Lakind, A., & Halverson, E. (2018, April). Maker Program Variation: how programmatic design impacts constructionist learning, American Education Research Association, N.Y.C. (original) (raw)
Related papers
AERA 2016 Division C: Learning and Instruction (Section 3a: Learning Environments) Chair: Angela Calabrese Barton, Michigan State University Discussant: Kris Gutiérrez, University of California, Berkeley Abstract Despite the growing interest and attention paid to maker spaces for transforming how we understand ‘what counts’ as learning, as a learner, and as learning environment, there is little evidence that the maker movement has been broadly successful in involving a diverse audience. Few studies have focused on the equity-oriented dimensions of makerspaces and making. Our session seeks to reverse this trend. Across the 8 papers/posters, we present examples of studies focused on designing/enacting inclusive makerspaces for young people in formal or informal education settings, provide innovative theoretical and methodological tools for better understanding learning and development of young people who participate in making, and discuss how researchers and practitioners can collaborate to build makerspaces for all.
Reference and User Services Quarterly, 2019
The maker movement has found a home in public libraries. Field leaders including public libraries in Chicago, Chatta-nooga, Houston, Louisville, and Toronto have built robust makerspaces, developed maker programming for a diverse range of patrons, connected community experts with library users for the purpose of sharing information, and fostered communities of practice. 1 Characterized by open exploration, intrinsic interest, and creative ideation, the maker movement can be broadly defined as participation in the creative production of physical and digital artifacts in people's day-today lives. The maker movement employs a do-it-yourself orientation toward a range of disciplines, including robotics, woodworking, textiles, and electronics. But the maker ethos also includes a do-it-with-others approach, valuing collaboration, distributed expertise , and open workspaces. To many in the library profession, the values ingrained in the maker movement seem to be shared with the aims and goals of public libraries. However, critiques of the maker movement raise questions about current iterations of makerspaces across settings. This article highlights critiques and responses regarding the "democratic" nature of the maker movement, and in particular, the article analyzes ways librarians involved in a prominent public library maker program discursively construct making and maker programming in relation to the maker movement more generally.
In this article, we introduce the case of a makerspace program that provides a systemwide approach to making rather than a singular face-to-face or online place. This makerspace, called Bubbler, extends across a public library system of a mid-sized Midwestern city (Madison, Wisconsin) and incorporates nine neighborhood libraries and numerous community spaces. Since 2011, Bubbler has come to be known as a physical place, a series of programs, and an approach to working with patrons of all ages. We aim to chronicle the development of Bubbler, describe its core features, provide examples of these features in action, and discuss victories and challenges associated with designing a systemwide makerspace in public libraries. We conclude by asserting that the library now includes making as a core service based on a model of diversity and inclusion that aligns with the basic tenets of public libraries.
Democratizing the Maker Movement: A Case Study of One Public Library System’s Makerspace Program
Reference & User Services Quarterly, 2019
The maker movement has found a home in public libraries. Field leaders including public libraries in Chicago, Chattanooga, Houston, Louisville, and Toronto have built robust makerspaces, developed maker programming for a diverse range of patrons, connected community experts with library users for the purpose of sharing information, and fostered communities of practice. Characterized by open exploration, intrinsic interest, and creative ideation, the maker movement can be broadly defined as participation in the creative production of physical and digital artifacts in people’s day-to-day lives. The maker movement employs a do-it-yourself orientation toward a range of disciplines, including robotics, woodworking, textiles, and electronics. But the maker ethos also includes a do-it-with-others approach, valuing collaboration, distributed expertise, and open workspaces. To many in the library profession, the values ingrained in the maker movement seem to be shared with the aims and goals...
