In this essay, Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan provide the context for research on the maker movement as they consider the emerging role of making in education. The authors describe the theoretical roots of the movement and draw connections to related research on formal and informal education. They present points of tension between making and formal education practices as they come into contact with one another, exploring whether the newness attributed to the maker movement is really all that new and reflecting on its potential pedagogical impacts on teaching and learning.

The Maker Movement in Education

The Maker Movement is a community of hobbyists, tinkerers, engineers, hackers, and artists who creatively design and build projects for both playful and useful ends. There is growing interest among educators in bringing making into K-12 education to enhance opportunities to engage in the practices of engineering, specifically, and STEM more broadly. This article describes three elements of the Maker Movement, and associated research needs, necessary to understand its promise for education: 1) digital tools, including rapid prototyping tools and low-cost microcontroller platforms, that characterize many making projects; 2) community infrastructure, including online resources and in-person spaces and events; and 3) the maker mindset, aesthetic principles, and habits of mind that are commonplace within the community. It further outlines how the practices of making align with research on beneficial learning environments.

/pdf/the-promise-of-the-maker-movement-for-education-t4385oa81s.pdf

The Promise of the Maker Movement for Education

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escude advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for working-class students and students of color. After reviewing various perspectives on making as educative practice, they present a framework that treats the following principles as starting points for equity-oriented research and design: critical analyses of educational injustice; historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. These principles are grounded in their own research and teaching in the Tinkering Afterschool...

Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity

The Maker Movement has taken the educational field by storm due to its perceived potential as a driver of creativity, excitement, and innovation (Honey & Kanter, 2013; Martinez & Stager, 2013). Making is promoted as advancing entrepreneurship, developing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, and supporting compelling inquiry-based learning experiences for young people. In this paper, we focus on making as an educative inquiry-based practice, and specifically tinkering as a branch of making that emphasizes creative, improvisational problem solving. STEM-rich tinkering activities are designed to support interdisciplinary investigations and creativity using a STEM-rich palette of tools, concepts, and phenomena. To date, the majority of research on making has focused on analysis of makerspaces, maker communities, and design and implementation of maker activities. In this paper, we describe a study that documented dimensions of learning in tinkering programs designed for museum visitors. The study, which was jointly negotiated among a team of researchers and practitioners, led to the development of a Tinkering Learning Dimensions Framework and a publicly available video library of tinkering exemplars, both of which are being actively used by tinkering practitioners in their direct service to the public and professional development work for the field. C

Learning Through STEM-Rich Tinkering: Findings From a Jointly Negotiated Research Project Taken Up in Practice

Background/Context Large gaps in achievement and interest in science and engineering (STEM) persist for youth growing up in poverty, and in particular for African American and Latino youth. Within the informal education community, the recently evolving “maker movement” has sparked interest for its potential role in breaking down longstanding barriers to learning and attainment in STEM, with advocates arguing for its “democratizing effects.” What remains unclear is how minoritized newcomers to a makerspace can access and engage in makerspaces in robust and equitably consequential ways. Purpose This paper describes how and why youth engage in making in an after-school, youth-focused, community-based makerspace program “Making 4 Change.” Four in-depth stories of engagement are shared. Using a mobilities of learning framework, we discuss how youth appropriated and repurposed the process of making, and unpack how the program attempted to value and negotiate youths’ ways of making from an equity-oriented perspective. Research Design Utilizing a two-year critical ethnography, involving 36 youth over two years in two making settings, we assumed roles of both program teachers and researchers. Data collected included field notes, session videos, weekly youth conversation groups, youth created artifacts, and interviews. Analysis was iterative, involving movement between a grounded approach to making sense of our data, and a mobilities of learning framework. Findings Three forms of engagement—critical, connected and collective—supported youths’ sustained and mutual engagement in the makerspace. Across the three, it was essential to balance purposeful playfulness with just-in-time STEM modules, invite a broadening range of identities youth could draw on and perform, and to more critically address the affordances and constraints inherent in a community makerspace. Conclusions From the insights gained, we suggest that framing youths’ experiences through the lens of equitably consequential learning and becoming challenges the field to consider how making—as a practice—is always linked to individual and social histories that unfold across space and time. Who can make and who cannot, whose knowledge matters and whose does not, are all a part of making itself. But such understandings are not without tensions, for the work that youth do, which can invoke nontraditional tools and practices towards nontraditional ends, can be fraught with complexities that youth and adults alike are unprepared to handle. “There are a lot of people who get frostbite in the winter when people are outside. Ours is way cheaper than a regular sweatshirt and way warmer. It will keep you warm and snug. It will have a heater in it, and lights for glamour and fashion.” Emily “Our idea could help change things. People make fun of you. Why are you wearing that? You are ugly. There are stains on your clothes… I was like I am going to give you something beautiful but with casual in it so that you don't expose yourself. Like a jacket that goes all of the way down.” Jennifer

The makerspace movement: Sites of possibilities for equitable opportunities to engage underrepresented youth in STEM

Through a comparative case study, Sheridan and colleagues explore how makerspaces may function as learning environments. Drawing on field observations, interviews, and analysis of artifacts, videos, and other documents, the authors describe features of three makerspaces and how participants learn and develop through complex design and making practices. They describe how the makerspaces help individuals identify problems, build models, learn and apply skills, revise ideas, and share new knowledge with others. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of their findings for this emergent field.

Lynette Jacobs-Priebe

Papers

Learning in the Making: A Comparative Case Study of Three Makerspaces.