Building Students' Literate Agency through Makerspace Activities in a Two-Year College

Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments Jan 2022

Building Students' Literate Agency through Makerspace Activities in a Two-Year College

Soyeon Lee

Abstract

This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.

Journal: Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments
Published: 2022-01-30
DOI: 10.31719/pjaw.v6i1.90
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Topics: basic writing two-year college writing across the curriculum multimodality translingualism multilingual writers affect and writing