Makerspaces: Aotearoa New Zealand: The Labs Goes Teen: Exploring our Social Identity

Monday, 20 April 2015

The Labs Goes Teen: Exploring our Social Identity

We’ve been documenting the evolution of The Labs at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh since 2012, when the project had just secured a pilot grant. It’s all grown up now, and looking to take over the entire library! Check out the whole series on The Labs @ CLP. Enjoy! ~Erinn

by Amalia Kalisz Tonsor, Labs Mentor

The latest chapters in The Labs @ CLP blog saga have marked a shift from an inward focus on building capacity to an outward goal of partnership and new connections. A platform has been firmly established through our sites and programs for youth engagement with digital media and creative technology. We now are experimenting with the most effective ways to use the resources we’ve assembled to best serve young people and our broader communities, as well as our colleagues across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh locations.

With some important benchmarks in the integration of digital learning across CLP, we are now reevaluating equally important facets of our growth with renewed energy toward the social questions of Connected Learning theory. How do our staff and our programs respond to the real lives of teens? What does our programming offer young people who are preoccupied with experiences of bullying, systemic racism, or domestic violence? How do we create programs that are inspired, as Mimi Ito writes, “in contrast to other educational reform approaches… by an aggressive social change agenda”? There are many ongoing conversations in The Labs about our goal to offer creative outlets for the meaningful intersections of digital and critical literacies, and this goal requires work on all levels of our program, including our approaches to structural, programmatic and collaborative development.

While emphasizing the importance of informal learning spaces and their role as a tool toward equity in digital literacy, Connected Learning pushes us to be more than providers of tools or services. The Labs program is inspired by the pedagogy that relationships between teens themselves and with staff in our spaces are the essential conduit for powerful learning, that these are built on mutual expression, trust and understanding. Over the last year, Labs staff have done our best to transition to a more consistent staffing model in our core sites with this in mind. Given the opportunity to be present with teen regulars at one site at a time, we have experienced a natural trend toward deeper engagement with teens in the day-to-day. The transactional interactions melt away, and the importance of teen identity and relevant programming grows louder. Connecting with young people’s passions and struggles, interests and stories requires that we as mentors and co-learners are willing to “go there” with them: to acknowledge and to be curious about their experiences in a world of ideas and issues beyond the library; to be learners as well as teachers, and to prioritize the messy, informal stuff of who we are just as much as the skills and projects we can show for ourselves. When I visited YOUmedia in Chicago through our staff-swap earlier this year, I was excited to hear this affirmed by many staff who described their work as “90% relationship building.”

Connecting with young people’s passions and struggles, interests and stories requires that we as mentors and co-learners are willing to “go there” with them: to acknowledge and to be curious about their experiences in a world of ideas and issues beyond the library; to be learners as well as teachers, and to prioritize the messy, informal stuff of who we are just as much as the skills and projects.

To grow these relationships on a structural level, we are considering what broader changes in our organization must be made to better support teens in critical learning, civic engagement and creative identity development. In daily informal situations of drop-in programming the staff’s ability to identify and respond to the challenging issues teens face requires that we can relate to those struggles, and that the diverse teen population we serve is reflected in library staff. This means we must look hard at the values reflected in our hiring processes and staffing models and prioritize mentorship, creative backgrounds and the relevant experiences of community building in the neighborhoods where The Labs programs are located.

On a practical level, building this kind of program also means valuing mentorship and collaboration across all teen staff, and encouraging cross-pollination and feedback between The Labs mentors and the awesome Teen Specialists at each CLP neighborhood location. It also means finding a balance between growth and sustainability in The Labs development, such that our small staff can truly root into relationships, ideas and projects in our embedded sites.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, it means opening up the scope of how we describe what we do. We are not just a maker lab! Wednesdays at CLP – East Liberty, we are a fun drop-in space where you might find a workshop in game design, or music production, or cosplay. But we are also partnering in exciting ways to extend The Labs beyond the Library as a production resource for youth projects and organizations focused on student activism, youth empowerment and leadership development. Our partnership over the last year with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on the Youth Initiative on Race & Identity has overflowed into new work with student organizers on related projects and campaigns, such as teen-facilitated workshops at the Summit Against Racism and an informal teen book club about racism in Pittsburgh through August Wilson’s plays. There are certainly more possibilities for teens to participate in co-creating a “social change agenda” through connected learning at CLP, but as an historic conduit of resources and information, the Library doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. What is truly within our means and vision is for The Labs to be a mic for teen voices; to amplify transformative projects in our communities by providing free access to materials, equipment and training in media production.

Want More?

Check out all the posts in our ongoing series on The Labs, starting in 2012, when the initiative was still in early planning!
Connect with The Labs @ CLP crew online, on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Amalia Kalisz Tonsor is an artist, educator and mentor in The Labs @ CLP, working with and learning alongside teens in creative media projects to grow in ourselves and connect in our communities.