed, equity-oriented social design experiment, we noted particularly interesting
practices and processes of relationship building that emerged specifically from the M & T activ-
ities. Accordingly, our guiding research question became the following: In what ways does the
organization of M & T activities lead to more symmetrical relations, or relational equity, between
youth and undergraduates in the context of a social design experiment?
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6DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
Setting and Participants
To get at how relationships developed through the M & T activities and environment, our unit of
analysis was the social organization of the practice itself. As just mentioned briefly, the research
context for this project was EPM, housed in the library space of a elementary school that is located
in a predominantly Latino suburb in Colorado. On each day of the program, which runs Monday
to Wednesday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., there were about 30 children from low-income and Latino
backgrounds who attended EPM. These children were students between Grades 2 and 5, and
their participation in EPM was free and voluntary, consistent with other after-school programs
that this school provides. The University of Colorado Boulder undergraduates, as part of their
Educational Psychology requirement, are required to attend EPM once a week and colead an
ensemble of two to six children. Most of the undergraduates who participated were junior- or
senior-level preservice teachers who expressed an interest in working with children in the future.
Role of the Researchers
EPM continues on to the present day, and both authors remain deeply involved in its design
on a theoretical and programmatic level. However, the research for this particular article was
carried out between fall 2012 and spring 2013. During this time, the first author conducted a
small qualitative study drawing on principles of ethnography to better understand relationship
development among ensembles during activity. In addition to serving as a researcher at the site,
the first author attended EPM every week on Mondays to assume a programmatic support role,
assisting with both activity creation and modeling pedagogical practices for the undergraduates.
Between fall 2012 and spring 2013, the first author collected 16 field notes from weekly obser-
vations at EPM. However, for the purposes of this article, which emphasizes M & T activities,
both authors drew from the latter eight field notes that included M & T, which was introduced to
the site in January 2013. Accordingly, the latter eight field notes emphasized the interactions and
discourse among ensembles that demonstrated engagement over time with two primary M & T
activities of “Squishy Circuits”3and, in fewer cases, “Scribbling Machines,” which are discussed
in more detail next. To gain a more emic perspective into the experiences of the participants,
we interviewed three undergraduates during the course of one semester, asking them about their
experiences with the program and the children. In addition, we interviewed four children, though
these interviews lacked in some consistency due to the young age of the children.
Designed Activities
The primary materials for Squishy Circuits, Play-Doh and LED lights, lend themselves to playful
exploration and playful learning without needing certain levels of prerequisite knowledge, both
important elements of learning from a sociocultural perspective. As articulated by Johnson and
Thomas (2010),
3“Squishy Circuits, developed by AnnMarie Thomas, consist of two kinds of Play-Doh: one is conductive, the other
not. By layering conductive and nonconductive Play-Doh in different configurations, simple, tangible, ‘squishy’ circuits
can be made and hooked into simple electronics” (LeDuc-Mills, Dec, & Schimmel, 2013, p. 618).
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 7
These compounds have extremely low entry barriers; anyone can learn from, and enjoy them. The
procedures for implementing basic circuits are very simple as well. ...One can almost immediately
start building circuits. ...This learning tool was especially effective [for improving knowledge about
circuits and electricity] among students that, judging from the preliminary test, had almost no pre-
existing knowledge of these subjects. (p. 4103)
These qualities of the Squishy Circuit allow both youth and undergraduates to “jump into
the practice,” a central design principle of M & T (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). Scribbling
Machines activity employs similar guiding tenets for design as those in Squishy Circuits, though
it involves creating a moving drawing machine out of batteries and recyclable art materials,
These activities served as ideal practices in which to study the affordances of “alternative learn-
ing spaces” (Nasir, 2012) that involve processes of learning by doing, albeit disguised more
informally as collaborative art/game design and play.
ANALYSIS
Analytical Approach
To capture discourse around identity and relationship development in activity, the first author
worked side by side with the groups doing various activities at EPM. Because of working so
closely across and within activities and ensembles, the first author was able to gain insight into
which activities were “working” best, in terms of creating contexts for sustained engagement in
activity and what appeared to be instances of positive relationship development between youth
and undergraduates. When M & T activities were introduced to EPM in January 2013, the first
author noted a marked shift in the types of relationships being produced in situ during activity.
Accordingly, the first author chose to focus her field notes on the ways in which the social orga-
nization of M & T was producing such symmetrical relations. To be sure, other activities at EPM
merit further investigation, but for the purposes of the present article, we restrict our analysis to
the data from the spring semester of 2013 at EPM.
