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Iterative Design toward Equity: Youth Repertoires of Practice in a High School Maker Space
Abstract
Despite their potential, maker activities do not always support equitable engagement. The authors report on a design research study where they worked to support equitable engagement of youth repertoires of practice in a high school makerspace. Their orientation toward equity is grounded in the construct of repertoires of practice, and they focus on the question of what counts as making, and who has authority to decide. The authors consider two cases across two years and analyze moments of student resistance and agency as opportunities to expand the valued practices in the makerspace to more equitably support engagement. They report on the particular pedagogical strategies that emerged through the work, including exploration and helping, as well as their process of iterative analysis and design work that led to the embrace of these strategies.
... However, while makerspaces can potentially serve as inclusive environments that integrate knowledge from various STEM fields, there are ongoing concerns about their accessibility and the breadth of practices they support [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Some researchers argue that makerspaces tend to reflect dominant, techno-centric practices, often overlooking the interdisciplinary and more diverse activities that could engage a wider range of students. ...
... While students can learn and develop skills relevant to professional STEM practices in makerspaces, when students try to access these opportunities, they are also faced with the marginalizing cultural norms prevalent in STEM disciplines [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] and a "maker culture" that is unwelcoming to non-dominant students [9]; "those makerspaces that have reached beyond dominant populations are the exception, and not the norm . . . [and there is] little research documenting what is working, how or why" [9] (p. ...
... 22). This perspective "aligns with constructivist and sociocultural notions that new learning always takes place within the context of previously learned knowledge, skills, symbol systems, and systems of meaning" [10]; in other words, the space and culture in which learning activities occur impacts how those learning activities manifest. Broadly speaking, the literature supports the concept that learning environments which are responsive to students' diverse and culturally relevant skills, knowledge, and interests (i.e., repertoires of practice) have the potential to be both more effective and more equitable, in contexts including mathematics [44], science [45], and making [46,47]. ...
Makerspaces have emerged as a popular supplement to formal K-16 STEM education, offering students opportunities to engage in hands-on, creative activities that integrate multiple disciplines. However, despite their potential to foster interdisciplinary learning, these spaces often reflect the techno-centric norms prevalent in STEM. As a result, makerspaces tend to be dominated by white, male, middle-class participants and focused on tech-centric practices, which may limit both who participates in these spaces and what types of activities they do there. To address calls to broaden student participation in makerspaces, we surveyed and interviewed undergraduate STEM students to understand how students’ perceptions of making and the makerspace itself influence their modes of participation. Using the lens of repertoires of practice, we identify which practices students believe to “count” in a STEM makerspace, finding that many students hold narrow, discipline-specific beliefs about making, which, for some students, were preventive of them visiting the facility. However, we also discover that students’ beliefs of making practices were malleable, indicating potential for shifting these views towards more inclusive, interdisciplinary beliefs. We conclude with recommendations for educators and makerspace administrators to broaden students’ conceptualizations of making practices and supporting such practices in STEM makerspaces.
... Despite nearly a decade passing since this call for an explicit examination of equity in makerspaces, a recent systematic review found only 34 studies that even mention equity in makerspaces [43] and only 10 that use a critical perspective to do so. These articles recognize that that the modern making movement systematically excludes some students and practices [7,[40][41][42][44][45][46][47][48], but they are the only studies identifying these barriers for students. To date, little research has interrogated the factors that may motivate or deter students from participating in makerspace experiences. ...
... Rather, as STEM education researchers, we value equity and inclusivity in a field that is historically more exclusionary than many other academic disciplines. We narrow our focus so that we might make "locally meaningful" [44] (p. 36) and "equitably consequential" [40] (p. ...
... Research shows that makerspaces can be valuable places for strengthening engineering students' competencies, interest, and efficacies [13,15,21,28,29,38] but we also know that the modern making movement systematically excludes some students and practices [7,[40][41][42]44,47,48], and thus, not all students have access to these benefits. Despite acknowledging this, researchers have previously investigated equity and inclusion in makerspaces through studies that sample students who have already opted into making experiences. ...
Makerspaces have become an increasingly prevalent supplement to K-16 STEM education, and especially so in undergraduate engineering programs. However, they also fall prey to hegemonic, marginalizing norms common in STEM spaces and, ultimately, the modern making movement has remained a white, male, middle-class pursuit. Despite calls to broaden student participation in makerspaces due to the benefits of participation, there has been no examination of why some students choose not to visit these spaces. We surveyed (n = 151) and interviewed (n = 17) undergraduate STEM students to understand the barriers facing students before and during their initial participation. Using the lens of Social Boundary Spaces, we identified six barriers to successfully crossing the boundary into the makerspace, including: (1) not having enough time, (2) not feeling you have a purpose for visiting, and (3) not knowing how to obtain the proper certifications. Further, students find approaching makerspaces to be intimidating because of (4) the design of the space and (5) the perceived technical skillset of the students there. Notably, non-dominant students face a multitude of (6) barriers corresponding with their social identities. We conclude with recommendations relevant to educators, makerspace administrators, and engineering leadership for alleviating barriers and supporting students’ involvement in STEM makerspaces.
... We recognized that centering digital fabrication processes as the locus of critical and creative attention to some extent decentered the cultural contexts of digital fabrication as loci of critical attention. In the mods, we aimed for the curriculum to acknowledge that the often assumed-neutral cultural referents in both art and STEM education are neither neutral nor universal, but largely rooted in dominant disciplinary histories centered around White and European cultures and male cultural producers (Acuff et al., 2012;Martin et al., 2018). Ladson-Billings's (1992, 1995 work on culturallyresponsive pedagogy critically addresses the implicit cultural norms imposed upon students by curricula and aims for educators to affirm and respond to the varied cultural referents students bring into the place of learning. ...
... (Scott et al., 2015, p. 420-421). Some STEM education scholars have found maker contexts to be valuable settings for fostering CRC, and particularly for critically questioning what counts as making (Martin et al., 2018) and who counts as a maker (Fields et al., 2018). Martin et al. (2018) sought to expand what counts as making by affirming and incorporating the repertories of practice students brought into their maker space. ...
... Some STEM education scholars have found maker contexts to be valuable settings for fostering CRC, and particularly for critically questioning what counts as making (Martin et al., 2018) and who counts as a maker (Fields et al., 2018). Martin et al. (2018) sought to expand what counts as making by affirming and incorporating the repertories of practice students brought into their maker space. A young Black woman with interest and experience in fashion design, for example, was able to bring her repertory of practice into the makerspace and extend it with the tools and skills made available to create attire with programmable lighting (Martin et al., 2018). ...
... More recently, science and engineering educators have become more attuned to the cultural and linguistic background that students possess that can be viewed as instructional resources rather than impediments (Martin et al., 2018;Moll & González, 2004;Rosebery et al., 2010;Suárez, 2020;Tan et al., 2019). Across the years, it has been recognized that the knowledge students already have is instrumental in influencing their cognitive responses to new material. ...
... We acknowledge that we-and specifically, Lottero-Perdue in her prior work described earlier-missed resources the study participants drew upon during the fence design challenge in prior analyses (Lottero-Perdue & Tomayko, 2020a, 2020b. Martin et al. (2018) wisely identified this problem as a ''pedagogical failure'' in which we, generally speaking, ought to have recognized those ''moments in which students do not do what is expected can be evidence of resources that those students have and that may be of value within a redesign' ' (p. 45). ...
