In an old mayonnaise factory that has been repurposed as a tinkering school in San Francisco, California, a group of children measure, saw, and screw together wood planks and other building materials to make a functional ice rink that they fully expect to play hockey on within a matter of days. Meanwhile, across the country, unschooled and homeschooled students working in a storefront outside of Boston mash together an assortment of spare electronic parts to make tiny robots that scamper across the floor. While families in Detroit gather in a church basement after Sunday service to make snow globes out of household materials and learn the basics of bicycle maintenance, families in New Mexico visit rural libraries to learn how to connect fruits and vegetables to a device called a Makey-Makey. At the same time, visitors to a children's museum in Pittsburgh are learning the basics of electric circuitry alongside their siblings and parents. Back in California, first-generation public high school students work with their teacher to redesign their school's outdoor spaces, just as students at a private school around the corner research, design, and construct new furniture for themselves and their community. Across these disparate contexts, each of these learning environments provides a glimpse into an educational transformation that is sweeping across the United States—and around the globe.

The first Maker Faire, held in San Mateo, California, in 2006, marked a resurgence of interest in making things—as opposed to merely consuming them—while at the same time celebrating the gizmos and gadgetry of contemporary life. Since that event, small and large-scale maker events have drawn crowds and inspired makers throughout the United States and around the world (Figure I.1). From basement workshops to massive cooperative makerspaces, interest in making has since been growing. Noting the significance of this trend, in 2014 the White House hosted its first ever Maker Faire and established June 18 as a National Day of Making.¹ In his address to the makers assembled for this historic event, President Barack Obama remarked:

Beyond the White House, scores of advocacy statements emphasizing the importance of making have spread throughout the media and the popular press.³ As author and inventor Chris Anderson noted in his book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, the next wave of manufacturing and entrepreneurship will be borne of the talents and shared ideas developed by makers.⁴ A surge of voices from government, industry, and education further argued that to equip our young people for this next wave of entrepreneurship and innovation, it is important to support maker-centered learning in various educational environments. Whether in schools, after-school settings, libraries, or museums, an interest in providing opportunities and spaces for making has spread everywhere. This renewed interest in making has come to be known as the maker movement—a rising interest in sharing and learning from others while working with one's hands within interdisciplinary environments that combine a variety of tools and technologies.

Intrigued by the relationship between maker experiences, arts, and education, the Bay Area–based Abundance Foundation began to take notice.⁵ With a deep commitment to public health, arts education, and empowerment initiatives, members of the foundation asked some compelling questions: What is the potential of bringing maker activities into educational settings? What might young people uniquely learn through maker experiences? What does making in schools currently look like? With these questions in mind, the foundation reached out to Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see if there might be an opportunity to explore these questions together.

Project Zero was founded in 1967 by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to study and improve education in the arts. Goodman believed that arts learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity but that “zero” had yet been firmly established about the field; hence, the project was given its name. Over the years Project Zero has maintained a strong research agenda in the arts while gradually expanding to include other areas of inquiry related to thinking and learning. With its current emphasis on interdisciplinarity, creativity, and multiple modes of learning, the maker movement presented an interesting opportunity for Project Zero to expand its research and to investigate if (and how) educational interventions could support maker-centered learning—and what their benefits might be. Thus, in spring 2012, backed by the support of the Abundance Foundation, the Agency by Design project was born.

Since its inception, the Agency by Design research team has endeavored to gain an understanding of the benefits of maker-centered learning and the pedagogies and practices that support it. To better understand this opportunity space, the Agency by Design team pursued three strands of inquiry: (1) a review of literature associated with maker-centered learning; (2) a series of site visits to a variety of maker-centered learning environments paired with formal interviews conducted with maker educators and thought leaders at the forefront of this emergent domain; and (3) a program of participatory research carried out first with a group of educators in Oakland, California, and later with a national learning community consisting of individuals representing maker-centered learning environments throughout the United States.

What the Agency by Design research team quickly discovered was that, while making in the classroom was not a new concept, maker-centered learning suggested a new kind of hands-on pedagogy—a pedagogy that encourages community and collaboration (a do-it-together mentality), distributed teaching and learning, boundary crossing, and responsive and flexible teacher practices. This book, Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds, presents what our team has learned about this new pedagogical trend throughout our three years of research.

What Is a Maker? And What Is Maker-Centered-Learning?