We drew upon the conceptual framework from Nasir’s (2012) research on the necessary social
conditions for learning to systematically code the data, because her work on the social organi-
zation of informal learning environments provided a useful heuristic with which to understand
the learning organization of the informal M & T setting at EPM. To be clear, this meant that we
coded for instances of (a) consistent feedback, (b) the availability of multiple roles, (c) personal
contribution, and (d) sense of social belonging across the data. Subsequently, as the research team
investigated the affordances of tinkering activities, we chose to add another layer of coding to the
data based on the conceptual framework of “tinkerability” by Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013),
in an attempt to attend to both the learning affordances and constraints of the activity itself and
the social practice by which it was constituted. This meant that we secondarily coded for imme-
diate feedback, open exploration, fluid experimentation, disaggregated by its components (recall
Figure 1).4
4Before deductively coding using the aforementioned conceptual frameworks, the first author was careful to induc-
tively review and broadly code the data noting instances of the following: joint activity, identity declarations, play, and
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8DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
We looked for disconfirming evidence as well, of which there were a few instances when
the M & T practices engendered the traditional “teacher as all knower” pedagogical practices,
characterized by asymmetrical relationships. However to an overwhelming extent the social orga-
nization codes overlapped and intersected with the “tinkerability” in such a way as to confirm the
reasoning behind deductively coding the second pass in this way. In particular, the excerpts asso-
ciated with both “immediate feedback” and “consistent feedback” revealed how relational- and
activity-based feedback was allowing for the development of more symmetrical relations, or rela-
tional equity among participants. The following illustrative cases serve as demonstrative of this
phenomenon.
Analysis of Findings
In this section, we illustrate how the social organization of designed M & T activities, particularly
the relational and material feedback from context and activity, afforded more symmetrical social
relations in which undergraduates assumed a more “partnerlike” approach in activity. For pur-
poses of brevity, Table 1 shows an excerpt of the codebook that illustrates the two feedback codes,
and Table 2 shows the frequency of feedback codes. The potential learning consequences of these
two types of feedback are subsequently explicated through a discussion of Edwards’s (2011)
notion of relational expertise and relational agency, both of which work to produce the relational
equity that constitutes the emergence of the partnerlike learning relations between undergraduates
and youth.
Example 1. The collaborative activity of making a Squishy Circuit requires all participants
to sit together on the floor or at a table, coordinating their activity in ways that positioned them
physically at the same level with each other. This activity also invites participants to work in
close proximity, facilitating ready exchange of ideas and suggestions during making. In addition,
the material use of tinker-friendly Play-Doh and LED lights afforded different ways of designing
the artifact, providing opportunities to continually repair one or another’s design. Consider the
following example:
From Field Note 8, 4.5.13: I [first author] approach a table of five participants [youth and
undergraduates], watching Jacqueline [youth], who is creating a butterfly out of the dough. She says
that she hopes to light up its eyes. When I get closer to see what she is doing and she can’t make
it light up, she tries various ways to plug in the wires and the batteries, but quickly says “I’ll call
you back when it’s ready.” Jacqueline’s undergraduate [who is seated next to her] says to her: “How
do you think you made it work the first time?” Nearby, Paige and Devon, two other youth who are
working to light up their designs, are also struggling initially either because of battery, LED, or wire
issues. They spend a few minutes talking about previous successful or failed attempts, and then Paige
says, “Devon it’s so cool-it’s so bright because I’m touching it!” Jacqueline then chimes in: “Wait I
got it- It’s working! It’s working, and it’s so bright!”
perceptions of teaching and learning, because these were the primary low inference patterns that emerged from a first
pass of the data (Carspecken, 1996; Miles & Huberman, 1994).
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 9
TABLE 1
Excerpt From Codebook: Activity and Context Feedback
Parent Code Child Code Definition Excerpt
Immediate
feedbacka
See the process During construction of M & T
artifact, participants can readily
see the consequences of each
step of activity, meaning that
they get a sense of ‘what
works’ during
moment-to-moment activity
“When there is a problem with the
scribbling machines, many of the
ensembles work to fix it by adding
weight or tape so that the wire stays
tapped to the battery. The children
smile when their machine works.
They don’t seem to tire with
reworking and adjusting the speed
of their machines.”
