Conclusion
The practice of making has been around for at least as long as Homo sapiens have had opposable thumbs. Throughout history, making has been a means not only of surviving but also of communicating, celebrating, reflecting, problem solving, influencing ideas, and inventing new ways of engaging with the world. Many programs in schools reflect this multiplicity of purposes: from vocational schools that prepare the next generation of carpenters and auto mechanics to arts education programs that encourage self-expression through the visual, performing, literary, and media arts, the K–12 curriculum has been endorsing hands-on and project-based learning for decades. And though many arts, design, and shop class programming in schools continue to be under fiscal fire, the resurgence in making that surfaced in the early 2000s brought with it renewed emphasis on the importance of making in schools.
Though it shares many similarities with traditional arts education and shop classes, with its focus on collaboration, sharing and learning from others, experimentation and iterative processes, and interdisciplinary thinking, the making at the heart of this resurgence is also unique in many ways.
In this book we have positioned the resurgence of making as an opportunity to help young people activate their sense of agency, to view the world through a systems lens, and to develop a sense of maker empowerment. As we learned from the many maker educators and thought leaders we have spoken with, maker-centered learning is not merely about acquiring making and discipline-specific knowledge and skills, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about building character, gaining creative confidence, being resourceful and courageous. Through our work on the Agency by Design project we have come to understand that the biggest aspiration for maker-centered learning is to develop a sensitivity to the designed dimensions of one's world, to see that world as malleable, and ultimately to believe in one's capacity to shape that world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking.
Our work with the many educators we interviewed, paired with our Oakland-based teacher partners, has helped us come to understand that the maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity are central to developing a sensitivity to design, and are therefore elemental to our framework for maker-centered learning (Figure C.1). Once again, thanks to our collaboration with our Oakland-based teacher partners, we have further developed the suite of thinking routines presented in Chapter Five to serves as tools to support the maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity.
FIGURE C.1: A young student fully engages all three maker capacities while working through a carpentry project.
Throughout this book we have argued that maker empowerment—agency seen through the lens of making—is dispositional in nature. We believe that this disposition—and the maker capacities that support it—can be fostered through the variety of learning that takes place both in and outside of the maker-centered classroom. To that end, we have explored the moves educators make to equip their students with a sensitivity to design and foster maker empowerment. Maker-centered learning, according to the passionate educators we encountered, looks different from many traditional classrooms: knowledge, information, and expertise moves between student, teacher, community members, and materials; teaching and learning is distributed; the physical and social environment is flexible and follows learning goals; and ideas flow and build on each other, generated by the collective. To engender maker-empowered young people, educators make intentional decisions across these fronts, including how to organize and display materials, how to encourage students to figure out problems for themselves, how to help them feel comfortable with the unknown, and being willing to experiment and explore.
Although we have learned a great deal throughout our exploration of maker-centered learning, which we have endeavored to share throughout this book, we have also arrived at this stage in our work with several questions and puzzles concerning various aspects of the maker-centered landscape.
Maker-Centered Learning: Challenges and Puzzles
Undoubtedly there is great enthusiasm around incorporating maker-centered practices into education. Yet despite the recognized benefits and outcomes associated with this work, there are very real hurdles to overcome. We share the excitement that has bubbled to the surface around the potential of maker-centered learning, but we are also deeply aware of some hard questions it raises—questions about the ethics of maker-centered practice, issues of access and equity, and the sustainability of maker-centered programs and curricula.
Considering the Ethical Dimensions of Maker-Centered Learning
When considering the intersections of ethics and maker-centered learning, one has to look no further than the 3-D printer to see potential dilemmas. In 2013, a Texas-based nonprofit organization named Defense Distributed announced they would be making downloadable and publicly accessible design files for a single-shot handgun. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. State Department responded by demanding the company—whose advertised charge is to “collaboratively produce, publish, and distribute to the public without charge information and knowledge related to the digital manufacture of arms”—remove the files from their site.1 Defense Distributed complied, but not before the plans were downloaded over 100,000 times. Just a year before, the Wiki Weapon Project, launched by Defense Distributed, released plans for the working parts of an AR-15 assault rifle. These designs were subsequently hosted on Thingiverse, the popular website that serves the maker community. Thingiverse soon pulled the rifle design from its website but, once again, not before hundreds of successful downloads.
