Maker Culture & Identity Construction

Learning Creative Learning makes me feel like I’m part of a creative universe of infinite possibilities:

(Image found online and shared by Stellar Indulgence on Tumbler)

This week I experienced lots of ideas unleashed by something Dale Dougherty said  in the week 3 lecture on Maker Culture.

The concept of Maker Culture invites me to draw mental parallels with Hip Hop Culture and the aim  to use high and low tech tools and any available resources to make things that express self for the purpose of feeling connected and more human– also both cultures by their inclusive and productive nature kind of transcend racial and socio-economic boundaries.

I heard this from Dale and off I went to explore the ideas that came to mind in writing:

“School is kind of famously overly structured in wanting to manage outcomes—so they give the project to the student and expect them to complete it and it’s kind of like a chemistry lesson—it’s sort of like in the lab—do all 9 steps and then everybody gets the same result—and you’ve kind of stripped the sense of play out of it, you’ve stripped the sense of exploration and discovery…  And what I think is happening—in the best cases of making, [people] are learning about themselves in doing this.  They are learning about working with other people.  In many ways I would say the process becomes a lot more important for them to engage in and learn then the product.  Especially in the school sense, you know the product could be conceived of as a throw away—as something just iterating over, but that process of iteration becomes clear—you know your first idea wasn’t your best one— you begin to improve it and begin to do things differently.”

I’ve been reflecting on the reasons I’ve felt so motivated, passionate and driven to bring a maker space to the community I began my journey in…  A lot of what I have stumbled upon in doing the readings, following the LCL media streams and talking to people out there these past few weeks has led me to some interesting self-reflection– mostly explored through writing at this point.

I’ve been thinking lots about the projects I’ve created over the years and why I created them and this has led to learning more about myself and sharing what I’m learning with others who are also reflecting and sharing and helping me carve out new language to speak about how I learn.

I’m amazed at how easy it has been to start conversations in the LCL Google+ space.

I feel that this community has come into my life at the perfect time.  I’m back in NYC and what I’m seeing in the places I grew up in has really been driving me to write and continue trying to build the Rockshelf project as a positive and hopeful action in the world.

I want to make something that helps balance some of what seems hopeless in the place that I grew up in.  I’m literally seeing the decay of “the projects” in the Bronx and the absence of supportive social structures for youth, recovering addicts and aging people living in severe poverty and in insanely poor health conditions.

Listening to Leah and Dale talk about Making & Constructionism…  I began to think about why I make things.

And what I can say is this…

I MAKE to find HOPE and PEACE in this world.

Without trying to at least re-mix or make something new—I think I would just get swept into the suffering that exhists in the communities I grew up in.   I would just get pulled into the muck like so many other people around me have.

Making things and talking to all of you about making things makes me feel connected to something really BIG and BEAUTIFUL and helps me to treat my Rockshelf idea as a life-long journey– a process to explore and learn from and  a platform to share what I’ve learned through public conversations– maybe someday even make real events in the world with people who could really use more positive learning opportunities around them.

I believe these acts of making or at least trying to make things with and for the world DO make me feel more human.  Making things helps me to reflect on the physical world in the same way that reading helps me to reflect on the world of ideas.  Connections are made very quickly and I’m left with the kind of productive and creative energy that gives way to making and project based learning.

With all of that said— I wanted to share this reflection sparked by listening to Joi & Mimi Ito speak about Cultural Identity and how it played a part in their individual learning processes.

Creating Identities

By

Rosa Alemán

I was recently reading “This is How You Lose Her” by Junot Diaz and I started thinking about the ways in which people who immigrate to this country create “American” identities and leave their native identities behind or try to burry it.

In particular (and mainly because of this course) I started thinking about my own experiences coming back to the US after living in Puerto Rico from age 2 to age 7.

I had a pretty well developed creative personality by the time I came to live in the Bronx.  I was use to the kind of creative culture my grandfather in PR was providing in his workshop space and the places he built to think and experiment.  I imitated him a lot and spent lots of time designing, building and flying kites in addition to creating a coffee delivery service in my grandpa’s work space to earn money for kite-making supplies and 25 cent baby chicks ( I tried to raise on my own).

I had cultural ties and bonds to life on the island– living with the sun and the sea and taking all the time needed to do good work daily.  I had a very playful connection with nature back then.  I liked taking care of the animals we kept around and planting things in my grandfather’s garden to watch them grow.  I learned a lot in this way.

My family has this thing about giving everyone nicknames at birth– a family name that creates kind of an inner-circle bond between siblings and cousins.  The name given to me was Bumbi (sounds like BOOMBee)–this is what I was called at home.