See the product Participants are able to construct a
tangible product that they and
others can interact with, either
digitally and physically; and
see how the parts relate to the
whole
“I think she [the youth] likes the fact
that she can like make something,
you know, and have like a product.”
Social
organization of
the practiceb
Consistent
feedback
During activity, participants
provide ongoing feedback to
each other regarding their joint
or individual tasks; which is
facilitated through working in
close proximity to each other
and the repair-friendly nature
of creating an artifact through
tinkering, rather than through
recipe-like instruction and
formal assessment
Youth: “It’s too hard. It’s hard to keep
the back up, and to do it by myself.”
Ug: “Okay let’s work on it
together.” [the scribbling machine]
Youth: “I don’t see the wires
because of the zebra tape ...But I
like the zebra tape ...”Youth: “But
that’s what holds the battery
together!”(Both undergrad and
youth are working on their own
machines and with batteries. Both
machines are working differently)
Youth: “You’re not supposed to hold
onto it, you are supposed to make it
run by itself. You are supposed to
use this (goes into supply bag) and
then places a rubber band on the
batter and then the propeller starts to
spin fast.”
Note. M&T=Making & Tinkering.
aOther “tinkerability” parent codes, in addition to immediate feedback, included open exploration and fluid experi-
ment, as well as their subgroups (recall Figure 1). bOther child codes for “social organization of the practice” included
availability of multiple roles, room for personal contribution, and sense of social belonging.
We argue that these relational and material feedback elements of the activity helped to create
an environment with relational agency—a “capacity for working with others to strengthen pur-
poseful responses to complex problems” (Edwards, 2011, p.34). According to Edwards (2011),
relational agency arises from (a) working with others to expand the object of activity and (b)
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10 DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
TABLE 2
Feedback Frequency and Co-occurrences Across Eight Field Notes and Six Interviews
(Four Youth, Two Adults)
Code Frequency Co-occurrence
See the process 19 13 (with consistent feedback)
See the product 13 10 (with consistent feedback)
Consistent feedback 22
aligning one’s own responses to new interpretations being made by the others while acting on the
expanded object. In the previous example, we understood the youth and undergraduate to have
been (a) working together to expand the object of activity (e.g., creating a butterfly whose wings
light up, requiring problem solving around how to conduct a circuit) and (b) aligning one’s own
responses to new interpretations in activity (e.g., the youth spend a few minutes talking about
previous successful or failed attempts), after which they made repairs that allowed their designs
to work.
Example 2. At EPM, youth are given the freedom to choose which activities they want to
do during their afternoon sessions with the undergraduates. Some youth attend EPM just 1 day a
week, whereas some attend multiple days during the week. This has the affordance of allowing
some youth to really gain expertise in a certain practice at site. For example, Isabel, a young
second grader at EPM, wanted to do the Squishy Circuits nearly every time she came to site.
As a result, she became something of an “expert” in the practice and felt comfortable taking on a
guiding role for newcomers. Consider the following excerpt from our field notes (3.5.13)
About an hour into the EPM session, Josie [youth] comes in to the tinkering room and wants to do
Squishy Circuits. Isabel has been working on her own designs for the past hour, and says that she will
help Josie. The two of them sit down and gather materials from me to get started. Their undergraduate
is nearby, and asks if Josie needs help, and she points to Isabel saying “No, because she is going to
help me!” Together, she and Isabel make insulating play-doh and I can hear Isabel taking a lead role
in telling her that “We need more salt” or “It’s too sticky;” they are both working together and helping
each other make dough. Josie says to me [first author], as I sit down next to them, “We are going to
make chocolate chip cookies” and I ask her if they will light them up, and she says loudly, “Yea we
can light them up!”
The social organization of the M & T activity of Squishy Circuits engendered a context where
Isabel could readily display her expertise and support others in joining her practice. Although
her undergraduate is nearby and offers help, Isabel’s confidence in her practice supports her
shifting identity as a knowledgeable maker of Squishy Circuits. We contend that this instance is
an example of activity that created room for “relational expertise,” which is based on “confident
engagement with the knowledge that underpins one’s own specialist practice, as well as a capacity
to recognize and respond to what others might offer in local systems of distributed expertise”
(Edwards, 2011, p. 33). The consistent and support relational feedback that Isabel was able to
offer Josie during activity may likely have led to Josie’s later confident statement of “Yea we can
light them up,” despite her novice status in the practice.
