Designing the Interface Pedagogy: More than Social, More than Material

Saturday 13:00 - 14:15

Sean Justice - Texas State University

Paper

This paper describes the interface pedagogy, a way of teaching and learning in the arts that activates the transition zone between computational machinery and embodied storytelling. The method involves physical computing activities that invite learners to explore the boundaries between computer programming and physical artifacts, while simultaneously building a learning community that empowers artmaking and critique of those boundaries.

Importantly, I did not plan to teach this way. Rather it has emerged in my studio art and theory seminars across multiple educational levels — college, graduate school, community-based workshops, and afterschool programs. Today, as I puzzle the implications of its emergence — i.e., the boundary between design as an intentional versus a serendipitous practice — and reflect on my students' learning, I am moved to ask if building computational interfaces as an act of storytelling (described more fully in the abstract below) prompts learners to fold themselves into the core of those stories. For instance, more than a little anxiety accompanies our collective questioning about who gets to tell what kind of story, and about the psychological and economic effects of being excluded or not represented in those stories. Here, computational tools present opportunities for entanglement that go beyond representation, that critique the assumptions informing those inside/outside biases. This is where the interface pedagogy might succeed best: in addressing the critically human question about how to tell one's own story, the interface pedagogy casts story and storyteller as co-constructed, emergent agents, each with an effect on the other.

To explain this claim, I will position teaching as an entangled social and material practice that can inadvertently create boundaries that diminish a teacher's effectiveness. To sidestep the contradictions, the interface pedagogy leverages the potential of computational tools to weave individual stories with community practices of meaning making. In this way, teaching supports learning with a hybrid gathering of incommensurate social and material elements, called sociomaterial by Fenwick & Edwards (2017). Here, I'll describe the interface pedagogy as a sociomaterial object that messes with the boundary between computation and gesture, where social history meets machine logic. My argument is that this kind of teaching can amplify the learning effects that computational materials make available for both students and their teachers.

In this presentation, I'll first discuss the context of my teaching and research. Then I'll share examples of student work with the tools and materials that comprise interface activities. Finally, I'll explore some implications for how sociomaterial teaching practices engage students in new kinds of artmaking while simultaneously informing a critique of the interconnected, cultural-machinic systems within which they are located.

Reference Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2017). How sociomaterial approaches could support higher education as a critical practice. In B. Leibowitz, V. Bozalek, & P. Kahn (Eds.), Theorising learning to teach in higher education (pp. 13-27). New York, NY: Routledge.

Takeaway

Participants will be encouraged to think about computation as a cultural effect that draws from diverse materialities-i.e., both physical and immaterial. One goal is to introduce a series of artmaking activities where learners build functional artifact-systems with computational tools and materials. Another goal is to encourage thinking about how storytelling is sustained as a cultural system of knowledge generation. Both of these goals result in the takeaway of a framework for exploring pedagogical shifts in participants' own artmaking and teaching. This is not to suggest that participants replicate the interface examples that will be demonstrated, but rather to prompt them to begin a conversation about the relationship between computation and storytelling as played out in cultural contexts. That is, this paper is about a way of thinking in and with computation as a human-centered mode of cognition. My argument-made primarily through the interface examples described below-is that low-cost, low-floor computational craft technologies make advanced systems-thinking available to learners who are novices with physical computing. Further, this paper proposes that sociomaterial teaching can make such ideas and practices available across various content domains (i.e., not only in art studios but also in social practice and theoretical seminars). Thus, an important takeaway for participants is the introduction to a hybrid way of thinking about teaching and learning in the arts. Along with that introduction, a web-based material resource list for computational studio-based activities will be distributed, and a bibliography of sociomaterial and computational resources will be made available.

Abstract

This paper describes a way of teaching and learning in the arts that has emerged in the transition zone between computational machinery and storytelling. I will demonstrate an approach to practice that I have come to call the interface pedagogy — a series of studio and seminar activities informed by the sociomaterial (Fenwick & Edwards, 2017) potential of computational tools. Interface activities are hands-on, physical computing activities where learners build interactive stories with craft and computational materials. The interface pedagogy that supports those activities is socially-oriented and material-centric, where student cohorts build learning communities to contextualize and amplify their learning.

For example, in an interface activity, participants build an interactive story (or story element) from tools and materials that do not necessarily appear related — computer programming, electronic circuitry, and picture making. Outcomes include paintings, drawings, and cardboard constructions that connect with narrative details on the computer. During workshops, students focus on emotional connections between story elements, such as character, setting, and plot, and how they might be expressed in color, motion, or sound. For instance, during tutorials I ask questions about how emotion can be conveyed by a character's motion across the screen. What does fast motion mean? What does skittery motion mean? Then, to attach their artworks to their animations, participants learn to build electronic switches using conductive materials like copper tape or metallic thread, and micro controllers like Micro:bits or Makey Makey. Finally, in wrap-up discussions, students and facilitators interrogate the way these material assemblages (i.e., picture, circuit, computation) inform the kind of meaning making that might now be available to enhance the community's further practice.

Both aspects of the interface pedagogy — the artmaking and the critique of the artmaking — can be seen as edge effects that are emergent from art and research practice in classrooms, studios, and community workshops with artists, kids, families, and teachers. That is, the interface pedagogy lives in a porous zone between social and material ways of knowing, where making weaves into and out of social theorizing. Fenwick and Edwards (2017) call these hybrid gatherings of incommensurate elements sociomaterial because of the way they can simultaneously resist and amplify each other's effects. In this presentation, I'll describe the interface as a sociomaterial object that marks the boundary between computation and gesture — where social history meets machine logic, where human intentionality tangles with serendipitous computation. First I'll discuss the context of my teaching and research, then I'll share examples of student work with the tools and materials that comprise interface activities. Finally, I'll draw out some implications for how sociomaterial teaching practices engage students in new kinds of art making while simultaneously informing a critique of the interconnected systems within which they are located.