... The irony is that field trials are meant to assess whether designs are sustainable outside the pristine conditions of curriculum developers' minds. As Martin et al. (2018) cautioned, those ''failures'' hold value for those who can suspend quick deficit-based judgements about where students fell short. In encouraging educational researchers to respect outliers and uncertainty, Bullough (2012) claimed that quality school-based research ought to be ''characterized by humility in the face of the complexity of education, a complexity that is not yet fully or adequately appreciated and of profound respect for those whose work researchers seek to understand'' (p. ...
... Furthermore, creating a sense of comfort may be particularly important for adolescents (Lee et al., 2017). Nevertheless, despite their potential, makerspaces do not always facilitate equitable engagement, as they fail to provide differentiated resources according to the needs of varying adolescents (Martin et al., 2018). With particular regard to empowerment, Kinnula and Iivari (2019) have highlighted the necessity of fair conditions of entry and the importance of making activities widely accessible in scheduling and location. ...
... With regard to the location and setting, the necessity for facilitating equitable engagement was identified in accordance with previous research (Martin et al., 2018). In addition to previous research, the findings indicated that it is crucial to establish equitable access to such activities. ...
... En segundo lugar, los espacios en centros de educación superior que dirigen su uso al desarrollo de invenciones (Blikstein et al., 2017;Browder et al., 2019;Forest et al., 2014;Knibbe et al., 2015;Saorín et al., 2017;Wilczynski, 2015). El tercer grupo se centra en promover la inclusión de individuos con diversas capacidades (Barton et al., 2017;Brady et al., 2014;Martin et al., 2018;Norris, 2014). Por último, espacios abiertos al público como bibliotecas o espacios móviles focalizados en el reconocimiento de tecnologías (Craddock, 2015;Gierdowski & Reis, 2015;Moorefield-Lang, 2015;Nowlan, 2015). ...
... En tercer lugar están los documentos que se asocian a un profundo interés en las condiciones de inclusión de agentes con diversas capacidades. Aquí se establece que los makerspaces no se deberían limitar a un objetivo práctico relacionado con la formación de conceptos, sino que deben considerar implicarse en aspectos emocionales y psicosociales de los asistentes (Brady et al., 2014;Martin et al., 2018). Los estudios muestran que las actividades proyectuales que se desarrollan proveen oportunidades para el autorreconocimiento, el desarrollo de competencias y de habilidades blandas (Barton et al., 2017;Norris, 2014). ...
Lo que denomino arqueodiseño consolida en parte una práctica para la recuperación de técnicas y tecnologías ancestrales bajo la perspectiva del Diseño del Sur, corresponde a una propuesta original para avanzar con sostenimiento, para caminar mirando el futuro – pasado (42, 43), aprendiendo de los pueblos Abya-yala en las sociedades contemporáneas. ¿Hacia dónde caminar? una alternativa es acercarse al tejido
de los diseños vernáculos, otrora descalificados, hilos del fieltro de culturas originarias, armónicas con la pachamama. Es plausible esta aproximación futurada y con ello andar-
desandar, tejer-fieltrar otras posibilidades de prácticas re-directivas en/del/para el diseño. Entender la cadena de defuturación que ha conllevado ideales implantados por la colonización, en especial del modelo neoliberal desigual, tienen un particular significado para desmantelarlos y optar por esta alternativa. Saberes y prácticas ancestrales se pueden reivindicar con el diseño del Sur mediante la praxis del arqueodiseño. En ese sentido, una propuesta en ciernes de la industriosidad del diseño del Sur, propende por Allwiya kamay como chakana para un allin kausay1, que pueden contribuir al campo del diseño y en complemento, a la construcción de otro devenir social, simbólico y técnico con sostenimiento. ¿Cómo opera y en qué consiste la apuesta por el arqueodiseño como un promisorio campo del Diseño del Sur, en especial, diseño desde la filosofía andina? Es parte de la aproximación del presente trabajo.
... Studies show that creating informal activity environments offers engineering students a fun way to engage with all aspects of engineering. Reviewing the literature on extracurricular activities, one often encounters the terms 'game' and 'entertainment' (Martin et al., 2018). Educational games have long been centered on fostering the development of children (Piaget, 1945;Vygotsky, 1978). ...
The number of players in the world exceeding 2 billion has greatly increased the popularity of digital video games, as well as providing a great economic income. In this article, the educational characteristics of digital games were examined, and they were evaluated within the philosophy of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), which is a new approach. The STEM philosophy is described as an educational approach in which various fields of science are brought together and that allows educational practices to be applied in a more entertaining way. In this article, a brief introduction of game distribution platforms such as STEAM, EPIC games, and GOG were made, and the characteristics of these platforms and their appropriateness for STEM were examined. The STEAM digital game distribution platform that has the same name with the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) philosophy, which was later expanded by adding the concept of Art to the STEM concept, has about 30,000 games and 25 million daily active players. As a result of investigations conducted on this platform, games with educational content were determined and recommendations about the use of these games in education were made. Regarding the determined games, some information such as producing companies, the release date of the game, age limit information, sale price, number of comments, and percentage of positive comments were also presented.
... For example, Tomko et al.'s study (2021) identified key aspects of women's pathways into university makerspaces, which also identified important themes of community and relationships [18]. We will also explore how our makerspace definitions can intersect with existing work on defining more forms of participation in making to include more social practices (e.g., [9], [19]). ...
... Makerspaces (laboratory/shop facilities with equipment and supplies for students to fabricate physical or digital products) enhance student engagement via active learning through creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication [74][75][76][77]. Most makerspaces are informal. ...
... Iteration, defined as successive rounds of design towards optimization within the prototyping process, is an important epistemologically-grounded maker practice (Martin, 2018). However, little attention has been paid to the intentional incorporation of community epistemologies towards new forms of legitimate STEM-rich maker knowledge/practice through iteration. ...
... Informal makerspaces offer opportunities for participants to engage in engineering practices and knowledge in creative ways [38], and they have been found to be widely effective [39]. Not only do makerspaces offer opportunities for young people to engage in engineering practices and knowledge in creative ways [38], but makerspaces also offer great potential in serving broader goals of education [36,[40][41][42], such as the critical goal of augmenting first-year engineering retention. Some institutions utilize makerspaces as a means to offer training and/or teaching new skills and/or knowledge [43]. ...
... It encourages participants to innovate and solve complex problems through iteration. The iteration process creates more equitable learning methods and participation for learners with different needs and interests [15], [16]. ...
... Early childhood (EC) is a vital period for establishing and developing gender roles and STEM identities (Campbell et al., 2020). EC instructors play a significant role in this process since their stereotyped rhetoric and unintended favouritism toward boys in STEM participation may prevent girls from participating in STEM activities and developing STEM-related abilities (Hand et al., 2017;Martin et al., 2018;Morgan et al., 2016). According to the ecological model of Bronfenbrenner, educators' gender identities and gender-biased teaching techniques may directly influence children's gender-isolated behaviours, interacting in the microsystem of children (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). ...
Various gender biases have been demonstrated in early childhood educators (ECEs) with unintentional preferential treatment provided to boys during STEM-related play activities. These biases could impact young girls’ identity formation, resulting in continued underrepresentation of women in STEM domains in future. In China, however, little research has been conducted on how ECEs perceive gender equity of STEM fields. Consequently, this study aims to close this gap by investigating the educators’ perceptions on and responses to gender differences in STEM play, drawing on the cultural-historical theory and incorporating feminist perspectives. Adopting a multiple-case study approach, this study collected perceptions and experiences of six Chinese in-service ECEs regarding STEM play and gender-related issues. The participants recognized and valued children’s equal involvement in STEM play, but failed to preclude ingrained gender preconceptions, leading to contradictory beliefs and performs. Meanwhile, Chinese ECEs considered prejudices from the external environment and peer influence the main obstacles to gender inclusion. Inclusive practices and emphasises are thus discussed relating to ECEs’ multiple roles in supporting gender-neutral environments for STEM play. These preliminary findings shed light on attaining gender equity in STEM within the context of a feminist discourse, and provide Chinese educators, leaders and even the educational system with pioneering information. However, further research on ECEs’ underlying stereotypes and teaching practices is still warranted to examine future professional development possibilities, support ECEs in reducing obstacles to girls’ STEM engagement, and ultimately create a welcoming and inclusive STEM play space for girls.