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 11
Example 3. In the particular preservice teacher learning social context of EPM, it can be
difficult for the undergraduates not to take an authoritarian-type role in activity because they enter
the space excited to be “teachers.” Yet we found that during the M & T activities such as Squishy
Circuits, undergraduates often did not feel comfortable with the disciplinary learning involved
in the STEM activity—which precluded them from organizing a more traditional, didactic-based
learning environment (Boaler & Greeno, 2000). As the following excerpt from the first author’s
interview with Miley (3.20.13) demonstrates, the undergraduate herself acknowledges that she
does not know the science behind the functioning of the Squishy Circuit.
First author: And what would be the benefits within that exercise, or the activity [of Squishy Circuits]?
Miley: Um, if you can get them to give you responses to why the light bulb is lighting up, and under-
standing the insulating dough and everything like that. I mean remember you asked me yesterday
why our circuit was lighting up a certain way, and I was like I don’t even know the answer to that!
Miley admitted that she was not familiar with the practice of circuitry, and because of this she
often relied on the youth to lead the way in activity. When her group was ready to light the circuit,
she frequently called to Sara (youth) because she was the best at creating a successful circuit.
To be sure, creating a learning context that privileges the development of relational expertise and
relational agency takes more than adults being unfamiliar with the subject area. However, in this
particular preservice teacher learning context, we contend that the Squishy Circuits activity was
socially organized to allow for novices to assume more expert roles in the practice. In doing so,
the context created room for relational expertise (the capacity to recognize and respond to what
others offer in local systems of distributed expertise) to be leveraged toward relational agency
(the capacity for working with others to solve problems) in joint activity.
Example 4. The opportunity for immediate feedback from the material activity, as well as
the repair-friendly social context of the learning activity, was equally important for promoting
sustained engagement in the learning process. The following interaction with Rossdy highlights
how both the actual activity and the environment in which it was embedded allowed Rossdy
ample room to negotiate her understanding of the science behind the functioning of the Scribbling
Machine.
Field Note 4, 2.27.13: When I [first author] asked Rossdy what she was thinking about when she was
designing her scribbling machine, she said “I was thinking about what was going to work.” When
she tries out her machine on paper, the propeller spins vigorously but the cup doesn’t move on the
paper like it is supposed to. She and Jordan [undergraduate] talk about why this could be the case,
for example “because the propeller is too heavy” or “the pen is bad.” I signal to Andrew, a youth
seated nearby at the computers with more experience in making Scribbling Machines, to come over
and help. He says that we need to change pens before going back to his station. I offer to go get
thicker pens and bring them back to Rossdy. The scribbling machine now scribbles around the page
in a circular fashion. When I ask Rossdy if she knew that the machine would go in circles when
she was making it, she said no. A few moments later, she says, “Maybe it’s because it is a circular
cup.” [Another pause] ...“Or because the propeller spins in a circle.” She continues to voice various
reasons why the machine was now moving in a particular direction.
Without being asked, Rossdy proffers a number of possible explanations to why her machine was
working better or worse during her exchange with the first author. The social organization of the
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12 DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
practice was such that she was able not only to have ready assistance and “repair” opportunities
(Stone & Gutiérrez, 2007) of her undergraduate, Jordan, but she was also able to talk through her
thinking with Andrew and the first author, both more experienced “Tinkerers.” This immediate
and localized feedback and room for repair is important for the development of her own identity
as a learner, in that she had the time and space to learn from others through modeling and to
situate herself as competent within the practice. If the experiment had ended with Rossdy’s first
failed attempt to make her Scribbling Machine draw, her understanding of motion and battery
propelled energy (or simply her enthusiasm for exploration) may have been left wanting.
Limitations of analysis. The spring semester of 2013, in which the first author was col-
lecting field notes on the tinkering activity, was the first semester that tinkering activities were
introduced to the EPM learning ecology. As such, the design team was emergent in their under-
standing of how to best support tinkering activities, as well as how to create a robust Maker space.
Moreover, most of the undergraduates involved in the activities did not report any prior experi-
ence with STEM-related activities. Accordingly, the authors are not proposing that this analysis
should be comparable to the analysis of activities in a fully developed M & T space.
In addition, the first author decidedly focused her field notes on these new M & T activities,
and as a result is not able to speak the social organization and material affordances of the other
designed activities at EPM in such detail. However, investigations of the transformative learning
of such Fifth Dimension spaces is well documented (Cole, 1996; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010;
Vásquez, 2003), and this article is but one small and perhaps complementary contribution to the
analyses of teaching and learning in such ecologies.
