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Electronic textiles are a part of the increasingly popular maker movement that champions existing do-it-yourself activities. As making activities broaden from Maker Faires and fabrication spaces in children's museums, science centers, and community organizations to school classrooms, they provide new opportunities for learning while challenging many current conventions of schooling. In this article, authors Yasmin Kafai, Deborah Fields, and Kristin Searle consider one disruptive area of making: electronic textiles. The authors examine high school students' experiences making e-textile designs across three workshops that took place over the course of a school year and discuss individual students' experiences making e-textiles in the context of broader findings regarding themes of transparency, aesthetics, and gender. They also examine the role of e-textiles as both an opportunity for, and challenge in, breaking down traditional barriers to computing.

Background: Research has highlighted the value of centering student voices and agency in classroom contexts, yet few curricula explicitly foreground critical agency in their design. This qualitative case study examines how students enact agency within an integrated curriculum that combines computer science, social studies, and Indian Education for All (IEFA) standards. The unit focused on tribal sovereignty and why treaties still matter for indigenous people today, enabling students to connect their lived experiences to broader sociopolitical contexts. Data were collected through classroom observations, student and teacher interviews, and student artifacts. Results: Analysis revealed that students performed agency in three interrelated ways: as experts, investigators, and advocates. In the expert role, students demonstrated mastery of content, research, and computational skills; as investigators, they engaged in inquiry-based exploration of food accessibility issues; and as advocates, they positioned themselves as agents of social change. These findings suggest that integrated, student-centered curricula can cultivate critical agency, enhance computational and disciplinary learning, and promote social justice orientations. Conclusions: By centering student agency, social studies classrooms have the potential to become spaces where learners are co-contributors alongside the teacher and engage with social issues. The study provides empirical evidence for designing curricula and professional development that support student-led inquiry and action, preparing youth to participate democratically and take civic action.

This paper shares findings from a teacher designed physics and computing unit that engaged students in learning physics and computing concurrently thru inquiry. Using scientific inquiry skills and practices, students were tasked with assessing the validity of local rollercoaster g-force ratings as posted to the public. Students used computational electronic textile circuits (e-textiles) to engage in “myth busting” amusement park g-force ratings. In doing so, students engaged computing and computational thinking skills in service to answering their scientific inquiry. Findings from this study indicate that physics classes are ideal spaces for engaging in computing’s Big Ideas as laid out by Grover and Pea (Educational Researcher 42, 38–43, 2013) as well as the pillars of computational thinking (Wing, Communications of the ACM 49, 33–35, 2006). However, essential to this dual engagement is a need for computing content to act in service to the better acquisition of physics content within the physics classroom space. Findings indicate that the teachers’ use of e-textiles to integrate physics and computing broadened and deepened student learning by providing affordances for computational thinking within the structure of physical science inquiry.

This paper examines how working with sewable, programmable electronics embedded in textiles (e-textiles) impacted the self-perceptions and actions of two middle school girls from non-dominant communities as they navigated their place within science class. Using analytic induction (Erickson, 1986), we explore the phenomena around their experiences and the influence of their teachers’ perceptions. Findings indicate that the personalizable nature of e-textiles created a meaningful opportunity for students to engage in science class in a new way.

This Special Issue of Education Sciences focuses on STEM in Early Childhood Education [...]

STEM is notoriously uninviting to wide swaths of the population [...]

We are interested in how whiteness shaped one teacher’s abilities to engage his elementary school students in culturally responsive pedagogy, especially his abilities to engage or avoid conversations about race-based inequities in an integrated technology unit focused on NGSS disciplinary practices. We draw upon culturally responsive pedagogy, critical race theory, and critical whiteness studies to understand the role of whiteness in a single case study of integrated elementary science teaching leveraging electronic textiles technology. The case study reported here is part of a larger study investigating how technology integration supports justice-centered science learning for elementary school teachers and their students in the Intermountain Region of the USA. The authors are white and Latino and all, but one, are former classroom teachers. Drawing on multiple data sources (field notes of classroom observations, interviews, transcripts of video-recorded classroom sessions), we developed a single descriptive case to illustrate shifts in teacher practice over time. We documented one white, male, fifth grade teacher’s engagements with his students around issues of race as manifested in conversations about immigration, migration, and forced relocation in an integrated technology unit focused on NGSS disciplinary practices. This single case and the teacher perspectives it illustrates are resonant not only of our data but also the scholarly literature on white pre- and in-service teachers in the USA. We conclude with some practical recommendations for teacher professional development.

Veterans are a growing presence on higher education campuses around the country, and as they become more ubiquitous, there is an increasing need to better understand this unique population of students. Veteran critical theory (VCT) addresses the necessity of understanding the student veteran experience by focusing on their narratives and counternarratives while pushing for a generative model of practice and inquiry. We report on data from a study of student veterans’ experiences of higher education, with a particular focus on the importance of friendships and camaraderie with other student veterans in their ongoing educational journeys. The project was conducted as a thematic narrative analysis using journey maps and a single interview, which was analyzed using VCT. We found that friendships, camaraderie, and purpose are important factors in the educational journeys of student veterans. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings contribute to the elaboration of VCT.

Millions of youth have joined virtual worlds to hang out with each other. However, capturing their interactions is no easy feat given the complexity of virtual worlds, their 24/7 availability, and distributed access from different places. In this paper, we illustrate what different methods can reveal about the dating and flirting practices of tweens in Whyville.net, a virtual world with over 1.5 million registered players in 2005 between the ages 8-16 years old. We compare findings from analyses of tweens’ newspaper writings, chat records, and logfile data. Our analysis demonstrates the mixed attitudes toward flirting on Whyville and the pervasiveness of flirting as a whole, as well as the breadth and selectivity of tweens’ adoption of flirting practices. We discuss how our multi-modal investigation reveals individual variation and development across practices and suggests that player expertise might contribute to the striking contrast between formal writing about dating and the frequency of it on the site. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our methodological approaches and suggest that our findings are limited to a particular space and time in the existence of Whyville and the tweens who populate it.