Creative spaces in and beyond education

This issue includes a collection of five research articles and a book review that contribute to understanding creativity and equity in contemporary spaces in and beyond education. The issue opens with a paper by Areej Mawasi, William Penuel, and Arturo Cortez, exploring aspects of intergenerational co-design in the context of higher education. The paper, titled “They were learning from us as we were learning from them: perceived experiences in co-design process,” focuses on the design of spaces for Artificial Intelligence (AI) education. It uses a particular approach to co-design based on storylines aimed at bringing up sociocultural, ethical, and political dimensions of AI. The research draws on interviews with a team of eight educators and five young students who together design the launch for a unit centered on AI. The study uncovers affordances of intergenerational co-design for disrupting racial exclusion and power dynamics otherwise common in education, as well as offering promise with regards to support critically reflecting upon AI technologies.

An article by Sarah Jean Johnson, “La mariposita ¿La recuerda?: The affective and moral dimensions of professional vision in learning to play the violin,” features a microanalytic study of the affective and moral features of professional vision as they unfold through a metaphorical story about a “mariposita” (Spanish for “little butterfly”) co-constructed by a violin teacher and a fifth grade student fluent in Spanish and learning English. The study focuses on a community-based music education program serving a US school district in a rural area near the border with Mexico and examines the way symbolic language, and more specifically metaphorical stories, become integral parts of the pedagogy involved in learning and teaching arts in marginalized contexts. Bridging an interest in interactional micro-ethnographic research and a concern with pedagogical ethics, the study brings to light opportunities for dignity-affirming pedagogies connected to the arts.

The third article in the issue, “Place as creative partner: Placemaking with a university arboretum” by Jaclyn Dudek and Heather Toomey Zimmerman also concerns the arts. The article reports an ethnography studying the preparation and performance of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” by a theater group including community members and university students at a university operated arboretum. The study problematizes conventional ways of understanding educational space/place and, taking a more-than-human epistemic stance, examines creative placemaking in terms of Barad’s notion of intra-action. The authors make visible ways in which place and participants reconfigure each other such that new skills, personalities, and ways of being emerge with physical, social, and artistic transformations.

The ways in which places, subjectivities, and social practices develop together is also the focus of Gro Skåland and Hans Christian Arnseth’s article, “Making the library of the future: Identifying the zone of proximal development for a Norwegian public library makerspace.” Taking a CHAT perspective, and focusing on the notion of Zone of Proximal Development, the study examines the ways in which systemic contradictions emerge through the historically developed practices at the library. The multi-layered analysis examines historical documents and situated practices through interviews and participant observation during a period in which the library developed and transformed a makerspace. The authors show how changes in the ways the library develops the makerspace can be traced to evolving and contradicting views and motives with respect to education and library users, particularly primary school children.

Jen Munson’s “Enacted identity: Broadening conceptions of teacher learning” examines mathematics teacher identity development. Noting that studies of teacher identity often focus on either the narratives teachers construct about their professional lives, or changes in professional practice, Munson examines teacher identity as a performance of self in practice or enacted identity. Sher follows three elementary mathematics teachers observing their classroom interactions. The analyses make visible two specific aspects of teacher enacted identity: the enactment of control and the enactment of patience as the teachers develop new forms of pedagogical practice.

The issue closes with a thoughtful book review by Christian Fallas Escobar and Janeth Martinez-Cortes, of Action Research in STEM and English Language Learning: An Integrated Approach for Developing Teacher Researchers (Razfar, A. & Troiano, B, New York: Taylor and Francis, 2022). The review offers readers an overview and an appraissal of the book’s relevant insights on action research as it becomes relevant in a wide range of educational disciplines.