Skip to main content

Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity

Item

Title

Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity

Abstract/Description

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for working-class students and students of color. After reviewing various perspectives on making as educative practice, they present a framework that treats the following principles as starting points for equity-oriented research and design: critical analyses of educational injustice; historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. These principles are grounded in their own research and teaching in the Tinkering Afterschool Program as well as in the insights and questions raised by critical voices both inside and outside the maker movement.

Date

Volume

86

Issue

2

Pages

206-232

Resource type

Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

Published Text

Scholarship genre

Theoretical

IRE Approach/Concept

Featured case/project

Open access/full-text available

Yes

Peer reviewed

Yes

ISSN

0017-8055

Citation

Vossoughi, S., Hooper, P. K., & Escudé, M. (2016). Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity. Harvard Educational Review, 86(2), 206–232. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.86.2.206

Comments

No comment yet! Be the first to add one!

Contribute

Login or click your token link to edit this record.

Export