Over the course of 3 years, we transformed a dormant woodshop in a large, urban high school into Nedlam's Workshop, a makerspace housing digital and craft technologies to promote engineering inquiry for students and teachers at the school. The aims of the projects were to explore how the introduction of a makerspace, that emphasized inquiry pedagogies grounded in making, computation, and engineering design, to a school community could shift the ways students and teachers engaged in meaningful learning. Our activities included after-school making workshops for youth, professional development workshops for teachers, co-designing curricular activities with teachers, designing a maker-centered learning course called Creative Design and Engineering, and offering summer enrichment workshops for youth.

Our design specifically addressed the ways low-tracked students are perceived in school contexts. When designing and making, those students who are gifted with their hands, in the arts, or have keen understandings about the struggles youth face in their communities, are celebrated as talented, capable, and brilliant. The students for whom school does not always work become stars in Nedlam’s Workshops, where hands-on learning, ingenuity, improvisation, and inquiry are valued. From the design of the space, to the activities we offered, and the work we did with teachers, the efforts of this project promoted the idea that making, engineering, and design were powerful ways of learning in STEM and other disciplines.

The results of this project call attention to some critical aspects of building makerspaces in schools, which is a phenomenon sweeping the nation.

First, centering the problems of youth's lives--be it charging your cell phone without it being stolen, or improving the condition of waiting for the public transit bus--engages an expansive set of interests, practices, and knowledge among the youth involved in solving these problems. When the problems are real to students’ lives, their investment, agency, and confidence in their abilities to solve them all improve. And, these problems present ample opportunities to address STEM content and practices from State frameworks documents.

Secondly, not all students have access to these technology and engineering opportunities. In a school-wide survey, we learned that girls and low-tracked students were significantly underrepresented in technology, engineering, and computer science offerings. Our experimental course was designed to address these issues. Specifically, we focused on problems in students’ lives, we offered supports for scoping those problems, and we scaffolded their ways of designing and making solutions. This  impacted who could participant and who was successful; over 50% of the students participating in Nedlam’s Workshop were girls, and a similarly large percentage were low-tracked students. Overall, we have seen the makerspace serve as a site where high-performing students work alongside, and in collaboration, with students who have been pushed to the margins of school.

Finally, we learned that teachers can reimagine pedagogical possibilities within the makerspace. In other words, in a space the emphasizes design, making, and inquiry, teachers are willing to challenge their own assumptions about the role of inquiry in their disciplinary teaching. The expectations for what one is supposed to do in a makerspace are less clear for teachers than the expectations, and obligations, they feel in their own academic classroom environments. For example,Biology teachers admitted that they had slowly drifted away from teaching using inquiry, but that their professional development workshops in Nedlam’s Workshop opened up their thinking about to the possibilities and excitement around inquiry through making. Furthermore, mathematics, science, and humanities teachers started to talk with each other about cross-curricular possibilities; these were conversations catalyzed by activities in Nedlam’s Workshop.

The overall outcomes of this project include: (1) the School’s leadership decided to reassign a teacher as a full-time “makerspace engineering teacher”, (2) this teacher now offers 4 making electives (called Creative Design and Engineering) and a 9th grade course on design, computer science, and technology education that more than half of the 9th graders (~200 students) will take, and (3) one of our participant teachers became the District technology integration specialist, placing the makerspace at the center of her efforts to bring making into classrooms in the high school as well as to K-8 schools in the District. In sum, we argue that Nedlam’s Workshop encouraged teachers, students, and the community to become re-enchanted with the power of learning through making, and the importance of inquiry in teaching STEM.

Last Modified: 11/29/2017
Modified by: Brian Gravel