... Maker-centered learning is a form of innovation education (Korhonen & Lavonen, 2017) that enables participation in technology-enhanced co-invention processes in STEAM contexts (Honey & Kanter, 2013;Martin, 2015;Petrich et al., 2013;Seitamaa-Hakkarainen & Hakkarainen, 2017). Investigations have indicated that maker projects are equally motivating for girls and boys (Buchholz et al., 2014;Kafai et al., 2014;Martin et al., 2018;Riikonen et al., 2020a), as well as those who have faced challenges in adapting to traditional educational settings or who come from nondominant backgrounds (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016;Sormunen et al., 2020). Furthermore, making and tinkering activities produce symmetrical relations and relational equity among participants in intergenerational learning environments (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016;Schwartz et al., 2015). ...
This investigation involved carrying out interventions that engaged teams of lower-secondary (13–14-year-old) Finnish students in using traditional and digital fabrication technologies to make materially embodied collaborative inventions. By relying on video data and ethnographic observations of the student teams' collaborative invention processes, the investigation focused on investigating 1) how the teams generated and developed their design ideas in their materially anchored making process and 2) what kinds of maker practices they relied on during open-ended invention projects. The study focused on a microanalytic study of three teams of students, and we utilized and developed visual data analysis methods. Our findings reveal the complex nature of the student teams' materially contextualized ideation and the knowledge creation activities that took place within their projects. The findings suggest that open-ended, materially mediated co-invention projects offer ample opportunities for creative cultural participation and practice-based knowledge creation in schools.
... Makerspaces are places where students can engage in these hands-on making experiences (Hatch, 2013). Pedagogical approaches used in making and makerspaces can support students' agency; inquiry with materials; approaches to design and problem solving; design self-efficacy; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy practices; and engagement in different and more equitable forms of STEM learning (Andrews et al., 2021;Bevan et al., 2015;Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2018;Martin et al., 2018;Puckett & Gravel, 2020;Sheridan et al., 2014; Page 2 of 22 Gravel and Puckett International Journal of STEM Education (2023) 10:7 2019). Schools are increasingly implementing making as a STEM reform effort (Martin, 2015), yet there are still relatively few studies that explore how schools adopt maker education in K-12 settings (e.g., Hansen et al., 2019;Kim & Sinatra, 2018;Rouse & Gillespie Rouse, 2022;Stornaiuolo & Nichols, 2018;Vongkulluksn et al., 2018). ...
Background
We investigate the factors that shape teachers’ implementation of a school STEM reform—the creation of a high-school makerspace. Educational reformers have increasing interest in making and makerspaces in schools. Prior research shows how factors shape reform at the classroom, school (organizational), and institutional levels, as well as across levels. However, most research on teachers tends to focus on classroom-level effects, which may not capture the full complexity of how they navigate multilevel reforms. We consider teachers’ decision-making from an ecological perspective to investigate what shapes their implementation efforts, using observational and interview data collected over 2 years in a large comprehensive high school.
Results
We find teachers’ efforts are shaped by four “distances”—or spaces teachers traversed, physically and conceptually—related to skillsets and distributed expertise, physical space, disciplinary learning, and structural factors. The distances operate as a constellation of factors—independently identifiable, co-operatively manifesting—to shape implementation. We position teacher deliberations and decision-making as portals into the forms of organizational and institutional supports offered in multilevel reforms.
Conclusions
The paper contributes insights into makerspace implementation in schools, adding to the emerging literature on how making can transform STEM learning experiences for students. We conclude that teachers’ decision-making around multilevel implementations can inform our understanding of how makerspaces are implemented and their impact on students’ experiences, as well as how seeing teachers as multilevel actors can offer new insights into reform dynamics writ large. We offer implications for makerspaces in schools, as well as methodological and theoretical considerations for how organizations and institutions can better support teachers as agents of STEM reform.
... Choice in activities provides learners with a degree of agency, similar to informal makerspaces, and promotes access to all learners by offering multiple paths to learning (Martinez and Stager, 2013). Studies show that well designed makerspaces in formal educational environments allow students to experience learning in new or different ways and cater to a range of different learning styles Sheffield et al., 2017) and contribute to an equitable learning space (Martin et al., 2018). A STEM makerspace is therefore another viable strategy to add to the repertoire of hands-on, concrete, inquiry based activities already being implemented in formal science and mathematics classes. ...
STEM is recognized as a sustainable strategy in education to promote global economic development. However, the goals for STEM education encompass broader outcomes such as STEM literacy. This article positions STEM Education as an integrated field and argues for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. The integrated STEM approach does present challenges for implementation such as practitioners having insufficient knowledge of STEM disciplines. Robotics and Makerspace are suggested as viable strategies for integrated STEM education. Studies indicate these two approaches provide a relevant context in informal and K-12 educational settings to show connections between STEM subjects and promote learning of STEM content.
... "Making," an umbrella term combining the long-standing culture of do-it-yourself artistic exploration and craftsmanship with newly accessible digital technologies (Martin, 2015), has the potential to support youth's sense of agency and affords opportunities for them to positively influence their communities (Tan & Calebrese Barton, 2018). Some have criticized the maker movement for being dominated by the images, practices, and work of middle-class White men and for perpetuating narrow narratives of who belongs in the STEM community (Chachra, 2015;Martin et al., 2018;Norris, 2014). In response, many researchers and practitioners have worked to broaden access to making for girls and youth from under-represented communities (Ryoo & Calabrese Barton, 2018). ...
This ethnographic study examines a girls-only summer maker program designed to empower girls who learned to use power tools to build their own designs. Drawing from theories of identity construction within figured worlds, the article shows how girls in the program authored themselves into roles that run counter to patriarchal notions of making and femininity. Illustrative examples show how girls played with gender presentation, produced gender-bending artifacts that became identity resources, and learned to collectively navigate traditionally male spaces. The article concludes with implications for the design of equitable maker learning environments.
... Since 2013, there has been a marked increase in research on the learning potential for STEM in making (Rouse & Rouse, 2022). The Maker Movement in education focused attention on activity that fosters STEM-rich learning when students are engaged in making things (Blikstein, 2013;Calabrese-Barton & Tan, 2018;Halverson & Sheridan, 2014;Martin et al., 2018;Peppler et al., 2016). The multimodal and transdisciplinary nature of making (Tucker-Raymond & Gravel, 2019) offers an expansive context for STEM learning. ...
Background
Computational approaches in STEM foster creative extrapolations of ideas that extend the bounds of human perception, processing, and sense-making. Inviting teachers to explore computational approaches in STEM presents opportunities to examine shifting relationships to inquiry that support transdisciplinary learning in their classrooms. Similarly, play has long been acknowledged as activity that supports learners in taking risks, exploring the boundaries and configurations of existing structures, and imagining new possibilities. Yet, play is often overlooked as a crucial element of STEM learning, particularly for adolescents and adults. In this paper, we explore computational play as an activity that supports teachers’ transdisciplinary STEM learning. We build from an expansive notion of computational activity that involves jointly co-constructing and co-exploring rule-based systems in conversation with materials, collaborators, and communities to work towards jointly defined goals. We situate computation within STEM-rich making as a playful context for engaging in authentic, creative inquiry. Our research asks What are the characteristics of play and computation within computational play? And, in what ways does computational play contribute to teachers’ transdisciplinary learning?
