Connecting Space and Narrative in Culturally Responsive Making in ARIS with Indigenous Youth

Abstract

Attending to issues of equity in making1 demands that we work closely with communities, focusing on what it is made, how it is made, for whom, and in what contexts. Rather than exploring making exclusively as a pathway to STEM learning, we examine how Indigenous youth learned about and documented community-based making using the Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) platform. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, we asked: (1) What did youth learn about makers, materials, and cultural meanings in their community? (2) What were the making processes of small groups of Native American youth tasked with developing games located in their community? Findings highlight how Indigenous youth learned about and incorporated cultural knowledge into their ARIS games. In the discussion, we address how beginning and ending with community-based making contributes to ongoing discussions about culturally responsive making and what others might learn from our experiences.