Learning to Teach in the Digital Age: Enacted Encounters with Materiality

Abstract

This study looked at teacher responses to the maker movement in a K-12 school. Guiding questions asked how teaching practices engaged with digital making and learning tools and materials; and whether teaching was changing as a result. This was as a qualitative, single-case study with multiple units of analysis. The study site was an independent K-12 girls school in a major metropolitan area of the Northeastern United States. Twenty-two teachers and administrators participated, selected for maximum variation across academic domain, age and length of service. Interviews and observations followed a sociomaterial disposition that was interwoven with new materialism and posthumanism. Methods were inspired by narrative inquiry and actor-network theory. Findings suggested that digital making and learning pedagogies were stabilizing at the school, but not in a linear way; and that the teaching practices that most robustly engaged the ethos of 21st century learning enacted a kind of knowing sometimes discussed by artists, poets, musicians and other innovators. This observation leads to the proposition that a different kind of language might be needed to adequately describe the effects of digital making and learning on teaching practice. Maker movement, new materialism, 21st century learning, posthumanism, teacher education