“I See Students Differently”: Following the Lead of Maker Educators in Defining What Counts as Learning

Bronwyn Bevan,Karen Wilkinson,Aaron Vanderwerff,Mike Petrich,Jean J Ryoo

doi:10.3389/feduc.2020.00121

Bronwyn Bevan, Karen Wilkinson + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00121

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Abstract

With the expansion of maker programs in school and out-of-school settings, investigating the connections between making and learning are important for many reasons, not least to build the evidence base needed by educators committed to its practice. In this paper, we argue that, as a relatively new area of inquiry, studies of making can benefit from close dialogue between researchers and the practitioners who have both pioneered and continue to develop the practice. We share how a research-practice partnership sought to amplify the voices of informal educators leading afterschool maker programs to address the research question: How can afterschool making programs support student learning that is valued and relevant to the school day? We show how the research-practice partnership helped to refine a tinkering design framework in ways that reflect the values and expert knowledge of informal educators committed to liberatory forms of education for young people, particularly those from socio-economically and racially marginalized communities.

Highlights

The pedagogy of making has a long history but only in the last decade has it garnered the widespread attention of education researchers: launching conferences, special interest groups, and special issues of journals like this one
We share how a researchpractice partnership sought to amplify the voices of informal educators leading afterschool maker programs to address the research question: How can afterschool maker programs support student learning that is valued and relevant to the school day? We show how the research-practice partnership helped to refine a learning dimensions framework in ways that reflect the values and expert knowledge of informal educators committed to liberatory forms of education for young people, those from socio-economically and racially marginalized communities
To advance our call for more direct and central practitioner involvement in research on making, we describe here how the Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) itself was used to leverage practitioners’ insights on the value of making for young people’s learning and development and how these analyses produced a practitioner-grounded framework for designing for liberatory learning through tinkering

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The pedagogy of making has a long history but only in the last decade has it garnered the widespread attention of education researchers: launching conferences, special interest groups, and special issues of journals like this one. These views on learning as a process and product of collective cultural and social activity help to frame the ways in which making and tinkering classrooms are sites for collaborative ideation and meaning-making They help us, for example, observe how ideas and strategies ripple through maker spaces, and how collaboration and teamwork serve as the basis for learning and development. Many have argued that concept maps may be primarily useful for design and for formative evaluation, as well as for communicating values and ideas (Edmondson and Smith, 1996; Plotnick, 1997) We posit that they can serve as a fruitful bridging or boundary object for researchers and practitioners to develop a shared language and FIGURE 1 | Final (third semester) version of the learning dimensions framework. For our RPP, the framework was something that we could “make” together, blending constructs and ideas from both research and practice to describe the kinds of learning behaviors or activities that educators could design for

RPP ACTIVITIES AND RESULTS

CONCLUSION

ETHICS STATEMENT