Toward a sustainable model for maker education in public education

Abstract

The integration of maker resources and pedagogies into formal education can enrich school curriculum by promoting more meaningful, contextualized, and inclusive ways of learning, particularly in STEM fields. We describe an implementation model of makerspaces that supports science teachers in incorporating new practices based on partnerships with makerspace teachers. This work is part of a larger effort to improve science education in public schools in Brazil, through new standards, teacher professional development, and implementation of makerspaces. We present findings from the first phase of the project, in which we employed a design-based implementation research approach to co-design new science curricular units with teachers over three iterative cycles. Based on our data, we present organizational and professional development strategies that can be deployed to support makerspace teachers in their roles of integrating their spaces into their schools in a sustainable and effective way.