When I started kindergarten in Puerto Rico they began to call me Rosa (in Spanish)– which was strange because this public, school-house “Rosa” was not really me.  I was Bumbi to everyone who mattered to me up until this point.

When things turned upside down in my family and I ended up living with my grandparents in the South Bronx, I had a complete name and identity change one more time.

My grandmother’s name is Rosa and my mother’s name is Maria– so I was named Rosa Maria after the two of them and went through several names before I really understood anything about personal identity.

When I came to live with abuela Rosa in the Bronx– I became “Rosita” at home– the younger version of Doña Rosa the elder but also publically I became “Rosa” (in English)–the newly immigrated student coming from Puerto Rico speaking severely broken TV English, reading pictures to try to understand and making up words to communicate.

With all of this confusion, I forgot that I (Bumbi)– my original self, was actually pretty smart and able to learn easily and share knowledge naturally.

Learning just looked and felt VERY different in the US then it did with my grandfather in PR.

Living here, I adopted (and poorly at that) some foreign cultural identities and ideologies to help me understand things I once knew intuitively—sort of in the way that Joi Ito describes his mentor in the week 2 lecture as a scientist who made models of molecules and shook them around in physical space to explain how they work.  My Abuelo, who was my first real teacher, was kind of like this.  He used math in creative ways to design mobile kitchens that anyone with basic cooking knowledge could operate and he kept a diverse set of tools around to teach himself new knowledge to apply to his designs and pattents.  This is pretty much what learning looked and felt like to me when I was younger.

When I moved to the US learning stopped being about hands-on exploration and asking questions and became more about “getting an education” in certain areas of study, being told what you had to learn and when and given assignments from big bulky text-books masquerading as “fun” learning tools but which really were just not interesting in English or even in my quirky bi-lingual teacher’s Spanish translations.  (Though his rap songs about dinasours were AMAZING!– To this very day I still remember some of the lyrics.)

By the time I got to the 6^th grade I thought I was pretty dumb.  My grades kept reinforcing this idea in me and I became completely disengaged in the classroom.  I made art and small sculptures with paper clips instead of learning multiplication and that pretty much became a trend through my middle school and high school journey.

In 8^th grade we were introduced to computers in the classroom and I made friends with all of the kids that stayed after class playing the “Oregon Trail.”  I found this creative “rap” video about the computer game that took over my 8th grade class at the Arlington School in Lawrence Ma.

Learning started to really happen for me in 11^th Grade when I became part of Lawrence High School’s first ever “Computer Club”.  I started learning HTML using the internet connection at the library and later saved up some of my weekend work funds from Walgreens 1hr Photo to buy “WebTV”—where I made my very first html website and learned all about Talk City–the first chat site that allowed me to talk to people online and collaborate to make things like a funny underground high school newpaper called “Barely Syndicated”–BS– which a high school friend designed and invited me to write for and which was partially created and experienced online through communication from my home via WebTV.  Up until that point I had to use the internet at the library and it was frustrating at times when I would get really into something and was interupted midway through by the security guard kicking me out of the tech space– it totally cramped my style and broke up the flow of my learning.

WebTv gave me something functional to work with until I could save up for a personal computer.

Later I was introduced to video production by a graduate student who came to visit our high school to teach us how to produce a music video.  I fell in love with cameras—started taking photography classes and in college taught myself video editing and multimedia story telling.  I really haven’t stopped learning through these mediums since.

I’ve been documenting my personal education path since 2004 when I received an Adrian Tinsley summer grant to make a documentary film on urban education and the Upward Bound program as a pathway to higher education for inner city youth.  I used the grant to buy my first camera, computer and editing software and used the internet and Adobe Premiere pro (ver. 3) for Dummies to teach myself how to edit.   I haven’t stopped recording, archiving and reflecting on these pieces of media since.

All of these experiences with technology have helped me rekindle that love for learning through exploration and creative practices misplaced in the confusion of both positive and negative experiences learning in a new “world” through multiple identities.

I have begun to seriously consider writing or creating some sort of multimedia text to share and explore some ideas about having, losing, finding and creating identities (ideas of self) to adapt to rapid, unpredictable changes and learn, grow and create to connect in a society that sometimes makes me feel isolated by cultural differences.

I think in a way—the internet helps everyone create “identities” to explore—through the “social network” avatars or things like 2^nd life or even this learning community.  I am currently observing myself learning through my little google+ window from people all around the world who keep offering me more amazing things to think about and remix into my current studies.

I find the more I write and share, the more people out there send me ideas to consider and the more connections I make to new language that helps me think and write and share!

It’s a nice little learning spiral that has been awesome to explore so far.