The STEAM Dance Makerspace - A Context for Integration: An Investigation of Learning at the Intersections of STEM, Art, Making and Embodiment

Champion, Dionne Nicole

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-a3nb-5722

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The STEAM Dance Makerspace - A Context for Integration: An Investigation of Learning at the Intersections of STEM, Art, Making and Embodiment

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This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the dance makerspace, a learning environment designed to support STEM engagement through making and embodied experience for a group of African American youth dancers. It looks at how participants in a 4-week summer camp program at an urban creative arts center-turned-makerspace, constructed embodied understandings as they developed projects that integrated STEM, dance, and making. Through a detailed analysis of the dance makerspace design, and of participant engagement in activities, I investigated what it meant to do science in an informal out-of-school context, where activities were guided by children’s interests and ideas, and where learning science was not necessarily the ultimate goal. In this dissertation, I will share analyses from the perspectives of designer, facilitator, and participant researcher, the three roles I played in the study. I examine how factors related to design and facilitation influenced youth engagement with STEM. I also examined dance as an interest, a representational medium, and a tool for sense-making, using ethnographic descriptions to show how and what youth learned as they engaged in embodied sense-making practices; and the relationships between STEM, art, making and the body when dance was used as a representational medium. This work brings readers inside the making process and demonstrates the potential for conceptual learning outcomes in informal STEAM making spaces. The findings show how the design and facilitation of activities created opportunities for youth to engage meaningfully in STEM in ways that are nontraditional, utilize their bodies for sense-making, and integrate STEM and arts practices. These findings further our understanding of STEAM learning in makerspaces, and they have broader theoretical and methodological implications. First, the study lends empirical support to research on making to learn by demonstrating how STEAM making can lead to conceptual understanding. It also expands ways of perceiving the body's role in cognition and sense-making, broadening definitions of cognition, and provides evidence to counter characterizations of cognition that separate mind and body. Further, the study provides methods for evaluating learning in informal settings where learning goals are not based on specific science content, and particularly when the products being evaluated are multimodal and non-verbal.

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