Makerspaces in Schools

Situating Makerspaces in Schools

Colin Angevine and Josh Weisgrau | September 24, 2015

America’s obsession with STEM is dangerous, Fareed Zakaria warns us, and our hunch is that most readers of Hybrid Pedagogy would tend to agree. We, Colin and Josh, certainly do. But the conversation that typically follows that headline rarely seems productive: a turf war for institutional priority and students’ time drawn on traditional disciplinary lines. Even when STEM advocates throw a bone to the value of creativity by adding “A” for Arts (making “STEAM”), the pendulum still swings, and the conversation never seems to advance.

In 1985 the Media Lab was created at MIT to advance the idea that computation would give rise to a new science of expressive media. Within the media lab, the Epistemology and Learning group extends the traditional definition of media by treating as expressive media materials with which children play and learn. The Group's work follows a paradigm for learning research called Constructionism. Several of the chapters directly address the theoretical formulation of Constructionism, and others describe experimental studies which enrich and confirm different aspects of the idea. Thus this volume can be taken as the most extensive and definitive statement to date of this approach to media and education research and practice. This book is structured around four major themes: learning through designing and programming; epistemological styles in constructionist learning, children and cybernetics; and video as a research tool for exploring and documenting constructionist environments. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Constructionism-Research-Reports-Essays-1985-1990/dp/0893917850

<more at http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/situating-makerspaces-in-schools/; related links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brit-morin/what-is-the-maker-movemen_b_3201977.html (What Is the Maker Movement and Why Should You Care? May 2, 2013) and http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/constructionism-reborn/ (+Podcast) (The Maker Movement and the Rebirth of Constructionism. January 23, 2014)>