Results
Teachers from grades 3–12 participated in a professional learning program that centered playful explorations of materials and tools using computational approaches: making objects based on rules that produce emergent behaviors and iterating on those rules to observe the effects on how the materials behaved. Using a case study and descriptions of the characteristics of computational play, our results show how familiarity of materials and the context of play encouraged teachers to engage in transdisciplinary inquiry, to ask questions about how materials behave, and to renegotiate their own relationships to disciplinary learning as they reflected on their work.
Conclusions
We argue computational play is a space of wonderment where iterative conversations with materials create opportunities for learners to author forms of transdisciplinary learning. Our results show how teachers and students can learn together in computational play, and we conclude this work can contribute to ongoing efforts in the design of professional and transdisciplinary learning environments focused on the intersections of materiality, play, and computation.
... An early analytic finding concerned the preponderance and importance of learners' participation in making practices by engaging in creative work through hands-on and improvisatory and collaborative discovery with a variety of multimodal media (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014;Martinez & Stager, 2013). Recent research, particularly in STEM education, explores the possibilities presented by making activities and makerspaces for more equitable and cosmopolitan learning environments (e.g., Martin, Dixon, & Betser, 2018;Ryoo & Calabrese Barton;Tan & Calabrese Barton, 2018). Few studies, however, explore the possibilities presented by making or makerspaces for culturally-sustaining literacies and languages learning. ...
... Maker activities designed with reference to fair, inclusive and non-competitive frameworks may have the potential to encourage even those who may not identify with STEM subjects in mainstream curriculum delivery. Martin et al. (2018), for example, take the students' practice repertoires or modalities of involvement in cultural activities as their main construct. This view would suggest a socio-cultural and constructivist perspective in which learning takes place in the context of prior knowledge of skills, symbolic systems and meanings. ...
The “Maker” movement is a cultural as well as educational phenomenon that has the potential to offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. The research reported in this paper, however, suggests that the simple provision of “Maker Spaces” for such activity is simplistic and not sufficient to realise this potential. The research involved a mixed methods study of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 26) in an Australian school located in a socio-economically disadvantaged outer-metropolitan region. The cohort undertook a range of Maker activities at a new “creativity centre” built at the school. Results indicate that the activities had positive impact on student attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) overall, but that the impact was highly specific across attitudinal constructs. A strong ranging effect was also evident, suggesting that the impact of the experience was highly dependent on students’ initial attitudes. Reflecting on these results, the paper also offers a reference framework that may help keep equity in mind when designing different kinds of Maker experience.
... William Wulf, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, decried the relatively homogenous, "pale male" model of engineering (Steele, 2001), and other scholars have called for "making whiteness and maleness visible" and making diversity "the expected condition" in engineering education (Pawley, 2017). We invite studies that closely examine the cultural practices, preferences, and structural conditions of engineering communities, using, e.g., a "repertoires of practice" (e.g., Martin et al., 2018) or "lines of practice" (e.g., Azevedo, 2011) theoretical framework and taking an equity-oriented approach to understanding makerspaces (Vossoughi et al., 2016). Such efforts may further point the way toward makerspaces that celebrate the assets of all students (not just those from dominant groups), reimagine what kinds of work is venerated and on whose terms design and making practices are valued, and ultimately, recast who is seen as a designer, maker, and engineer. ...
The process of becoming an engineer involves having access to the people and practices of an engineering community. By working with others, students see what engineering practice is and who they might become. Campus makerspace communities have emerged as important sites of engineering-related self-efficacy, belonging, and identity development; however, the social processes that underpin such development are not well understood and do not appear to be equally available to all. This study examines the exchange of help between student newcomers and others in a campus makerspace community. The analysis is grounded in sociocultural lenses of learning stemming from Rogoff (2003) and Lave and Wenger (1991). The mixed-methods design uses a network analysis (longitudinal survey data) of reported help received among a sub-community of 85 makerspace members to inform an inductive analysis of how six students described asking for help (longitudinal interview data). Network analysis revealed that students who entered the makerspace with many (>6) prior relationships reported receiving significantly more help than their less connected (and disproportionately first-generation, low-income) peers. This gap in help received widened with time and may be self-reinforcing. Interviews analysis found that students asked for help by moving between three emergent frames—knowledge-seeking, affirmation-seeking, and collaboration-seeking—and that these frames were tied to students’ self-efficacy and belonging. This article shows that access to help is not equally distributed in a makerspace. It has implications for how engineering learning environments are designed to facilitate more equitable access to social learning resources and engineering pathways.
... 17). Studies that have followed youth through makerspaces to inform iterative makerspace design have also contributed to expanded understandings of what maker practices are possible and could be more explicitly acknowledged, supported, and centralized (Martin et al., 2018). For these reasons, we employ Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a tool to combat the anti-black nature of making, while providing a counter-narrative of Black joy. ...
What does it mean to express Black joy and loving blackness through STEM-rich making? What does it mean for Black youth in community-based, youth-focused makerspaces to express Black joy and loving blackness? We look at how Black youth alongside their facilitators co-create spaces of Black joy through making. These makerspaces are located at two local Boys and Girls Clubs in the US Midwest and the Southeast. Makerspaces are informal sites where youth are encouraged to work collaboratively while building digital and physical artifacts. As two Black female STEM educators working with Black youth we frame our work in critical race theory. Specifically we draw on the tenets of whiteness as property and counter-narratives. Using critical ethnographic methods, we explore the ways in which Black youth produce counter-narratives that disrupt whiteness as property through STEM-rich making. Data sources include fieldnotes; artifacts, such as youth work; interviews; and video recordings. The first vignette highlights how two Black girls navigate choosing and creating characters using Scratch. The second vignette focuses on a brother and sister duo who center their making on family and their shared maker identity. We then discuss the freedoms afforded to youth with flexible co-designed curriculum with facilitators and how we foster open spaces. We address this special issue’s driving question by asking, How do we, as STEM facilitators, counter anti-blackness in/through STEM by fostering space for Black joy with youth in making?
... We recognize the problematic hierarchy inherent in the exposure activities which prioritized particular making activities over others, privileging access for white, middle class males and perpetuating a one dimensional notion of what it means to be a maker (e.g. Kafai et al., 2014;Martin, et al., 2018;Vossoughi, et al., 2016). While this study explored one event that favored electronics, the larger EMMET project included more diverse making activities throughout the life of the program. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand how learners describe their experiences with short-term, introductory maker experiences and to test a method for assessing learners’ experiences authentic to short-term learning.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected written responses from participants at a two-day event, STEM Center Learning Days. Through an analysis of 707 unique instances of learner responses to participation in drop-in maker activities, they examined how participants describe their short-term learning experiences.
Findings
The authors found that although some activities appear to onlookers to create passive experiences for learners, these seemingly passive moments have a significant impact on learners. In addition, some learners described themselves as working in tandem with tools to make something work and other learners viewed the tools as working autonomously. They found that the assessment method allowed them to gain an understanding of how learners describe their experiences offering important implications for understanding short-term learning events.
Originality/value
The findings provide researchers studying short-term learning in its natural setting a new method to understand how learners make sense of their individual experience. Further, designers of short-term learning experiences may gain insights into their unique activities and indications of where additional guidance and scaffolds will improve small learning moments.