DISCUSSION
EPM is an informal preservice teacher learning context, and the undergraduates in this space
often expressed5a tension around not understanding their role at site with the youth: Are they
supposed to act as teachers? Mentors? Friends? As site staff and course instructors, we stressed
the importance of a light pedagogical touch through emphasizing learning, over teaching, in this
designed after-school ecology. This tension around mentoring roles, however, is well documented
(Villalpando & Solorzano, 2005), and we saw this manifest in the undergraduates’ discursive
framing of the youth. Similar to Kafai et al.’s (2008) findings, we believe that undergraduates’
perspectives on the youth in this particular context were “built on an inherent knowledge differ-
ential between the mentor and mentee” (p. 18), which can lead to an inherently deficit perspective
of the youth and their learning abilities. However, we found that the M & T activities within this
context mediated the ways in which the undergraduates interacted with the youth. In particular,
the material and relational feedback from the Squishy Circuits and Scribbling Machines allowed
for the emergence of more symmetrical relations between teacher and learner. Perhaps because
of the undergraduates’ lack of extended experiences in M & T prior to their interactions with the
youth, they more readily became learners in practice, despite their possible preconceived notions
about what it meant to be a teacher/mentor in this space. In this way, we believe our findings
5And continue to express to the present day (April 2015 at EPM).
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RELATIONAL EQUITY AS A DESIGN TOOL 13
build upon prior literature (Kafai et al., 2008; Tabak & Baumgartner, 2004) in suggesting the
need to consider how particular activities and participant structures can create more equitable
teaching and learning practices in preservice teacher learning environments.
Specifically, in this article, we argue that the availability of consistent and immediate feedback,
as conceptualized by both Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) and Nasir (2012), engendered space
for the development of more symmetrical relations between the undergraduates and elementary
age students. The undergraduates’ relations with students during M & T activities more closely
resembled partnerships, rather than the hierarchal power dynamics often seen in educational
environments or mentoring relationships. In their discourse, the undergraduates demonstrated an
authoritative top-down approach to teaching and learning. In contrast, during M & T activities, the
undergraduates’ practice looked very different: They often positioned themselves as novices and
learners, asked youth for guidance in activity, and developed a meaningful relationship through
fluid conversation over time.
CONCLUSION
In this article, we illustrate how the social organization of particular M & T activities, within
the larger context of a social design experiment explicitly designed for transformative change,
helped to create a learning environment with the necessary social conditions for feedback in
practice that supports consequential learning. As the data show, the development of joint activ-
ity was bolstered by the material and relational feedback of the activity and the activity context.
Of significance, more equitable learning opportunities for youth and undergraduates emerged in
the iterative process of M & T. These analyses support our ongoing conjecture that proleptic ori-
entations to learning in mediated praxis helps to foster a new social and pedagogical imagination
(Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) within a preservice learning context.
We believe this work has implications for broadening participation in STEM-rich activities, for
introducing novice teachers to new content and pedagogical practices, and for the development of
more equitable opportunities to learn. These practices become increasingly salient for historically
marginalized communities who may benefit even more from the instantiation of M & T practices,
as students from these communities are typically not provided with fluid or sustainable entry and
access to higher order material, relational, and ideational resources (Nasir, 2012). We argue the
need for more opportunities to engage in consequential, side-by-side learning and for a design
focus that attends to the necessary social conditions for learning now and the future. The present
study suggests that those interested in preservice learning environments would do well to inves-
tigate M & T practices, because of their demonstrated potential to engender more symmetrical
types of participation structures where students and teachers can utilize both relational agency
and relational expertise to learn alongside one another, together in practice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network for their continued
support with this research, as well as the CU Boulder Educational Psychology/El Pueblo Mágico
research team and the elementary school site support. We also want to thank a number of the CU
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14 DIGIACOMO AND GUTIÉRREZ
Boulder Learning Sciences faculty including Susan Jurow, Bill Penuel, and Ben Kirshner for pro-
viding supportive feedback for this project. We acknowledge Shirin Vossoughi and Meg Escudé
for their conceptual, pedagogical, and pragmatic framing of the Making & Tinkering activities
that helped constitute our Making and Tinkering activities at EPM (http://fablearn.stanford.edu/
2013/wp-content/uploads/Tinkering-Learning-Equity-in-the-After-school-Setting.pdf).
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