At the heart of this research agenda lies the recognition that individuals, in particular thosewho have experienced acute forms of marginalization and oppression, experience the world notjust culturally or racially but also politically and ethically, and develop political identities in rela-tion to these experiences. Youth then carry and enact these identities in various contexts includ-ing within learning environments that either take up and nurture these identities or suppress andmarginalize them.

Stacey’s active participation as a learner and designer in the classroom community was sup-porting a renewed understanding of educational inequality as a specifically racialized and struc-tural issue in her school, which in turn was seeding possibility for an emergent racial andpolitical identity. These identities, then, were opening space for new forms of participation inthe design process, and new ways to interpret the values associated with the discipline of com-puter science.

The study reported upon in this paper draws from a social design experiment (Gutierrez, Jurow,& Vakil, in press; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) conducted in a high school computer science classwithin a large urban high school, in which students were invited to design technologies thataddressed social problems in their school context. My analysis examines how students’politicalidentities shaped the ideas and artifacts they produced, and how, in turn, active participation in alearning community organized around equity-shaped students’political views and identities. I beginwith elaborating on a theoretical perspective on political identity and learning that draws on diverseliteratures including political science, political psychology, critical pedagogy, and sociocultural the-ory. After an extended discussion of my methodology, I present case studies for two students,Stacey and Lupe, who each illuminate the relationship between political identity and learning in aunique manner. Ultimately, the cases illustrate that explicitly attending to students’political identitydeepens our understanding of their learning processes more generally, and also provides insightinto ways that students make sense of themselves in relation to the disciplines they are engaging in.In the discussion I make the case that attending to political identity and learning has important the-oretical and as well as practical implications for fields including but not limited to STEM education.

At the heart of identity research lies a rec-ognition that supporting learning requires empirically and theoretically rich accounts of who stu-dents are as learners and as people, and who they might become through their future experiencesin schools and learning contexts more generally

A key feature of the situated framing is the recognition of authentic learning practices and the realization that learning means becoming a member of a community of practice with shared goals and values

One key limitation of a cognitive framing is that student learning outcomes are seen mostly in individualistic terms, pay-ing little attention to how learning is embedded in social and cultural contexts

expanding beyond narrow fram-ings which emphasize solving problems with computers toward an understanding of the values, biases, and histories embedded in computational technologies and cultures which run on com-puters.

computational thinking has become part of a global effort under which the introduction of CS education in K–12 is promoted under different directives, most prominently to main-tain each country’s economic competitiveness

The two groups demonstrated unique navigation patterns that revealed

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally transform science edu-cation by making learning of abstract science ideas tangible and engaging

we developed from a CoP that was led by consortium members to one where facilitators’ interests and challenges determined the agenda

The gesture allowed the participants to referback to ideas as they were first conceived, negotiated, and shared, rather than starting thediscussion of the same ideas all over again.

The joint representationalfunction of the drawings and gestures scaffold the creation and discussion of more complex concepts

diagramas the stable common ground

Every Process gesture had a slightly different function.

The first repetition and the last were not the same.

variations of the rotationswere enacted until Julia and Taryn made only small rotations of their finger during the lasttwo enactments.

With each repetition the gesture accumulated further details adding more strength tothe encapsulated concept.

insider gesture

stability

She was looking at Julia while enacting the gesture

memory trigger

. If the gesture had not been successfully associated with the process diagram, confusion couldhave risen as to which drawing Julia was referring to or pointing to.

Thisperspective allows the analyst to integrate verbal and nonverbal communication with the environ-ment and material objects being used as part of interaction with the world.

The benefits of free-hand drawing and sketching in the design process are numerous

This indicates that Julia was successful in associating theProcess gesture with the diagram on the wall and that Taryn agreed with this new association.

The Process gesture was repeated several times during the meeting.

The link was established between the term“process,”the diagram onthe wall, and the rotating gesture, combining them in a single semiotic resource.

Taryn’s previous comment when she pointed toward the diagram on the paper saying“this process”linked the term“process”with both Julia’s drawing on the wall and the diagram on paper.

As her finger moved she stated“this process”while rotating her hand in a clockwise direction over the diagram

Taryn instigated the Process gesture.

circle in the diagram.

discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and evolution

Process

set of scaffolds

Table 1.

The multimodal system of analysis in this study has the sketching and drawing practices of theparticipants at its center.

three-stage approach involving preliminaryreview, substantive review, and analytic review

the study of the local rationality of members’practices of reasoning andactivity organization

Thedrawing processis messy,exploratory, and more situated to experimental, free-flowing work, which is common during theearly conceptual phase of design

According to this perspective, a group of people working together isseen as a distributed cognitive system in which cognition is distributed across brains, bodies, and aculturally constituted world. This distribution is always mediated by human interaction, and humaninteraction is deeply multimodal.

They can become a local semiotic resource establishing links across talk andbinding together layers of perceptually available entities

Through thedrawing processa designer explores, questions, suggests,proposes, and develops ideas

They can serve ascognitive artefacts whenthey are used to support thinking, communication, andcollaboration in the process of concept develop-ment in groups.

Metaphoricgestures

Deictic gestures

preparation, prestroke hold, the stroke itself,poststroke hold, and retraction.

Gestures synchronise

(a) to bring to fore the important communicative role gesturesplay in face-to-face educational design, and (b) to demonstrate how a multimodal analytical frameworkcan illuminate the role of gestures and other communicative modes such as inscriptions.

the participants created and reused a gestureand associated it with a diagram on the wall through a combination of talk, gaze, and othernonverbal communicative modes.

In this study, gestures and drawings are not analysed as self-contained individual sign systems, but as part of the larger system of semiotic resourcesjuxtaposed to mutually elaborate each other.

gestures draw attention to the most important entities or visual elements in the drawing

Encapsulating Concepts in Gestures and Drawings DuringEducational Design Team Meetings

The purpose of this paper i

Design thinking

long-term impacts

direct and secondary consequences of our work

disastrous long-term consequences

it is this focus on empathy and understanding users, their values and experiences that has made designers stand out as modern-day humanists casting a renaissance light in a world transformed by technology.

problems

But is design enough?