Guest Lecture: “Learning from E-Textiles: Broadening Participation and Deepening Learning”

School of Education Guest Lecture
“Learning from E-Textiles: Broadening Participation and Deepening Learning”
Presented by Kylie Peppler, Associate Professor
Learning Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington

Thursday, January 18, 2018
11:00 – 12:15 pm
Education 2024
Open to the public.

Abstract: Central to our understanding of learning today is the relationship between various tools, technologies and their socially situated practices. This talk focuses on a novel set of tools and materials called e-textiles–computers and electronics integrated into clothing and other accessories–which represent a unique nexus of three distinct and historically gendered practices: crafting, coding and electronics. Drawing on mediated discourse theory as well as constructionist learning theory, this talk presents a number of recent studies across school and out-of-school settings that reveal how these tools and materials bear traces of their unique histories of cultural use and access, tacitly communicating gendered scripts that invite participants to perform masculinities and femininities in socially recognized ways. Findings illuminate how these scripts implicitly grant access to and participation in educational activities, thus affording opportunities to disrupt participation patterns in the classroom for non-dominant youth and, in the process, lead to significantly improved learning outcomes. The implications for rethinking our current educational toolkits to better align with deeper conceptual understanding as well as a set of general design principles for fostering more equitable participation in classrooms will be discussed.

Bio: Kylie Peppler is an Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Director of the Creativity Labs at Indiana University. An artist by training, she engages in research that focuses on the intersection of arts, media, new technologies, and informal learning. Peppler is an advisor to the Connected Learning Research Network and a member of the 2015 National Educational Technology Plan Committee sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Throughout her career she has studied the creative uses of computer programming among youth communities and has focused most recently on the design and study of e-textile artifacts–fabric-based artifacts with embedded electronics sewn with conductive thread. This work has resulted in numerous publications, a new four-book curriculum through MIT Press, and a co-edited volume titled, Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of E-Textiles and Education. This work has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Moore Foundation, Google, the US Department of Education, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.