At the time, Wired magazine posted an article raising concerns for the implications of 3-D printed weapons. Highlighting a post from the firearm resource website AR15.com, the article described a thread that reveals a widespread “culture of gun fandom.” As the Wired article noted:
Of course, 3-D printing gun parts does not necessarily result in destructive behavior. Further, it certainly is not the only industry whose fans are also participants in the maker community. Interest in lock picking, making homemade gun powder and improvised explosive devices, affixing cameras to quadcopters, developing invasive bots and malware, and using 3-D bioprinters to make human organs all surface moral, ethical, and legal implications of maker-centered culture.
In all of these examples, the potential for harm is significant. Maker educators, like any educators, sometimes have hard choices to make. We believe that if the goal of teaching and learning in the maker-centered classroom is to empower young people to shape their worlds, then educators in those spaces have a responsibility to discuss the ethics of making with their students, and to actively intervene if either the product, process, or intention of making runs a serious risk of bringing harm into the world.3
Just as we have encouraged educators to slow down their practice and to encourage students to look closely and explore the complexity of the designed dimensions of their worlds, so too do we encourage maker educators to find the opportunities to discuss with their students issues of ethics, emphasizing that like any tool, the empowerment and sense of I can do that which students gain from their experiences in the maker-centered classroom must be used as a tool for good.
Equity and Access in the Maker-Centered Classroom
Another set of questions regarding maker-centered learning concerns equity: Who is maker-centered learning for? Who does it spotlight and favor? Who are the champions and beneficiaries? Indeed, not long after the flurry of enthusiasm surrounding maker-centered learning began, important concerns focused on issues of access and equity soon rose to the surface. “Are the maker movement and maker-centered learning really as warm and welcoming as they claim to be?” some began to ask—and rightly so.
Nestled among the glow of LED lights and the buzz of drones, a small display within the education tent at the 2015 Bay Area Maker Faire directly addressed this question. Within this display, a small placard reported statistics from the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire: 97% of attendees held college degrees, the median household income of attendees was a comfortable $130,000, and 70% of attendees were male. The provocative placard may not have cited its sources, but a quick, unscientific scan of the crowd at the 2015 Bay Area Maker Faire seemed to confirm the 2014 statistics. Happily, the display did not stop there. Next to the placard were two boards soliciting suggestions to address these issues. One read “make making more accessible to …” and the other read “make making more accessible by …” Both were filled with crowd-sourced suggestions penciled on multi-colored Post-it Notes.
Though we cannot fully know the true intentions of the makers who put together this display, we would like to think that their goals were not merely to raise the important question of how can we make the maker movement and maker-centered learning more accessible to a broader and more socially and culturally diverse population of young people and adults? Rather, we think it was to take a stance, make a demand, and raise a challenge: We must make the maker movement and maker-centered learning more accessible to a broader and more socially and culturally diverse population of young people and adults.
As community- and school-based maker-centered learning has gained momentum, some educators and researchers have decried the maker movement's inherent biases. The practices of the maker movement, they note, preference and celebrate white, middle-class boys and men. Further, some have argued that the type of making typically represented—robots, electronics, and rocketry—favors the interests of young, white boys while overlooking the interests of young girls and children of color.4
These critiques center on issues of access and equity. Access quite plainly means what it suggests: make making more easily accessible to a broader swath of young people and adults. Access, in this sense, means eliminating the barriers to entry. But just making making experiences more accessible to a more diverse population of young people does not mean that those experiences become more equitable. Even if maker-centered learning were to become universally accessible, that universal access would do little to address the fact that some people arrive at a makerspace or in the maker-centered classroom more advantaged or disadvantaged than others. Issues of advantage stretch beyond the domain of access and into the domain of equity.
As Mindy Kornhaber and her colleagues have noted, to move beyond the equal view that access suggests we must embrace more equalizing and expansive views of equity.5 In this regard, equity concerns itself with providing greater resources and support to disadvantaged individuals than to their more privileged peers. Different from access, Shirin Vossoughi and her colleagues have noted that “equity lies in the how of teaching and learning.”6 In a paper presented at the 2013 FabLearn conference in Stanford, California, these researchers have suggested that in order to make making and tinkering experiences more equitable, maker educators must consider how they design their learning environments, how they use instructional language, and how they make cultural and historical connections that make making more relevant and meaningful for a broader array of learners. We think this emphasis on the learning dimensions of making is exactly right (Figure C.2).
