Earlier this Spring, our team facilitated a new version of Family Creative Learning (FCL) in collaboration with the ideaLAB at the Hadley Branch Library. This post takes a closer look at how we approached documentation during this workshop series.
This past April, Creative Communities facilitated our first in-person Family Creative Learning (FCL) Workshop in collaboration with the Hadley Branch Denver Public Library. This is Part 1 of a three part series of blog posts that will explore how we used documentation to make learning visible for families and facilitators and will share perspectives from pre-service teachers who were facilitators in the workshops.
For a graduate student or postdoc, being a reviewer for conference papers and journal articles is an excellent way to gain insight into the academic publishing process, build skills in giving and receiving feedback, and create connections with the academic community. However, this can also be a bit of a daunting process for emerging scholars who may feel as if they aren’t qualified enough to review the work of their peers - especially when they may be reviewing work written by more experienced scholars. With that in mind, I would like to offer some tips that have helped me as a reviewer:
Firstly, remember that you are not the only reviewer for the article. While your review will help senior reviewers, editors, or conference chairs to make their final decisions, your own review will likely not be a “make it or break it” moment for the paper. Just do the best you can. Many reviewing systems also have space for a reviewer to rate their expertise with the topic area, so there’s no need to say you’re an expert if you don’t feel like you are one.
My overarching principle is that I want to be constructive, but kind. I aim to be the reviewer I would want to have on my own work, and word my feedback in ways that I would be comfortable saying, in person, to a colleague or friend. No one likes an overly critical or harsh review - remember that the paper you are reviewing was written by real people, who may be emerging scholars as well.
I aim to give a mix of positive and formative feedback. Point out the things that you like, sentences that are well-written, strong arguments, and good organization. When giving more critical feedback, I tend to use sentence starters such as “I am confused about…”, “I am curious about..”, “I would recommend adding more detail about…” etc. I also may focus on figures and tables (do I understand the main idea they are trying to get across?), add recommendations for relevant literature, or suggest new ways to organize sentences/paragraphs to improve the flow of the paper.
I sometimes feel pressure to judge the main idea/argument/framework to determine if it’s “good enough” for the field - and how can I do that as a relative newbie to the field? Don’t forget: even as a graduate student or postdoc, you are a part of the field too. You’ve taken courses, read papers, formulated your own ideas, and written your own papers. That said, I tend to think about my reviews more personally, rather than trying to speak as “the field” as a whole. Examples: does the argument make sense to me? Am I confused about anything? Is there enough detail for me to assess the methods/analysis? Can I easily see the connections between the theoretical framework, methods, analysis, and discussion? Can I see the application of this research to my own work? Chances are, if I can see some areas for improvement with my relatively fresh eyes, likely others with more experience than me will too.
I hope that these tips can help graduate students and postdocs feel more comfortable about participating in the peer review process!
Additional resources:
Last month Ricarose, Ronni and Stephanie of the Creative Communities team worked together with members of the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium and MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group to plan and facilitate a pre-conference workshop for the Association of Science and Technology Center’s 2021 virtual conference. This workshop planning was part of our group's ongoing collaboration under an NSF grant titled “Facilitating Computational Tinkering.”
Information on our upcoming Drag/Makeup vs. AI workshops and studies! This study is completely optional and voluntary - you may participate in one of our workshops without being part of the study. You can enroll in this study (1) online, anytime or (2) in person, at the start of the workshop (see upcoming workshop details below). To begin online enrollment, please visit: https://bit.ly/3nVLETO
This blog post was written by Janet Ruppert and Celeste Moreno.
Over the last year, our research group has been inspired by the concept of social dreaming. In this blog post we’d like to share some of our reflections and introduce an ongoing collaborative collection of resources for social dreaming that others can borrow from and build on.
We’ve assembled a collection of resources that have moved us to imagine different possible futures and ways that we could bring those about. We describe these as resources for social dreaming (elaborated below). So far it includes a range of materials from interactive maps and comic books to academic papers and frameworks, which we have noticed overlap with tools for speculative design, futuring, and critical design.
We invite you to explore and add to this collection if you are interested in learning about or trying out social dreaming activities! We hope that by gathering materials that inspire social dreaming this collection can make it more tangible, accessible, and diverse.
For example, one resource that has been inspiring us to socially dream is the book titled We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. It’s a collection of essays, interviews, and stories from abolitionist organizer and scholar Mariame Kaba. Kaba and other organizers invite us to envision a future and present without prisons and policing.
In the book’s introductory essay, Kaba addresses the extensive changes to institutions, communities, and ways of thinking that abolitionism requires. She writes, “some might be wondering, “Is abolition too drastic? Can we really get rid of prisons and policing all together?” The short answer: We can. We must. We are.” Later in this chapter, she poses the following question as an abolitionist start point to readers, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?”
Book cover of “We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice” by Mariame Kaba.
The following screenshot depicts the view of the whole collection, where you can see Kaba’s book is currently the third entry. To view each resource individually, hover your mouse over the entry and click on the “Expand” icon to the left of the title, depicted as two diagonal arrows.
Screenshot of Social Dreaming Resources collection in Airtable.
Below is a screenshot of what the resource looks like when expanded.
Screenshot of the entry for Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us” in Social Dreaming Resources collection in Airtable.