As authors of a book titled Maker-Centered Learning, we feel responsible for articulating what we mean by maker and maker-centered learning. We recognize that some readers will arrive at this text with strong associations, and others may be unfamiliar with how they have come to be used. With this in mind, here and in the chapters ahead we have made a concerted effort to discuss maker-centered learning in a way that both invites newcomers into this landscape and also pushes the boundaries of what more-established maker-centered educators and advocates understand about this work. Whether readers of this book are members of the initiated, the uninitiated, or somewhere in between, we hope that the definitions offered will be illuminating for all.

For most people, the word maker conjures up images of people working with their hands—designing, building, and crafting. Seen in this light, maker is a noun: a way to describe someone who engages in the act of making, perhaps even a profession, like artist or sculptor or crafter. A maker might be someone who bakes bread or someone who quenches steel; she might be someone who builds chairs or someone who paints portraits. Ultimately, a maker is not a special title one achieves after gaining entry into an esoteric social club but rather is someone—anyone—who makes things. By understanding maker in this way, the maker community can be viewed as being inclusive, embracing, and welcoming to all those who make.

Often, though, a quick scan of the media coverage of the maker movement emphasizes a certain type of maker: hackers with expertise in robotics, information technology, and electronics, working with innovative tools and technologies such as 3-D printers, microcontrollers, and computer numerically controlled (CNC) tools. As designer, engineer, and educator Leah Buechley criticizes,⁶ this narrow representation of makers places limits and constraints on the types of people who are identified as makers. To be more specific, she argues that the maker movement, as it has been portrayed in the popular press, can be seen as favoring the work and interests of white, middle-class males.⁷

Conjoining the terms maker with movement may add to the exclusivity of the phrase, because participating in a movement implies belonging and identity. As educational researchers Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan note, the word maker “describes the identities of participation … that people take on within the maker movement.”⁸ Being part of a community implies being connected to its practices, norms, and responsibilities, which may leave some people wondering: Can I participate in this movement? Do I—or does my work—qualify me to be a part of this community? As Halverson and Sheridan argue, it is possible that a lack of identity with the dominant narrative presented by the maker movement may cause many would-be makers to feel alienated or self-select out of this growing cultural trend.⁹

Unfortunately, along with a sense of belonging comes the implicit corollary: not belonging. And this is where the label maker movement just might do itself a disservice. Putting boundaries around makers in the shift to maker-as-cultural-identity runs the risk of excluding those who might ordinarily consider themselves makers. Those bread bakers and chair builders might identify with other people who make things but not necessarily with the maker culture as it has been portrayed and promoted in the media.

Perhaps the making movement would have been a better name, capturing what people do rather than who they are. Yet there is something unique about the kinds of activities and culture in which the maker community engages. For instance, as our own research and the work of others has emphasized,¹⁰ maker activities are inherently social as seen in the collaboration in Figure I.2. Community is an important aspect of participating in the maker movement—and the norms of that community are indeed important. So how can the maker movement and maker culture be framed more inclusively while also recognizing that the work happening in makerspaces and maker-centered classrooms has a distinct social ethos?

One way to start is by explaining what we want the language we use to mean. Accordingly, we have developed a two-pronged way to address the definition of maker. First, we have reframed the kinds of activities we have been researching as maker-centered, with an explicit focus on learning (i.e., maker-centered learning). Second, we have taken a symptoms-based approach to defining what the maker in this context means.¹¹ Here we take inspiration from the founder of Project Zero, Nelson Goodman, who addressed the problem of defining art not by trying to identify the essence of art but rather by identifying several symptoms that are frequently present in works of art, none of which are disjunctively necessary for something to function as a work of art.

Each of these moves has allowed us to stretch the boundaries of maker. Maker-centered is more nuanced than just making (allowing for the uniqueness described already). A symptoms-based approach to defining the term helps us point to characteristics that suggest what qualifies as a maker-centered experience but that do not strictly define what the essence of such an experience is or is not. In other words, a maker-centered experience need not include the full set of characteristics associated with such experiences to qualify as one; rather, exhibiting a majority of these characteristics in any configuration will suffice.

Although such a symptoms-based approach can be applied to any kind of maker-centered experience, the Agency by Design research team's focus has been on learning. Through extensive conversations with educators and thought leaders at the numerous makerspaces, classrooms, and events we visited, patterns emerged that suggested a set of symptoms for what we began to understand as maker-centered learning. Specifically, three constellations of characteristics stood out as exemplifying typical maker-centered components: characteristics related to community, characteristics related to process, and characteristics related to environment.