FIGURE C.2: Exploration and experimentation in the maker-centered classroom can be made more accessible and equitable through the careful planning and facilitation of maker educators.
Supporting and Sustaining Maker-Centered Practice
A third challenge related to maker-centered learning is sustaining its presence in the curriculum beyond the initial honeymoon of interest and enthusiasm that is taking place right now. As we learned through our review of literature, interviews with maker-educators, and site visits to schools and organizations across the country, maker-centered learning quite often occupies a precarious space in the structure and curriculum of schools—especially, as noted above, in public and traditional schools. This is generally true of any new program introduced into the entrenched ecosystem of a school, but in the case of maker-centered learning, the problem may be exacerbated by the fact that maker-centered learning is not yet a formal discipline and does not have the backing of a professional and organized network.7
Often, a school's response to the challenge of integrating a new program is to offer faculty and staff professional development: In the case of maker-centered learning this might take the form of a workshop on maker-centered learning or a field trip to a successful maker-integration site or makerspace. Granted, the Agency by Design team members has taught their fair share of professional development workshops about thinking and learning in the maker-centered classroom, and in truth we have found that presenting workshops can be a quite effective way to share big ideas and core practices. But to sustain practice beyond an initial introduction to ideas, it is important to develop a cadre of educators who learn together, question together, engage in deep thinking together, and can then advocate for programs and positions feeling both confident and supported.
The power of creating a space where educators can come together to do these things was made visible to us by our Oakland-based teacher partners. Through the adult learning community they created, we saw how they established a space to test ideas and to explore uncharted territory. It was a space for educators new to maker-centered learning to share theories and puzzles, to build knowledge and confidence together. It was a space for researchers and teachers to experiment together, to pilot-test thinking routines, and to look closely at student work. And perhaps most importantly for the community, it provided an opportunity for educators to come together from different schools to share stories and strategies across schools that were physically proximate though demographically disparate.
Cultivating maker empowerment is not just a student outcome; it is important for educators to feel maker-empowered as well. Building on the community initially created in Oakland, several of the educators we worked with went on to exercise their sense of empowerment in different ways: forming a unified voice to advocate for positions and programs; leveraging resources in the community; integrating maker-centered teaching in curricula for which it is not explicitly designed or supported; organizing local maker educator meet-ups; facilitating maker empowerment workshops for other educators; and embracing the notion of teacher as learner. Perhaps most rewarding, we witnessed educators coalesce into a community of inquiry-driven, confident, risk-taking designers of their own maker-related teaching and learning experiences.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Maker-Centered Learning
What does the future hold for maker-centered learning? As the foregoing sections make clear, there is important work to be done on several fronts: ethical questions about making and learning need to be considered honestly and carefully; issues of equity and access need to be energetically addressed, as do the challenges of sustaining maker-centered learning initiatives in schools and creating communities of educators to support them. In addition to these challenges, we want to point to another very important one: If maker-centered learning is to become more than a passing trend, it is essential to develop assessment and documentation strategies that illustrate and support the educational outcomes associated with this work.
The challenge of measuring maker empowerment is tricky. The central argument of this book has been that the core educational outcomes of maker-centered learning concern the development of agency and character. These are broad dispositional outcomes, and measuring them—indeed even documenting them—is a very different enterprise than measuring, say, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills using pre- and post-tests.
There is already noteworthy work being done in the area of maker assessments across the country. Two examples include the Open Portfolio Project, a collaboration between the Maker Education Initiative and Indiana University's Creativity Lab, that is engaged in an effort to develop common practices for maker portfolios. Another example comes from the work of Tiffany Tseng at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT's Media Lab. Here, Tiffany and her colleagues have been creating documentation tools to capture making and design work in process. The Agency by Design team itself hopes to continue to work on the challenge of assessment, specifically by developing documentation and assessment strategies related to the three maker capacities that comprise the Agency by Design framework—looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity.
One of the most important aspects of developing documentation and assessment strategies for any type of learning is the idea of making thinking and learning visible. Researchers at Project Zero have long been interested in the topics of visible thinking and visible learning.8 From the perspective of the Visible Thinking research team, visible thinking is defined as “any kind of observable representation that documents and supports the development of an individual's or group's ongoing thoughts, questions, reasons, and reflections.”9 We believe that by using the aforementioned thinking routines, it may be possible to make the variety of thinking that takes place in the maker-centered classroom visible.
