Reflection on learning

I have just read this paragraph from a book when it occurs to me that I can use it to capture how I feel as a reflection of my learning process during this course.

"…in a 1982 interview, he (Foucault) remarked that ‘when people say, “well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,” my answer is…[laughs] “Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?”’. This attitude to his own work fits well with his theoretical approach—that knowledge should transform the self. When asked in another 1982 interview if he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist or Marxist, Foucault replied ‘I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning’." (David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2008)

Exactly, leaning is the changing of self so that you will never feel bored by the same person you know of yourself.  That is why learning is exciting. This is also very much true to what I experienced during this course. Personally and psychologically, it helps me become another self I would be more appreciative of and build confidence by developing wonderful ideas through making, tinkering, sharing and by conquering fears over the course of turning the unknown into the known. Here are my fundamental takeaways:

Learning can happen in an unplanned way. Before this course I was a planner and I feared to approach my field in an unplanned way. This is probably true to most people and needless to say this is still a mainstream in education. A case in point is an anecdote I described in a previous post in which I had a chance to talk about a maker-space based research with one of my LCLE colleagues. She was a elementary school teacher before, and she very much questioned the “theory of the maker space” on the ground that if there was no instruction to or planned curriculum for the children and just let them do whatever they like to do, that would be equal to the exoneration of the teachers’ responsibility. I didn’t argue with her but secretly wished that she could join me in the projects of toy hack, scribbling machine or laser cutting to understand the value of tinkering, a bottom-up approach of learning as opposed to the traditional pre-planned top-down instructional practice prevalent in today’s school education. In tinkering, children will learn to start the project totally without a plan (or a general goal without detailed plan to each specific step), improvise with currently available materials to build or repair objects, and create new ideas  and work out problems in the process. Planning can contribute to the skill of organizing our thoughts, behaviors and activities, but it is also necessary for us to see the importance of fostering children’s ability to think and act creatively, the ability to come up with innovative solutions to unexpected situations and unanticipated problems because we are facing a world that has been increasingly characterized by uncertainty and rapid change. Tinkering allows children to be better prepared to deal with uncertainties and changes in their future world of exploration (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013).

Learning is a process. We learn through mistakes and failures. “The process of becoming stuck and then ‘unstuck’ is the heart of tinkering. It is in this process that authorship, purpose, and deep understanding of the materials and phenomena are developed (Petrich et al., 2013, p.55).” This is how Petrich, Wilkinson and Bevan argue for the significance of tinkering and also what exactly characterized my tinkering experience with the “scribbling machine”. My first attempts to make it move were failures. But it seems a paradox to me that the more I stuck, the more I found myself engaged. For three days, I was trying to make a better contraption and struggling with a number of configurations involving a diverse range of materials. I got more and more excited when it worked and improved as I designed. The process itself was rewarding. This must be the fun of tinkering as is concluded by Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013): “We see tinkering as a playful style of designing and making, where you constantly experiment, explore, and try out new ideas in the process of creating something (p.165).” 

Learning is a conversation with things in the world. To learn to appreciate the agency of materials is definitely a new aspect of self as a result of learning in this course. So to speak, a salient overarching theme of this course is materiality. Concepts like “object to think with” and “bricolage” are so impressive (Turkle & Papert, 1992). And I cannot agree more with the observation of Petrich, Wilkinson and Revan (2013) that innovation happens when new tinkering strategies emerge through growing understanding of tools, materials, and phenomena (p.54).  But as a woman myself, the most resonating ideas are from material feminism. It is revolutionary for me. It were the feminist scholars who brought a closeness or proximity to objects, a departure from “a tradition of scientific epistemology that sees the essence of science in objectivity and the essence of objectivity in a distanced relationship with the object of study (Turkle & Papert, 1992, p.12).” Turkle and Papert cite for example geneticist Barbara McClintock, who described her relationship to objects of scientific study as “one of proximity rather than distance” and who established this relation through conversing with and feeling for her materials (ditto). It was through these conversations that I conquered fear I felt especially when the materials were so alien to me at the beginning, such as in the laser cutting and three-D printing project, or when the materials refused to turn out the way it was supposed to, like what I experienced in making a scribbling machine.

This being said, conversations will not be possible if it is not predicated on a more dynamic view of objects and materials--material feminism, in which matter is conceptualized as agentic and all sorts of bodies are recognized as have agency so that all of them are embraced "within a confederacy of meaning-making" (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, p.666). As a result, “it requires us to recognize the power of things and to lose some of our hubris as humans in order to see, understand and take into account the forces, capacities and energies possessed by matter, including non-humans, other-than-humans and more-than-humans (ditto)”. This implies that materials are imagined to be as much alive as we are so that we can “have a conversation with them”. This is especially true when I was sewing the circuit, talking to the LEDs, battery, needles and thread, alligator clips, persuading them to work together, and feeling the embodiment of the flow of electricity while my needle guided it to run from the battery through the magic thread to my desired LEDs. This is really a girl thing, felt probably more acutely by girls (Buchholz et al., 2014).

Think like a designer-educator. The most impressive principle of constructionism that has impacted me as an educator is the idea of “design for designers.” I see it embodied in most of our projects and activities, especially, in DIY, Scratch, makerspace, and digital interest-driven arts learning. When we design a learning project or process, what we need to concern ourselves with is whether our design will facilitate our students’ designing, as opposed to pure consumerism. Again, materials matter. Petrich et al. (2013) consider as one of the principles of maker space design: “We select materials or phenomena largely on two criteria: their inherent potential to be sensually and aesthetically evocative and their potential to provide immediate feedback to the tinkerer’s actions (p.59).” Material feminisms and our sewing project also illuminate the importance of repositioning of materials as against our biases and preconceptions. Instead of complaining about girls’ lack of interest in STEM or suggesting overbearingly that girls should learn STEM, material feminisms suggest us to make a change of materials in our design. It enables us to “realize not just how necessary it is to revise what we understand as causality, motivation, agency and subjectivity...but also to devise new, practical and ethical acts of engagement which motivate and enact change in the material continuum that constitutes educational practice (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, p.667).”

In conclusion, this is my illustration of what learning is to me and how this course works it magic on me.

Constructionism constructs a new and stronger self of me
by helping me conquer the fear of the unknown and develop wonderful ideas through making

References:

Buccholz, B., Shively, K., Peppler, K., & Wohlwend, K. (2014). Hands on, hands off: Gendered access in sewing and electronics practices. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 21(4), 1-20.

Petrich, M., Wilkinson K., & Bevan, B. (2013). It looks like fun, but are they learning? In M. Honey & D. Kanter (Eds.), Design, Make, Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators. New York and Abingdon, Oxon., England: Routledge.

Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. In M. Honey & D.E. Hunter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 163-181). London: Routledge.

Taylor, C. A. & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, (25) 6, 665-670.

Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1992). Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 11(1), 3-33.