... While the promise of the Maker Movement is to open up the opportunity for a more diverse population of students to participate in STEM activities, women and people of Color continue to be marginalized in making, perpetuating a onedimensional notion of what it means to be a maker (e.g., Kafai et al., 2014;Martin et al., 2018;Ryoo & Barton, 2018;Vossoughi et al., 2016). While the face of making has shifted as scholars introduce new forms of making including e-textiles (Kafai et al., 2014), toy and game design (Holbert, 2016;McBeath et al., 2017), and traditional, cultural forms of making such as weaving (Vossoughi et al., 2016), making is often placed in a hierarchy wherein traditional STEM and computing activities are seen as more valuable than others, exacerbating equity issues historically associated with STEM+C (Buechley, 2016). ...
... Making has drawn much attention from educators and researchers alike since emerging studies acknowledge that making has the potential to support inquiry-driven, learner-centered, interdisciplinary learning (Moriwaki et al., 2012;Schlegel et al., 2019;Keune & Peppler, 2019). Our analysis of the literature surfaced three ideas: 1) making is often related to materials and tools (Martin, 2015;Kafai et al., 2014;; 2) making is a process of designing, tinkering, and modeling, through which people solve problems, develop multiliteracies, and create tangible or intangible products (Bevan et al., 2017;Martin et al., 2018;Vossoughi et al., 2013;Hira & Hynes, 2016;Tucker-Raymond & Gravel, 2019), and 3) making involves multiple relationships, including collaboration, mentorship, dialogue, and expertise exchange (Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014;Hagerman et al, 2019;Hynes & Hynes, 2018;Sheridan et al., 2014). Additional research has highlighted that making is a multifaceted way of learning that emphasizes creative, improvisational problem solving (Bevan, et al., 2015) and situates makerspaces as productive places to engage in potentially uncomfortable conversations (Tan & Calabrese Barton, 2018). ...
Making as a term has gained attention in the educational field. It signals many different meanings to many different groups, yet is not clearly defined. This project’s researchers refer to making as a term that bears social and cultural impact but with a broader more sociocultural association than definitions that center making in STEM learning. Using the theoretical lenses of critical relationality and embodiment, our research team position curriculum as a set of locally situated activities that are culturally, linguistically, socially, and politically influenced. We argue that curriculum emerges from embodied making experiences in specific interactions with learners and their communities. This study examines multiple ways of learning within and across seven community-based organizations who are engaged directly or indirectly in making activities that embedded literacy, STEM, peace, and the arts. Using online ethnography, the research team adopted a multiple realities perspective that positions curriculum as dynamic, flexible, and evolving based on the needs of a community, its ecosystems, and the wider environment. The research team explored making and curricula through a qualitative analysis of interviews with community organizers and learners. The findings provide thick descriptions of making activities which reconceptualize making and curriculum as living and responsive to community needs. Implications of this study expand and problematize the field’s understanding of making, curriculum, and learning environments.
... School is a place where students mental health-related issues are diagnosed (Kessler et al., 2005) and treated through parents collaboration, teachers, headteachers, and community members active support which is associated with students educational opportunities (Colombo, 2006). The parental involvement with diverse socioeconomic status Plevyak, 2003) and their socio-cultural dynamic is the key factor that affect on students mental health (Martin et al., 2018). ...
Purpose of the Study: The purpose of the current research was to determine the effect of equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being on promoting student's mental health. The researchers eagerly explored everyday situations happening in male elementary schools of district Lahore, focusing on pandemic situations with zeal and zest. Methodology: The researchers structured causal-comparative research focusing positivist paradigm on a sample of randomly selected 980 respondents enrolled in male elementary schools of district Lahore of Punjab-Pakistan. The authors collected the data after administering Scott (2006) Educational Equity and school reforms Scale, Prince-Embury (2013) Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, Ryff’s (1989) Psychological Well-beings Scale, and Lukat et al. (2016) Positive Mental Health Scale. After ensuring ethical considerations, the researchers run regression technique, one way; ANOVA and Pearson Product Moment Correlation (r) on the participants data. Main findings: The findings revealed that educational equity effect 81%, resilience 87.10%, and psychological well-being affect 66.60% in promoting students mental health. Educational equity, resilience, and psychological well-being have the same effect on 6th, 7th, and 8th grades students in promoting their mental health. Further a significant strong association between educational equity and mental health (r = .900**, n = 985, p < .05), resilience and mental health (r = .946**, n = 984, p < .05) and psychological well-beings and students mental health (r = .815**, n = 985, p < .05). Applications of this study: The results of the research will be applicable for headteachers, teachers, and parents to get aware of the worth of equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being that play an enormous role in promoting students mental health. The debatable constructs of the current research will provide capable stakeholders to know the entire magnitude of mental health that drastically instigate and enhance student's vigour, attentiveness, dependability, intellectual ability, and optimism. Novelty/originality of this study: It is evident from the literature that less work is conducted inequitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being that play a massive role in promoting students mental health. In the case of Pakistan, the situation is very alarming and the meager because none of the researchers took initiative to framed research on these burning constructs. However, this research will opened new dimensions for the future researchers that will raise their intentions to explore the effect of primary, secondary, higher secondary, and tertiary level students equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being on their mental health.
... Over the last decade, Tinkering has gained international recognition as a powerful, motivational and engaging approach for developing STEM learning and building 21 st Century Skills (Anzivino and Wilkinson 2012; Bevan et al. 2015;Petrich, Wilkinson, and Bevan 2013;Ryoo and Barton 2018;Vossoughi et al. 2013;Vossoughi and Bevan 2014;Wilkinson and Petrich 2014). Highly personalised, learner-centred and freed from the constraints of formal scientific language, Tinkering is increasingly being adopted by a wide-range of informal STEM learning organisations 1 to help engage diverse audiences across a range of education settings -both formal and informal (Barajas-López and Bang 2018; Barton, Tan, and Greenberg 2016;Fields et al. 2018; Lee and Worsley 2019;Martin, Dixon, and Betser 2018). ...
Over the last decade, Tinkering has gained international recognition as a powerful, motivational and engaging approach for developing STEM learning and building 21st Century Skills. At European level, it has been the focus of three Erasmus+ -funded projects which brought together practitioners from across the STEM education sector.
The first two projects focused on young people and families, while the third project specifically targets adult learners with a focus on inclusive and equitable ‘Adult Learning and Education’. It reaches out to adults who may not currently identify with STEM learning, who have relatively low levels of confidence with STEM and who are less likely to choose to participate in science- related social, cultural or training opportunities.
This publication details the methodological framework for the third project on adult learners and comprises a critical review of the relationship between Tinkering, adult engagement with STEM, development of 21st Century skills, lifelong learning and social inclusion.
http://www.museoscienza.it/tinkering-eu3/download/tinkering-addressing-the-adults-framework.pdf
This chapter uses an equity lens to examine learning in makerspaces with a focus on the role that literacies and technologies play in these spaces. The authors examine ways that makerspaces bridge formal and informal learning and serve as important contexts for community building and mentorship. This stance on makerspaces centers equity and inclusion as driving forces that must become central to the design of these innovative learning spaces. The piece includes a review of the literature aimed at building a deeper understanding of the principles that underlie literacy practices, collaboration, and learning engagement. The authors offer principles and recommendations for designing, organizing, expanding, and sustaining learning-through-making opportunities for all learners.
Common artists, crafters, artisans, and DIY (do-it-yourself) makers need spaces to explore their inspirations and creativity and to advance their making skills. They need a place to set up their equipment. They need a physical location to store their supplies and reference materials and incomplete works. They may need a virtual space to create, too, to harness the power of computation. They need a market for their goods. They need a community, in the real and the virtual, for emotional support, ideas, and camaraderie. There is little known in the way of how these at-home making spaces may be set up for the best outcomes, broadest ranges of possibilities, and ultimate creativity, but it is thought that some insights from professional maker spaces and the academic literature may inform on this challenge. This exploratory work offers some initial ideas from the literature review and applied action research in an auto-ethnographic case.
