Cultural Repertoires: Indigenous youth creating with place and story

Abstract

In this paper, we present an example of culturally-responsive making in the context of developing location-based community stories. Working with members of an Indigenous community in the Southwestern United States, we co-designed and implemented a two-week summer camp in which middle school youth used Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS), a narrative-based programming tool, to create virtual community tours for the purpose of sharing the information they learned about tribally owned locations with others. We developed case studies of two groups of students who incorporated culture into their community tours of a tribally-owned golf course complex and stadium complex to address the following question: How did small groups of youth conceptualize culture and how did they integrate it into their community tours? In the discussion, we address what can we learn from youths' design processes and completed products about designing culturally responsive learning experiences.