Within the constellation of community characteristics, characteristics such as collaboration, distributed teaching and learning, the combination of diverse skills and expertise, and an expectation to share information and ideas all serve as symptoms of maker-centered learning. Within the constellation of process characteristics, curiosity-driven, experimental learning along with rapid prototyping, an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, and flexibility all stand out as prominent symptoms of maker-centered learning. And within the constellation of environmental characteristics, open spaces, accessible spaces, and tool- and media-rich spaces all resound as symptoms of maker-centered learning.

With these three constellations of characteristics in mind, it is worth reiterating the symptomatic nature of our definition of maker-centered learning. No one learning environment exhibits all of the symptoms of maker-centered learning previously discussed, nor are these lists of symptoms exhaustive. Although the constellation of characteristics and their associated symptoms do bring maker-centered learning into relief, they are not meant to rigidly limit what may qualify as a maker-centered learning experience. By taking a symptoms-based approach, we have made it our goal to develop the most porous boundaries possible.

In much the same spirit, we have taken an inclusive approach to defining the settings where maker-centered learning takes place. Throughout this book we use the phrase maker-centered classroom to refer to the wide range of settings where young people and adults gather to engage in maker-centered learning experiences. Just as other researchers have noted,¹² maker-centered learning happens in a variety of different environments. These settings may include traditional classroom spaces in public, private, and charter schools, but they may also include libraries, museums, community makerspaces, afterschool programs, and everyday backyards, basements, kitchen tables, and garages. We use the term maker-centered classroom to embrace all of these environments.

A Road Map to the Journey Ahead

Maker-Centered Learning is structured around the three core questions that have been at the heart of the Agency by Design research initiative:

1. How do maker educators and leaders in the field think about the benefits and outcomes of maker-centered learning experiences?
2. What are some of the key characteristics of the educational environments and instructional designs under which maker-centered learning thrives?
3. What kinds of educational interventions can support thoughtful reflection around maker-centered learning and the made dimensions of our world?

Chapter One lays the groundwork for the rest of the chapters to come. It begins by drawing on the numerous conversations we have had with educators and thought leaders working at the forefront of maker-centered learning environments across the United States (and at one site in Canada) to address the first of our core questions: How do maker educators and leaders in the field think about the benefits and outcomes of maker-centered learning experiences? Looking at media coverage of the maker movement, visiting Maker Faires, and watching videos and tutorials from young stars like Super-Awesome Sylvia and Caine Monroy,¹³ it is clear that young people can have a lot of fun making cool projects, and they can learn some useful technical skills along the way. But when educators talked about the deep and abiding benefits of maker-centered learning, it was neither the making of stuff they emphasized, nor the acquisition of technical or academic knowledge. Gever Tulley, founder of the Brightworks School in San Francisco, put it like this:

As the interviews we conducted made clear, developing students' discipline-specific knowledge and skills (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and math [STEM] skills) and more maker-based knowledge and skills (e.g., learning to code or how to use a drill press) were certainly important to the educators we spoke with. But these learning outcomes were always discussed as being secondary or instrumental to the more dispositional outcomes of developing agency and building character. Chapter One presents these two primary benefits of maker-centered learning and discusses each in detail. We begin by examining what it means to develop a sense of agency—a proactive orientation toward the world. According to our interviews, maker-centered learning helps students see themselves as people who can effectively take action in the world, mainly—but not only—by making, hacking, or redesigning the objects and systems in their lives. Some educators characterized this agentic orientation as a set of life skills, like self-reliance and courage. Others described it as having the creative confidence to envision the world differently and take action toward that vision. With these views as a backdrop, this chapter discusses how developing a sense of agency can be understood in terms of stuff making and community making. While the former describes an inclination to make, hack, or redesign material objects, the latter suggests a similar orientation toward shaping or reshaping communities and social systems.

The chapter then goes on to discuss how maker-centered learning supports a sense of self making, or what we describe as building character. The character building that takes place in the maker-centered classroom can be described in terms of three kinds of achievements: building competence in the use of certain tools, materials, and processes; developing confidence in one's abilities; and ultimately developing an identity as a maker. Along the way, young people and adults further acquire a variety of general thinking dispositions. Like the sense of agency people develop through maker-centered learning, these general thinking dispositions can also be described in terms of stuff making and community making—both of which we discuss in detail.

