Ricarose, Kristina, Ronni, and Celeste presented a session called, “Building projects, building relationships: Designing for family learning” at the 2021 Scratch Conference. The Scratch conference is a celebration of the community that has grown around the popular creative coding platform, Scratch. Typically educators from around the world convene to share their Scratch stories, to facilitate Scratch-based experiences, and to learn from each other. This year the convening was virtual and while we missed the opportunity to connect with this vibrant community in person, we were thrilled to be able to reach participants from all over the world in our online session. You can watch a recording of our session here or below. Thank you to the Scratch Conference team for making sure that our video is subtitled and includes Spanish and Portuguese translations.
Here are some highlights:
We introduced Family Creative Learning (FCL) and provided a brief overview of the workshop series and the values that shape it, e.g., “building relationships is just as important as building projects.
Then we described how FCL workshops strive towards inclusivity and representation of culturally and linguistically diverse families by employing strategies like: encouraging families to use the languages they're most comfortable with, incorporating their family stories, and centering their experiences.
We shared a little bit about our approach to recruiting facilitators and preparing facilitators to be a part of FCL.We like to recruit facilitators who have interest and comfort in working with families. Expertise in computing isn’t required to be a great FCL facilitator. We also focus on “facilitating” facilitators, rather than “training” them.
FCL shifted to virtual workshops in response to the pandemic. We shared some of our lessons learned for remote facilitation of FCL workshops, like making time for “fearless exploration” when introducing participants to Scratch for the first time. You can learn more about how we’ve been engaging people online in this series of blog posts: https://creativecommunities.group/blog/februaryremotefcl
We shared a sneak peek of the ScratchJr edition of the FCL facilitation guide. This version is designed to support families with younger children (ages 5+). This edition of the guide focuses on family storytelling, has more information about supporting diverse families, and includes some new features like a focus on documentation. This version of the guide will be published in a format that makes it easier for you to edit and adapt the content to fit your setting and will be shared under a Creative Commons license so that you can remix, adapt, and share the guide. We anticipate that this version will be released by the end of the year.
We wrapped up our session by engaging participants in a padlet reflection and enjoyed reading and discussing the thoughtful responses from participants. We wanted to know:
Why engage families?
What has been important in your practice to meaningfully engage families?
What have you learned about engaging families remotely this year in your own work?
What would you love to see in the ScratchJr edition of the FCL guide?
How do you find relevant resources for your practice?
It was a joy to share our work with and to be a part of the Scratch conference community. We’re already looking forward to next year!
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005764 and 1908351 and was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant No. lg-96-17-0176-17