There has been a large push over the last decade to drive STEM interest during the formative years of adolescence through computer science related initiatives such as computational makerspaces that allow students to design and build personally connected artifacts. However, these programs are not often designed to be culturally relevant to the students they aim to motivate. This paper presents a case study of one student who participated in the first iteration of a summer makerspace camp for Black youth ages 12-16. The design principles guiding this STEM camp adapted pedagogies for computational making for belonging and becoming (Escude et al., 2020) with a goal of fostering culturally relevant STEM identity development. Using the phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST; Wigfield et al., 2007) as a theoretical and analytical lens, we present three phenomenological episodes representing an overview of the student’s arc from Days 1-8 of the 12- day camp. Over time we see the student extend the boundaries and objects of their coping strategies, moving from just utilizing the resources in front of him to thinking more flexibly about where help can be found. We argue that this student is an ideal case for refining design principles and providing insights into supporting belonging and becoming in the context of computational making.
The museum field currently and historically has centered on the needs of White, educated, privileged, and affluent people, and changing that reality requires new ways of conceptualizing, organizing, and assessing our core practices. Practice‐based models—including specific stories of how museums and communities work together—are still needed in our field, both as guidance for structuring future projects and as inspiration for what is possible. We share a case study of a 10‐year makerspace design process and identify key features for sustaining community–museum relationships over an extended period of work, which we call community‐informed design. We describe five key aspects that promote sustainability in terms of community–museum relationships and the creation of high‐quality experiences: naming values and assumptions, emergent planning, flexible and distributed staffing, organization‐to‐organization relationships, and layered data.
In this manuscript, we describe a coding club we created and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were purposeful in creating the club to: (a) focus on design and problem solving as the basis for learning computer coding and (b) include elements to improve the engagement of girls. We ran multiple iterations of a Girls Design with Code Club that involved over 100 girls from 22 countries. We reviewed various sources of data to evaluate how our design and implementation of the coding clubs impacted the girls who participated. In an effort to share our learnings with other researchers and program providers, we share evidence of choices that we believe had positive impacts and others that we can improve in future iterations.
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how youth’s engineering identity has changed in the process of productive struggle in Making activities in the Midwestern U.S in a summer program. The researchers conducted focus-group interviews, and also administered an Engineering Identity survey as well as the Draw an Engineer Test to the students at two time points (pre/post). Additionally, the researchers observed the level of youths’ interaction by video-recording each session, conducted debriefing sessions, and examined youth artifacts. The findings revealed two themes. The first theme is that the boys and girls who were engaged in the process of productive struggle showed changes in their identity with engineering. The second theme is that the boys and girls who weren’t fully engaged in the process of productive struggle (i.e., demonstrated unproductive struggle) showed little or no change in their identity with engineering. This study showed that regardless of whether the students went through the process of productive struggle or not, they developed neutral or positive attitudes toward engineering. This finding also added to the existing literature on that productive struggle in Making activities has potential to enhance these youth’ learning of engineering knowledge and engineering tools.
Background
Makerspaces have increased in popularity recently and hold many promises for STEM education. However, they may also fall prey to hegemonic, marginalizing norms and ultimately narrow the definition of making and exclude who counts as makers. Explicitly focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion when examining makerspaces is of utmost urgency and importance for STEM education researchers; one way to foreground equity is through theoretical frameworks that critically examine the structure, environment, participation, and pedagogy within STEM makerspaces.
Purpose
Thus, we investigate the following: (1) what are the theoretical frameworks applied and (2) how, if at all, is equity addressed in research exploring STEM makerspaces? In synthesizing prior work, we aim to provide recommendations for using theoretical frameworks in supporting inclusivity in STEM makerspaces.
Scope/Method
We conducted a systematic review of articles that examine a STEM makerspace, apply a theoretical framework, and consider diversity, equity, and/or inclusion. We identified n = 34 relevant studies and coded each for basic characteristics.
Results
We highlight 10 exemplars that use critical theoretical frameworks as a way to foreground equity in the research design. The authors of these exemplar studies are reflective throughout their research processes and position themselves as learning in tandem with their participants. Further, they take active steps to transfer agency and power to their participants, and in doing so, lift forms of knowing not widely valued in STEM spaces.
Conclusions
We conclude with recommendations for educators, makerspace staff, and researchers relevant to expanding dominant conceptions of what counts as making and thereby, supporting inclusivity in STEM makerspaces.
Recent advances in technology have accelerated the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, not only the manufacturing sector but also all sectors of society are expected to undergo changes in the future. In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is going to be more important for learners to improve their creativity than to acquire knowledge. So scholars are exploring new ways of teaching to cultivate suitable talent for the future society. Among these various methods of education, Maker Education at Micro Manufacturing Space is recognized as the optimal method for the AI era. This study, in light of this, analyzed the operation of Micro Manufacturing Space, which is located in a university, and further suggested the direction of development of Micro Manufacturing Space in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The results of this study are as follows. At the university’s Micro Manufacturing Space, students can be trained to think innovatively and improve creativity. In addition, this space can also be used as an open learning and meeting space for university students to visit freely. Moreover, the place can be built for the purpose of a start-up space. Therefore, future Micro Manufacturing Space in universities, as it were, will definitely prove to be a multifunctional space providing support to foster and improve creativity of the main force of the future of society. The findings can be used as theoretical basic data in the creation of a Micro Manufacturing Space for design thingking.
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how equity-oriented pedagogy infused with Making activities promoted five non-dominant middle school youths’ attitudes toward science in an after-school program in the Midwestern United States. The researchers conducted pre- and post-interviews with five students from non-dominant backgrounds, and also administered attitudinal surveys to the five students at two time points (pre/post). Additionally, the researchers observed the level of student participation by video recording each after-school session, observed the level of student anxiety by using skin temperature biofeedback, and examined student artifacts. The findings revealed three themes. This study found that equity-oriented pedagogy infused with Making activities showed great potential in sustaining non-dominant youths’ positive attitudes toward science.
Freedom is necessary for creativity. School leaders must have freedom from external control to be successful, but also must explore and expand their leadership potential. Creative leadership includes personal characteristics associated with creativity, but also involves facilitating the creativity of teachers and students. Schools must be allowed creative freedom if they are to reach their potential as centers of learning. Teachers and students need freedom of choice, freedom to imagine, freedom of inquiry, freedom to take risks, freedom of association, and freedom of self-expression. Curriculum that promotes freedom and creativity allows students to choose from diverse content and learn in diverse contexts, experience in-depth learning, develop skills they can use outside the classroom, and receive learning support from multiple sources. Teaching for freedom and creativity involves developing strong relationships with students, modeling creativity, engaging students in dialogue, being a guide-on-the-side, and fostering student collaboration. Freedom and creativity in assessment include alternatives for reaching learning goals; feedback from others; and self-assessment through structures like the reflective folder, portfolio, digital learning map, student-produced visuals, and student-created rubric. Families should be encouraged to support children as autonomous learners. Creative strategies to engage families include creative projects, parents/guardians as co-learners and co-teachers, and menu-based engagement. Freedom and creativity are needed to connect school and community learning, and school-community partnerships can assist that connection.