We often think of dreaming as something mysterious that happens to a person while they’re asleep. From a neurological perspective, this dreaming might be thought of as the mind-body processing sensory inputs in order to prepare for future activities. To describe dreaming that takes place while we’re awake, we have the term daydreaming, which brings up having your “head in the clouds” and laziness.
In these conceptions, dreams are individual and completely disconnected from reality. We invite you to watch the short Ed Talk from CU Boulder’s own Dr. Toliver below for more discussion of this.
Social dreaming, as we understand it, describes activities to collectively construct desirable and just futures from critiques of and reflections on our current social order.
This notion of social dreaming flies in the face of our normative ideas of dreaming. Social dreaming is collective by nature, defined by joint activities that build shared visions over time. Social dreaming is embedded within and confronts what we think of as reality, as we envision what our worlds and futures could be and ought to be.
What does social dreaming mean for you?
“We are our grandmothers' prayers./ We are our grandfathers' dreamings.” - lessons by Ysaÿe M. Barnwell ©1993 (link)
Our own dreams and priorities might be radically different from what parents, teachers, or “society” dreams for. Dr. Lizárraga, another brilliant CU Boulder professor, shares some of his own views on this in the video below.
In fact, the term “social dreaming” was developed in part from conversations among parents who are migrant workers in the US about their children’s futures (Espinoza, 2008). Through these social dreaming conversations, parents working under harsh conditions brought to life visions of their kids graduating from college and pursuing careers other than their own while still maintaining strong family and community ties.
Parents’ social dreaming of their children’s futures included educational attainment and economic assurance, but always alongside specific cultural and social priorities. A common refrain, writes Espinoza, was "es importante que los estudiantes no se olviden de donde vienen/it is important that students do not forget where they come from." (Espinoza 2008, pg 18)
When you imagine your future, what do you want to carry forward with you from your past? What do you want to leave behind?
We hope this growing collection can be a source of inspiration for you thinking through these questions and others.
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.
This weekend, a couple of Creative Communities members held our group’s first in-person workshop since the beginning of the CoVID-19 pandemic! We partnered with the Broomfield Library’s inventHQ makerspace to explore sewing and cybersecurity by making and testing Faraday cages for our phones.
This blog post details our Stop Motion Workshop design for our February series of remote workshops in collaboration with the ideaLab team at the Denver Public Library. This was our first attempt designing for a family learning experience that kept the traditional Family Creative Learning spirit of joy, playfulness and a focus on relationships, over Zoom.
In February our group facilitated a series of remote workshops in collaboration with the ideaLAB team at the Denver Public Library. Together, this was our first attempt to design an online family learning experience. In total we designed four workshops, two in English and two in Spanish based around the theme “Make it Move.” Families made two frame stop motion animations that showed everyday objects coming to life as well as Scratch animation projects.
What practices are educators already using to cultivate civic engagement alongside computational skills in youth people? Where are there gaps that future research and educational work on this could look into? In order to answer these questions, we reviewed six youth programs which include both computing and civic education.
"Animate Your World" is an activity prompt created by the Tinkering Studio which invites you to tinker with combining webcam input and programming using a feature called "video sensing" in Scratch (a free, beginner-friendly, creative coding website) to create playful mashups of the physical and digital world.
As many computational toys and kits become available for children to explore computational thinking at home, we interviewed parents with young children to explore what kinds of roles parents might be playing at home and to gather parents’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of engaging their children in these experiences.
We are organizing coding workshops for young people to create and play with physical activities, with the aim to explore how we can make K12 CS education more active and social rather than sitting in front of a screen. In the workshop, participants will learn programming concepts and skills by playing physical activities. Free participation and lunch will be provided!
The Creative Communities research group is looking for PhD students who are interested in working youth and families from underrepresented groups in STEM, developing experience in community-based research, examining equity and inclusion in learning environments, and exploring the possibilities of learning with creative technologies.
Play our board game pre-release with your family. We'd love to hear your feedback!
Please sign up by filling out the form at this link.
If you have any questions, please email Janet Ruppert at janet.ruppert@colorado.edu.
About the playtest:
Our research team is developing a family board game about online data collection. It can be played by 2 to 6 people. The game usually takes about 30 minutes to play. Afterward, we'll ask you a few questions about your experience playing. This will take, at MOST, an additional 30 minutes.
Eligibility:
We invite players of all kind - hardcore, casual, old, and young. We are looking for families with children ages 7 and up in the Boulder area, but if you don't quite fit this description, please sign up anyway!
Location:
Playtesting can happen almost anywhere! We could use our research lab on the CU Boulder campus, meet at a public place, like the Boulder Public Library, or even meet you at your house.
Privacy information:
Any and all information you provide to us will be viewed only by researchers, and will not be shared with any other people or entities.
Great! How do I sign up?
To sign up for a playtesting session, please fill out the form at this link. A member of our team will contact you within the week to confirm a time and location!
Our group has paper titled “A Review of Computational Toys and Kits for Young Children” accepted to International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. This paper presents a review of computational toys and kits that enable young children (ages 7 years old and under) to explore computational ideas and practices. We collected 30 computational kits and performed a qualitative analysis of these kits. We reflect on the implications for designers and researchers to expand the possibilities for children to create, explore, and play with computing.