Having identified the primary and secondary benefits of maker-centered learning in Chapter One, in Chapter Two we consider the various characteristics of instructional design that support these outcomes and the decisions educators make to achieve their learning goals. Drawing again on our interviews and site visits, Chapter Two addresses the core question: What are some of the key characteristics of the educational environments and instructional designs under which maker-centered learning thrives? The chapter examines what teaching and learning look like in the maker-centered classroom and what the maker-centered classroom looks like itself. We highlight the distributed nature of teaching and learning in these spaces, including the various roles that educators and students play, and the manner by which authority is redirected and distributed (Figure I.3).

Chapters Three, Four, and Five address the third core question of this book: What kinds of educational interventions can support thoughtful reflection around maker-centered learning and the made dimensions of our world? Chapter Three gives shape to a maker-centered perspective on agency. Here, we offer the concept of maker empowerment—a dispositional stance in which students understand themselves as individuals of resourcefulness who can muster the wherewithal to change their world through making. The chapter considers how we can help young people develop a sense of maker empowerment. It discusses the psychological elements necessary for dispositional development and suggests that an important but often overlooked component is developing a sensitivity to opportunity. In other words, to engage in dispositional behavior, one has to be sensitive to opportunities that invite or require that behavior.

This raises the question of how we can help young people to become sensitive to opportunities that activate their sense of maker empowerment. We turn to this question in Chapter Four and propose that to develop a maker-empowered disposition, students must first perceive elements of their world as inviting design. For example, they might think about redesigning a chair because they recognize that chairs are objects that can be reenvisioned and recrafted. This may sound simple, maybe even simplistic, but the truth is that we often go about life without paying much attention to the designed dimensions of objects and systems. For instance we use things like chairs and plates and soap dispensers without much thought; we participate in systems like lunch lines, food shopping, and electoral processes without paying attention to how they are designed or how they might be changed. This chapter argues that a key pathway to helping young people develop a sense of maker empowerment is to help them develop a sensitivity to the design of the objects and systems, large and small, that shape their worlds.

Chapter Five presents an instructional framework for maker-centered learning that centers on three critical maker capacities that support a sensitivity to design, which in turn encourages a sense of maker empowerment: (1) looking closely, which involves the careful observation of objects and systems to notice their intricacies, nuances, and details; (2) exploring complexity, which involves investigating the interactions between the various parts and people associated with objects and systems; and (3) finding opportunity, which involves seeing the potential for building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking objects and systems. Chapter Five also draws on our collaboration with a teacher–partner group called the Oakland Learning Community, who have not only helped us develop the various tools described before but also provided us with important pictures of practice that illustrate what our instructional framework looks like in action. Lastly, this chapter presents several cognitive strategies—thinking routines—aimed at cultivating the capacity to look closely, explore complexity, and find opportunity. We begin by describing how thinking routines are generally designed to act as devices that elicit dispositional behavior. We then introduce the four thinking routines we have specifically developed to support having a sensitivity to design to foster maker empowerment.

In our concluding chapter we review the main themes of this book and look ahead to the future. Although this final chapter presents a positive outlook, we also candidly address the hurdles that lie ahead for realizing a more maker-empowered world. Here we consider the very real barriers to participating in maker-centered learning experiences that exist for the majority of young people and the biases that exist throughout the burgeoning field of maker-centered learning. The concluding chapter also considers the ethical dimensions of making. Maker-centered learning is frequently framed in a positive light, but it is important to note that the act of making may also involve serious ethical considerations that need to be addressed head on.

Finally, we put forth some imagine if … ideas of our own—imagining what a world of maker-empowered young people might be like, and further considering how the world might be a different place if each of us went about our daily lives with a more heightened sensitivity to design. Ultimately we conclude on a high note, returning to the benefits of maker-centered learning and emphasizing the potential for all young people to shape their worlds through building, tinkering, re/designing, and hacking.

In many ways, when the Abundance Foundation first approached Project Zero with an interest in developing a research initiative around maker-centered learning, we were transported back to Project Zero's roots. Just as there was little, or zero, communicable knowledge known about the cognitive affordances of the arts when Project Zero was founded in 1967, so, too, was there little communicable knowledge about the cognitive affordances of maker-centered learning when the Abundance Foundation first approached us in 2012. Several years later, we are happy to offer a research-based view of the benefits and outcomes of maker-centered learning, along with a pedagogical framework for bringing some of these about. We hope that this book will serve as a resource for the many educators, parents, and policymakers who have committed themselves to the work of empowering young people to view and shape their worlds through maker-centered learning.

Although we believe there is still much left to learn, we are delighted to present this book, Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds, as an initial synthesis of our work—and as a celebration of maker educators, tinkerers, designers, builders, hackers, and doers all over the world.