This chapter uses an equity lens to examine learning in makerspaces with a focus on the role that literacies and technologies play in these spaces. The authors examine ways that makerspaces bridge formal and informal learning and serve as important contexts for community building and mentorship. This stance on makerspaces centers equity and inclusion as driving forces that must become central to the design of these innovative learning spaces. The piece includes a review of the literature aimed at building a deeper understanding of the principles that underlie literacy practices, collaboration, and learning engagement. The authors offer principles and recommendations for designing, organizing, expanding, and sustaining learning-through-making opportunities for all learners.
The burgeoning popularity attained by the maker culture has enlivened the library environment regarding its approach to engaging patrons. Despite the extensive makerspace literature, little is written on making from the hobbyist perspective, particularly beyond youth. To tackle inquiry about the potential relation between libraries and hobbyism as a form of leisure, we recruited 25 arts and crafts hobbyists and conducted a qualitative project. Combining diary studies and individual interviews, we aim to explore the perception making hobbyists have of libraries. Grounded upon the empirical data, we found that hobbyist participants mostly considered libraries a resource provider whose informative provision could go beyond traditional forms of print and digital collections. We also identified the value of librarianship to bolster inclusion in a making context to involve people of all ages, demonstrating the underlying need to reconsider the current support of libraries to the making activity. This is especially true in unexpected situations, like when physical library access is discouraged during the pandemic.KeywordsMakingArts and craftsLibraryHobby
In this systematic review, we examined research on school-based makerspaces, emergent but increasingly popular sites for instruction and learning in preK through 12 settings. Through electronic database, hand, and ancestral searches, we identified 22 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals and dissertations that reported preK-12 students’ learning outcomes after participating in school-based makerspace interventions. We found that school-based makerspace research is increasing and published internationally, with a majority of studies (n = 13) conducted with middle and high school participants. Outcomes and interventions varied considerably across studies, demonstrating the disparate nature of school-based makerspace research. In the studies we reviewed, the goals, objectives, and scope of makerspace interventions did not conflict with those of schools, but best practices for makerspace teachers were lacking and equity-oriented approaches to designing makerspace activities and materials were still emerging. Implications of our findings for planning makerspace instruction and future research on makerspace interventions are discussed.
FabLabs and makerspaces offer unprecedented opportunities for digital empowerment, especially for children and adolescents. However, reviews on making with regard to empowerment are lacking. We identified n = 180 publications on digital making with children and adolescents and, after categorizing them regarding formal criteria and formality of settings, identified the main topics in publications on digital making in non-formal settings. Results revealed a great demand for empirical studies with experimental designs. Three main topics emerged: domain-specific determinants of participation, equity, and skills and competencies. Implications for further research and limitations as well as implications for digital empowerment processes are discussed.
Making and the ”maker movement” have been growing in popularity as a progressive educational approach. However, researchers have leveled critiques of making as being exclusionary towards people with disabilities. In this paper, we present results from the iterative design, implementation and evaluation of Inclusive Making, an undergraduate and graduate level course on accessibility in making. Students in the course went through a ten-week process, culminating in the design of accessibility solutions to include communities with disabilities in making. Using qualitative methods, we chronicle students’ design products, processes and learning in relation to the course iterations. Results show that when students worked with external stakeholders, their designs and learning improved. Moreover, designing for neurodiverse children required students to grapple with existing literature about making in education. We discuss insights from our work regarding the need for more accessibility research in making, and the potential of university students to promote accessible making by engaging with external stakeholders.
An examination of young people's everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use.
Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces.
Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.
In this manuscript, we examine the stories of youth makers from non-dominant communities, and argue that through their making practice they are involved not only in "artifact making" (the prototypically viewed outcome of makerspace work), but also in space-making within and across the worlds of STEM, makerspaces, and community. Such space-making fosters new forms of interaction among scales of activity, and supports the movement of ideas, resources, relationships and people in support of youths' emerging practices and how they might be recognized for them. As the youth engage in their making practice, they inscribe new meanings for what it means to make within the worlds they inhabit, refiguring participation in these worlds and the possibilities for becoming within them.
In this paper, we attempt to bring equity to the fore within discussions of learning in tinkering and making. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over the last year and a half, we argue that equity lies in the how of teaching and learning: specific ways of designing making environments, using pedagogical language, integrating students' cultural and intellectual histories, and expanding the meaning and purposes of STEM learning. We build this argument by sharing some of the design principles, interactions and practices that constitute the Afterschool Tinkering Program – a partnership between the SF Exploratorium and San Francisco Boys and Girls Clubs. We focus on defining and elucidating a situated understanding of equity in order to: 1) identify the specific tensions and possibilities we see within discourses of tinkering/making for educational practice 2) develop new ways of perceiving and supporting children's learning in making environments where equity is a central organizing principle 3) present a preliminary analysis of the kinds of learning we have documented in the After-School Tinkering Program, and consider what these examples offer for helping re-imagine education as it could be (Boal, 1995).
In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé 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 Program as well as in the insights and questions raised by critical voices both inside and outside the maker movement.
Participatory design-based research continues to expand and challenge the “researcher” and “researched” paradigm by incorporating teachers, administrators, community members, and youth throughout the research process. Yet, greater clarity is needed about the racial and political dimensions of these collaborative research projects. In this article, we focus on how race and power mediate relationships between researchers and communities in ways that significantly shape the process of research. Using the notion of politicized trust as a conceptual lens, we reflect on two distinct participatory design projects to explore how political and racial solidarity was established, contested, and negotiated throughout the course of the design process. Ultimately, this article argues that making visible how race and power mediate relationships in design research is critical for engaging in ethical and sociopolitically conscious relationships with community partners and developing theoretical and practical knowledge about the repertoires of practice, tasks, and sociocultural competencies demanded of university researchers.
The recent emergence of digital creativity that extends beyond the screen and into the physical world, engendering new forms of creative production, has transformed educational and professional fields. From AT&T's bio-tracking clothing to Lady Gaga's smart-hydraulic "Living Dress," e-textiles infuse fashion with electronics to produce unique and aesthetic effects using new conductive materials, including thread, yarn, paint, and fabrics woven from copper, silver, or other highly conductive fibers. This chapter outlines both the educational and societal implications of these new materials in the field of e-textile creation like consumer-ready e-textile toolkits, high-profile displays of imaginative e-textile creations and an increasing body of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) literature on e-textile design that have emerged in the past decade. It also looks at ways in which e-textiles are transforming new solutions to old and persistent problems of underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields and providing a vehicle in which to rethink teaching and learning in these disciplines. © 2016, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice” and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.
Electronic textiles are a part of the increasingly popular maker movement that champions existing do-it-yourself activities. As making activities broaden from Maker Faires and fabrication spaces in children's museums, science centers, and community organizations to school classrooms, they provide new opportunities for learning while challenging many current conventions of schooling. In this article, authors Yasmin Kafai, Deborah Fields, and Kristin Searle consider one disruptive area of making: electronic textiles. The authors examine high school students' experiences making e-textile designs across three workshops that took place over the course of a school year and discuss individual students' experiences making e-textiles in the context of broader findings regarding themes of transparency, aesthetics, and gender They also examine the role of e-textiles as both an opportunity for and challenge in, breaking down traditional barriers to computing.
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 authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute of Education Sciences, they call for the formulation of collaborative research standards that must require researchers to provide evidence that they have engaged in a process to surface and negotiate the focus of their joint work, and to document the ways participation in this process was structured to include district and school leaders, teachers, parents, community stakeholders, and, wherever possible, children and youth. They close by describing how this new criterion—“relevance to practice”—can ensure the longevity and efficacy of educational research.
