Negotiating tensions between aesthetics, meaning and technics as opportunities for disciplinary engagement

For educators, making has become a compelling activity for creating expansive learning opportunities in STEM. Less well known are the ways in which disciplinary learning unfolds over time for makers. We explore critical junctures in the ongoing journey of one project from a youth maker, Nasir. For this project, Nasir decided to design and build a set of interlocking gears to represent his ideas about the tensions between Black Lives Matter and "all lives matter" discourses. We postulate that tensions between three dimensions or within any one dimension serve to drive his engagement: a) Ideas he wanted to express through the project (e.g., about the Black Lives Matter movement); b) the envisioned aesthetics, (e.g., does it look good?); and c) technics, (e.g., features of the tools and materials in use). We argue that in grappling with and negotiating tensions between or within these dimensions, Nasir engages deep disciplinary practices, particularly in mathematics and engineering. We then discuss the implications of this theoretical model.