Fabricating response: Preservice elementary teachers remediating response to The Circuit through 3D printing and design

Abstract

Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the intersection of reader response theory and multimodal literacies to examine how 13 preservice teachers in the course Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts remediated responses to Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant Child through additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D printing) and arts-integrated making. Through qualitative analyses of participants’ in situ processes and product(s), we identified a range of ideological and material supports and constraints during the digital fabrication process. Reading and responding to text—as mediated actions and events—became iterative spaces wherein individual understandings of text transformed into encounters of difference. Suggesting that participants’ artifactual responses at times operated as critical literacy texts, our analyses of 3D fabrication and remediated responses led us to consider how modalities of composition yielded unique affordances and constraints to the ways readers encountered texts and expressed and responded to controversial social issues.

Keywords:

• Preservice teachers
• multimodality
• reader response
• technology
• children’s literature

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 From Dewey’s (1934) early advocacy for aesthetic learning experiences to more contemporary work suggesting that the arts allow for rich combinations of form and meaning that expand what learning can be (see, for example, Halverson & Sheridan, 2014), the argument for bringing the arts into other disciplines has a long history. School-based arts integration has elicited debate for three reasons: (1) binary arguments for the effects of arts-integration tend to foreground their instrumental value (i.e. helping students succeed in the academic discipline) or their intrinsic value (i.e. because art supports students with socioemotional learning and self-expression; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), (2) integration can result in an oversimplification of the arts and reinforce long-standing academic hierarchies among disciplines (Mejias et al., 2021; Peppler & Wohlwend, 2018), and (3) arts integration does not consider underlying notions of how the arts shape activity (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2018).

2 Dominant framings of arts education (and what it means to be an artist) have been shaped by values and aesthetics dating back to the Renaissance, conceived (and then exported) on Eurocentric terms. Gaztambide-Fernández et al. (2018) wrote that “‘the arts’ and what it means to be an artist are profoundly shaped by racial logics and racist assumptions” (p. 2) implicitly predicated on Eurocentric understandings of cultural production and sophistication. Given our focus on sociocultural theories of learning, we looked to expand pedagogical possibilities by taking up the arts as forms of cultural practices involving symbolic creativity (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). We were committed to what was made possible through engaging in digital technologies and additive manufacturing, repurposed for non-entrepreneurial and expressive means.

3 3D printing—an emerging technology that facilitates the creation of objects through material design—has become a powerful educational tool (Elrod, 2016; Ford & Minshall, 2019;). 3D design and printing asks composers to perform semiotic work differently. Polylactic acid—the thermoplastic used in 3D printing—brings with it different potentials for meaning making (e.g. density, color) and so too does the software that accompanies computer-aided design. Across disciplines such as secondary history (Maloy et al., 2017), anatomy (Vaccarezza & Papa, 2015), art education (Menano et al., 2019), chemistry (Gross et al., 2014), rhetoric (Sheridan, 2010), and technology education (Chien, 2017), scholarship has documented 3D printing’s affordances as an innovative learning technology. However, empirical research examining 3D printing in the teacher education classroom has been relatively scarce (see, e.g. Maloy et al., 2017; Song, 2020; Verner & Merksamer, 2015;).

4 Although we rooted our study in the sociocultural tradition and operated from a logic of reflection/representationalism, alternative perspectives of thinking with materials exist. Leveraging ideas of relationality from the visual arts, science and technology studies, and philosophy, we used these more-than-human encounters with materials to examine the material ↔ discursive entanglement through the vantage point of diffraction (see, e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017).

5 Fabricating Response is an activity grounded in examining how responding through materials remediated textual responses through acts of symbolic creation. PTs began with reflection and individual responses to text. Because of our grounding in sociocultural theories of learning, we were interested in how the individual responses were explained and reformulated through the discourse stimulated by the collaborative aspect of the artifact design. Similarly, final artifacts that were more abstract held a potential for further reformulation through peers’ interpretation, bringing more conversation and discussion into the project. In that way, we had particular interest in nonrepresentational forms but were not evaluating the artifacts based on such criteria. Rather, in our analysis, we worked to understand the patterns across different forms of representation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon M. Wargo

Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. An educational researcher who attends closely to qualitative methods, Wargo engages community-based, ethnographic, and multimodal methodologies to examine how media and technology mediate children and youths’ social and civic education. In turn, he explores how these practices facilitate youths’ critical literacy learning as well as broader cultural change.

Melita Morales

Melita Morales is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. As a long term arts and interdisciplinary educator, she is invested in the multiple ways we come to know and make meaning of the world through day-to-day informal settings as well as formal academic experiences.

Alex Corbitt

Alex Corbitt is a Ph.D. student at Boston College’s (BC) Lynch School of Education and Human Development. His research interests include literacies, gaming, horror, and climate justice. Before enrolling at BC, Alex taught English language arts at a public middle school in the Bronx, New York.