Journal for Learning through the Arts, 2017
In recent years, the concept “making” has been claimed by “The Maker Movement.” While making offers great potential (and resources) for art integration in informal learning sites, maker discourse is often intertwined with a neoliberal mission. For example, movement leaders glorify Steve Jobs and hark on the myth that hobbies can be transformed into wealth-generating endeavors. As art-making activities in informal learning setting across the U.S. intersect with the maker movement, prominent learning theories that contradict this neoliberal philosophy may be repurposed or disremembered. Constructionist learning will require a continued commitment to a notion of learning by doing, “rather than acquiring theoretical precepts for subsequent application” (Ingold, 2013, p. 52). This article examines research from a multi-year empirical study of a Public Library system’s arts-based maker program. It provides a rich example of how discourse around making fits into learning in arts education, showcasing instances when neoliberal ideology collides with contradictory theories regarding how and why people learn and make. First, this paper will introduce the reader to the maker movement in education and review literature on making, learning, and neoliberalism. Secondly, I analyze the discourse of public librarians who implement the arts programming and suggest possible implications for how learning through the arts can be undermined by neoliberalism. And, finally, this article proposes a view of making that does align with arts education that embraces dispositional, constructionist, and post-modern/new materialist approaches to learning: Making as the reciprocal relationship between maker, material, tools, skill, and intention.
International journal of designs for learning, 2017
In this article, we introduce the case of a makerspace program that provides a systemwide approach to making rather than a singular face-to-face or online place. This makerspace, called Bubbler, extends across a public library system of a mid-sized Midwestern city (Madison, Wisconsin) and incorporates nine neighborhood libraries and numerous community spaces. Since 2011, Bubbler has come to be known as a physical place, a series of programs, and an approach to working with patrons of all ages. We aim to chronicle the development of Bubbler, describe its core features, provide examples of these features in action, and discuss victories and challenges associated with designing a systemwide makerspace in public libraries. We conclude by asserting that the library now includes making as a core service based on a model of diversity and inclusion that aligns with the basic tenets of public libraries.
In this study, we explore the STEM literacy practices of experienced makers as they engage in a variety of making activities. Literacies are the ways in which individuals navigate, use, and make sense of representational texts within various contexts and for a variety of purposes. Descriptions of experienced makers' practices using representational texts can inform the ways in which educators support young people's literacy practices in formal and informal learning spaces. We interviewed 14 experienced makers—those proficient with certain tools, materials, and techniques for design and fabrication—about their making processes, and we focus our analysis on a particular literacy practice we call identifying, organizing, and integrating (IOI) information. We argue that this practice is enacted within particular making activities—e.g., ideating, tinkering—in certain ways with the purpose of sourcing and navigating information related to the maker's chosen problem. Our ultimate goal is to demonstrate how STEM literacy practices, like IOI, can serve as bridges between the meaningful work of maker-based learning in informal spaces and the curricular demands in schools, so we may broaden participation and, thus, increase equity in maker-based learning experiences.
Innovation from Below: Infrastructure, Design, and Equity in Literacy Classroom Makerspaces
Research in the Teaching of English, 2020
A growing research base has examined the possibilities of makerspaces in education; however, there has been little exploration of how such innovations are folded into formal school structures, like English language arts classrooms. This article addresses this by following the formation of literacy classroom makerspaces in the Innovation School-an urban public high school organized around principles of making. Using ethnographic research conducted over the school's first two years, it traces how teachers integrated making into literacy instruction and how the contours of classrooms were reshaped by making's ideals and assumptions. In particular, it focuses on resulting shifts in the infrastructures of literacy education-the often-invisible mechanisms that support, sustain or undermine reading and writing in classrooms. Findings show how the interoperability of these literacy infrastructures with those of making produced frictions that had uneven consequences for students, at times reproducing forms of deficitization that making education is often purported to ameliorate. These outcomes elucidate possibilities and challenges for educational equity when literacy learning is refashioned in the image of innovations like making. They are also instructive for understanding how educators might imagine "innovation" otherwise, wresting it from experts and entrepreneurs and relocating it in the lived dynamics of classrooms.
FabLearn , 2015
Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended targets of such investments learn to develop new maker related educational programs. Using the framework of Expansive Learning [9], focusing on organizational learning processes resulting in new and unfolding forms of activity, this paper begins to fill this gap through a case study of a community organization serving non-dominant youth that engaged in an 18-month learning process to create its own maker-space. Utilizing interviews, field observations and diverse forms of documentation, findings show that (1) regional organizational networks play infrastructural roles involving inspiration, validation and orientation in expansive learning through providing access to expertise and partnerships, (2) organizational learning around maker education involves dimensions of not only pedagogy and technology but also of social geography, institutional logics and organizational design processes, and (3) processes of object transformation within expansive learning around maker education by organizations rooted in non-dominant communities can act as sites of critique and, potentially, contributions maker education culture in ways that address issues of broadening participation and increasing equity.