When students are able to see external representations of their thinking as it unfolds, several important things happen. First of all, each individual student sees how his or her ideas contribute to a larger whole. For example, in using the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine, a teacher might keep evolving lists on the board of students' ideas and observations. Each time a student mentions a part, it gets written down—likewise, when a student mentions a purpose, and so on.
Another important thing that happens when the unfolding of students' thinking is made visible is that students are able to see that knowledge-building is an evolving, dynamic process. Indeed, the physical artifacts of visible thinking—lists, maps, diagrams, sketches—can often be messy. Ideas get scribbled in, crossed out, moved around. Lines are drawn to show linkages; key thoughts are underlined for emphasis. This messy vitality serves an important purpose because it shows students that the process of building knowledge is an energetic, evolving process, filled with stops and starts and detours and epiphanies (Figure C.3).
FIGURE C.3: A whimsical redesign created from the messy and evolving process of repurposing materials.
Perhaps the central purpose of making thinking visible is to provide teachers and students with physical documentation that allows them to see evidence of learning and to reflect on the learning process. For example, as students write down or draw the parts of an object they are examining, the documentation can make visible shifts in perception, such as when students suddenly discern a new kind of detail. Similarly, as students make diagrams in the Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine, their visible artifacts can reveal moments of insight regarding the complexity they are exploring, such as when they notice that people play multiple roles in a system, or that the causal relationships among parts of a system can be both linear and cyclical. The important point about visible thinking is that it plays an active role in the learning process by providing students and teachers with documentation of thinking in action that can be reflected upon, examined, probed, and changed.10 As we and others begin down the path toward developing assessment and documentation strategies for maker-centered learning, we hope to leverage a variety of technologies—from smartphone apps to chart paper and markers—for making thinking and learning visible in the maker-centered classroom.
A final question we have about the future of maker-centered learning is how—and indeed if—it will define itself as a field. Though strands of maker-centered learning can be found in long-standing educational practices and past pedagogical theory, as a unified body of work maker-centered learning does not neatly fall into any one category. Much of this has to do with the fact that it involves the incorporation of practices from multiple disciplines, rather than being a discrete discipline itself. Perhaps, as Joi Ito likes to say about the work he engages in with his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab,11 maker-centered learning will become an antidiscipline—a connected fabric of invention and innovation that brings together many disciplines but resists the siloing associated with the traditional disciplines.
Will maker-centered learning become a field or a profession? Perhaps, but as it exists now, maker-centered learning lacks the structures that make up fields and professions, among them annual conferences and peer-reviewed journals where practitioners share new ideas, a professional association that oversees the field and the profession, and degree-granting institutions where aspiring professionals can be trained and licensed for participation in the field. What might it mean for maker-centered learning to formalize itself in any of these ways? Would it stand to benefit from the formalization of its practices, or would the very essence of what makes maker-centered learning so exciting be sapped out of it through the rigors of standardization? From our current vantage point, we cannot make a prediction, but we are eager to see what happens next.
Imagine If …
Throughout this book one of our goals has been to introduce the wonderfully thoughtful and passionate maker educators and thought leaders we have been so lucky to meet—and to share their insights and their expertise. At the same time, it has also been our goal to provide glimpses into the array of deeply inspiring maker-centered classrooms that we have had the privilege of visiting—and to better understand what makes them tick. Whenever possible, we have also made it a priority to share the enthusiasm and passion for learning expressed by the young people that have been introduced within these pages. They include Frederica, Ana, Roberto, Cesar, and Tomas, Nala—and Jimmy.
When we think about the future of maker-centered learning, we think of these young people and their stories. Imagine if our world was full of bright, determined, empathic, and self-directed young people just like them. Young people comfortable with learning from failure like Frederica. Young people who care about their community and can navigate complex webs of social interactions to effect change in their communities like Ana. Young people who are eager to reach across social and cultural boundaries to learn from others and take charge of their own academic experiences like Roberto, Cesar, and Tomas. Young people like Nala who have developed the capacity to see the world through the lens of complex systems. And young people who will not be defeated by a broken zipper—young people who see themselves as the creators of their experiences, not just the consumers of their experiences—like Jimmy.
Now imagine an educational system that supports young learners to develop as maker-empowered citizens of the world—not just in particular neighborhoods, not just young people that share a particular set of interests—but for all young people. We cannot know what the future holds for maker-centered learning, but we can hope, we can wish, and—through thoughtful work—we can imagine if …