The Maker movement promotes hands-on making, including crafts, robotics, and computing. The movement’s potential to transform education rests in our ability to address notable gender disparities, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. E-textiles—the first female-dominated computing community—provide inspiration for overcoming long-standing cultural divides in classrooms. Analysis of children’s use of e-textiles reveals that materials like needles, fabric, and conductive thread rupture traditional gender scripts around electronics and implicitly gives girls hands-on access and leadership roles. This reconceptualization of cultural divides as
sets of tacitly accepted practices rooted in gendered histories has implications for reconceptualizing traditionally male-dominated areas of schooling.
Design research is strongly associated with the learning sciences community, and in the 2 decades since its conception it has become broadly accepted. Yet within and without the learning sciences there remains confusion about how to do design research, with most scholarship on the approach describing what it is rather than how to do it. This article describes a technique for mapping conjectures through a learning environment design, distinguishing conjectures about how the design should function from theoretical conjectures that explain how that function produces intended outcomes.
The authors argue that design-based research, which blends empirical
educational research with the theory-driven design of learning
environments, is an important methodology for understanding how,
when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Designbased
researchers’ innovations embody specific theoretical claims
about teaching and learning, and help us understand the relationships
among educational theory, designed artifact, and practice. Design is
central in efforts to foster learning, create usable knowledge, and advance
theories of learning and teaching in complex settings. Designbased
research also may contribute to the growth of human capacity
for subsequent educational reform.
In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative "site." Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.
This article addresses a challenge faced by those who study cultural variation in approaches to learning: how to characterize regularities of individuals’ approaches according to their cultural background. We argue against the common approach of assuming that regularities are static, and that general traits of individuals are attributable categorically to ethnic group membership. We suggest that a cultural-historical approach can be used to help move beyond this assumption by focusing researchers’ and practitioners’ attention on variations in individuals’ and groups’ histories of engagement in cultural practices because the variations reside not as traits of individuals or collections of individuals, but as proclivities of people with certain histories of engagement with specific cultural activities. Thus, individuals’ and groups’ experience in activities—not their traits—becomes the focus. Also, we note that cultural-historical work needs to devote more attention to researching regularities in the variations among cultural communities in order to bring these ideas to fruition.
This article describes subtle resistance of students in upper middle-class high school classrooms who work toward achieving school success. This dialectical attitude of resistance and compliance is interpreted as being influenced by a teaching approach that attributes superiority to academic school knowledge and that promotes a recitation style of classroom interaction. It is argued that such an approach does not take into account adolescents' language and interests even though it goes along with upper middle-class academic aspirations.
This article examines how people learn by actively observing and "listening-in" on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observation and listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings (such as early language learning in the family) in communities that routinely segregate children from the full range of adult activities. However, in the past century some industrial societies have relied on a specialized form of instruction that seems to accompany segregation of children from adult settings, in which adults "transmit" information to children. We contrast these two traditions of organizing learning in terms of their participation structure, the roles of more- and less-experienced people, distinctions in motivation and purpose, sources of learning (observation in ongoing activity versus lessons), forms of communication, and the role of assessment.
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
Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation, is a new vehicle for including Mexican Americans into U.S. history classrooms. This study explores how a class of primarily Mexican American students, who because of their heritage might develop a personal connection to the case, made sense of Mendez. The findings suggest that Mendez is subsumed under the larger Black Civil Rights narrative and stripped of its unique aspects. The inclusion of Mexican Americans into the history narrative is contingent on their story being analogous to the Black experience. Consequently, students learn an oversimplified understanding of Mexican American discrimination and race/ethnicity.
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.
THIS STUDY investigated the implications of signifying, a form of social discourse in the African-American community, as a scaffold for teaching skills in literary interpretation. This investigation is related to the larger question of the efficacy of culturally sensitive instruction. The major premise on which the hypotheses of this study are based is the proposal that African American adolescents who are skilled in signifying use certain strategies to process signifying dialogue. These strategies are comparable to those that expert readers use in order to construct inferences about figurative passages in narrative texts. In order to apply this premise, an instructional unit was designed aimed at helping students bring to a conscious level the strategies it is presumed they use tacitly in social discourse. This approach is offered as a model of cognitive apprenticing based on cultural foundations. Analyses are presented of how the cultural practice links to heuristic strategies that experts use in a specific domain, as well as how instructors modeled, coached, and scaffolded students.
This article presents an agentic theory of human development, adaptation, and change. The evolutionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people's lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems.
© 2006 Association for Psychological Science.
This article analyzes the quality of intellectual reasoning of a class of high school students with standardized reading scores in the bottom quartile. The analysis situates the intellectual work on 1 day of instruction in terms of the history of the activity system out of which the dispositions of these students were constructed over time. The analysis deconstructs the historical dimensions of the cultural practices these students learned to acquire. Using a framework of cultural-historical activity theory, the article examines the knowledge base of the teacher, in this case the researcher, to coach and scaffold a radically different intellectual culture among students who were underachieving. The framework for the curricular design implemented and the strategies modeled explicitly aligned the cultural funds of knowledge of the African American students with the cultural practices of the subject matter, in this case, response to literature.
This article examines the educational research and policy surrounding "science for all" as it relates to children living and learning in poverty. The author illustrates that science for all students, although egalitarian in theory, has proven difficult to actualize among all students in all schools, especially those living and learning in poverty, in part because it positions students and science in a relationship where only students can change. It is argued that if "science for all" is to be a reality, then the reflexive nature of the relationship between science and all must be articulated.
This article describes elements of an approach to research and development called design-based implementation research. The approach represents an expansion of design research, which typically focuses on classrooms, to include development and testing of innovations that foster alignment and coordination of supports for improving teaching and learning. As in policy research, implementation is a key focus of theoretical development and analysis. What distinguishes this approach from both traditional design research and policy research is the presence of four key elements: (a) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; (b) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; (c) a concern with developing theory related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and (d) a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems.
A critical challenge in urban science education is determining how to provide empowering science learning experiences for all students. In an effort to address the achievement gap in science education, I have focused on the concept of ownership, specifically when and how students gain ownership in science learning. This paper presents a teacher action research study with data collected over three school years and six 7th grade science classes in an urban middle school in New York City. The study addresses two questions: (1) Is it possible to foster student ownership in the context of school science and does this support students’ engagement in science class? and (2) What are the classroom structures (physical, curricular, and pedagogical) that support students’ cultivation of ownership? Two vignettes are used to illustrate how students fostered student ownership in the school science setting, how this supported students’ engagement in science class, and how specific “ownership structures” supported students’ cultivation of ownership. These vignettes make evident that it is possible to foster spaces of student ownership within the context of the formal science classroom that lead to increased and deeper student engagement. In addition, there are multiple dimensions to what students “own” within the context of the science classroom.
In the past ten years radical educators have developed several theories around the notions of reproduction and resistance. In this article, Henry Giroux critically analyzes the major positions of these theories, finding them inadequate as a foundation for a critical science of schooling. He concludes by outlining the directions for a new theory of resistance and schooling which contains an understanding of how power, resistance, and human agency can become central elements in the struggle for social justice in schools and in society.
Thinking about making. Keynote delivered to FabLearn
- L Buechley
Buechley, L. (2013). Thinking about making. Keynote delivered to FabLearn 2013 Conference. Stanford, CA.
Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media
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Why I am not a maker
- D Chachra
Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators
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Dougherty, D. (2013). The maker mindset. In M. Honey & D. E. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 7-16). New York: Routledge.
Enabling innovations in education and systematizing their impact
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impact. In A. E. Kelly, R. Lesh, & J. Y. Baek (Eds.), Handbook of design research methods in education: Innovations in
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Travels in Troy with Freire: Technology as an agent for emancipation. Social justice education for teachers: Paulo Freire and the possible dream
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Talking science: Language, learning, and values
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