#781: Dialogues with Objects: Learning through Relational Attunement in Making

By engaging participants in an expansive example of open-source sharing practice, this study explores how dialogical encounters with others’ designs can inform more just and contextually grounded pedagogies in making. Building on a long-term design-based research partnership among a museum, schools, and community members, the study invited learners to engage with artifacts that carried the histories, relationships, and aspirations of youth makers. Analysis of dialogical sequences—moments of response and counter-response between people and artifacts—identified three forms of dialogical responsiveness: attending to contextual detail, negotiating conflicting representations, and sustaining dialogue through uncertainty. Findings suggest that engaging with materially and historically rich artifacts cultivates empathy, critical interpretation, and ethical imagination, reframing making as a practice of listening and responding to the social worlds that materials embody.