Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Maker-Centered Learning - Coggle Diagram
Maker-Centered Learning
Exploring the Benefits of Maker-Centered Learning
Benefits and Outcomes
Primary Outcomes
Developing Student Agency
Community Making: Taking ownership over the process of making with a community; creating things that are meaningful to one's community.
Stuff Making: Taking ownership over the process of making; creating things meaningful to oneself.
Building Character
Building confidence, building competence, forming identities
Self-Making, and gaining confidence in one's abilities
General thinking dispositions
Tinkerer, Carpenter, Entrepreneur, Muralist, Hybrid
Secondary Outcomes
Cultivating Discipline-Specific Knowledge and Skills
Using prior knowledge to solve problems
Hands-on activities to develop skills that turn them into overall better people
Cultivating Maker-Specific Knowledge and Skills
What tools are, how they are used, and how they can be used to the greatest effect
Prototyping, drafting, experimenting, etc.
8 Attributes to Cultivate in Young Makers
Curiosity/Exploration
Playfulness
Risk-Taking
Responsibility
Persistence/Grit
Resourcefulness
Sharing
Optimism
Non-Cognitive Skills for Young Makers
Inspiration
Collaboration
Growth Mindset
Motivation
Development of a Failure-Positive Outlook on the World
Teaching and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom
Who (and what) are the teachers in the maker-centered classroom?
Students As Teachers
Students teaching frees up the teacher to play other roles in the classroom.
Sometimes students are experts at something that nobody else knows anything about.
This directly serves skills like confidence-building, developing student agency, and building character.
Teachers in the Community
Maker educators will often bring in experts from the community to teach them what they need to know.
Online Knowledge Sourcing
The Internet allows students to make choices about what paths to follow and make judgments about the validity of the info they're reading.
Tools and Materials as Teachers
Some maker educators present their students with tools and materials and have the students use their imagination and prior knowledge to figure out how to use them.
Maker-Centered Roots and Connections
Educational Roots and Themes
John Dewey
Emphasized learning by doing (hands-on or experimental approach)
Rejected traditional notions of education that treated knowledge as static.
Two Educational Theories
Constructionism: Building knowledge occurs best through building things that are tangible and shareable.
Constructivism: Teachers construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information.
"Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn."
Jean Piaget
Considered the father of constructionism.
Argued that knowledge is constructed via interactions between learners' conceptual framework and their experiences in the world to which these frameworks are applied.
His theories connect to maker-centered learning with a strong emphasis on tinkering and figuring out; both involve starting with one's own ideas and then shaping those ideas based on direct action.
Educational Theory
Peer Learning
Lev Vygotsky - known for promoting the idea that all learning is social.
Cooperative Learning: Students exploring ideas together.
Peer Tutoring: Students providing one another with direct instruction.
Project-based Learning: Students work together to create something new.
Peer Critique: Students learning from each other by providing one another with informative feedback.
Zone of Proximal Development
particularly apt to the variety of peer learning that takes place in the maker-centered classroom.
Increased self-esteem, teamwork, and perspective taking.
What Does Learning Look Like in the Maker-Centered Classroom?
Students teaching other students.
Students teaching teachers.
Teachers and students learning alongside each other.
Students will be knowledge-sourcing from one another and online.
Students working alongside the community.
Students working collaboratively and offering feedback.
Students should be trying to figure things out on their own.
Setting up your classrooms so that the environment is most conducive to the learning goals:
Variety of tools and materials
Having workshop classrooms (3-D Printing, Woodworking, etc)
Storage and Visibility
Specific and flexible spaces
Developing a Sense of Maker Empowerment
What is Agency?
Agency By Design: A research team whose hope is for students to have a can-do spirit.
Agency has to do with choice, intention, and action and can be defined as our species' capacity to make intentional choices about how to act in the world.
Agentic Action: The difference between saying to yourself "I can do that," and actually doing it.
Scope: the thousands of small choices that we make, which all accumulate to agentic action.
Locus: where a sense of agency originates and resides.
Internal View: originates wholly from the internal workings of an individual mind.
External View: wholly socially constructed and arises solely through the influence of external environmental factors.
Maker Empowerment
A desirable outcome where we aim to describe maker empowerment in a way that can usefully inform the day to day work that maker educators do when they design, implement, and assess maker-centered learning experiences.
Maker Un-Empowerment: Having a passive consumerist preference; one is blind to the roles others have played in the makings of things, and blind to the possibilities of enacting one's own agency.
Social Justice: Youth empowerment programs devoted to civic engagement, youth rights councils, student activism networks, and community organizing programs.
Education: Teaching maker-centered learning to all students because they believe it is empowering for all young people to engage with the world.
A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, points of importance of simply noticing that many of the objects, ideas, and systems we encounter in the world are human-made design.
Developing a Sensitivity to Design
Developing Sensitivity to Design in a Consumer-Driven World
Young people engage with human-made objects and systems every day; it's important to reflect on their form and function to some degree.
Many objects and devices we use every day lack transparency.
Today we think that electronics have a lifespan. Consumers are encouraged to replace their devices altogether rather than fix them or buy replacement parts.
What is Sensitivity to Design?
Being attuned to the designed dimension of objects and systems, with an understanding that the designed world is malleable.
Paying attention to how the design is put together and for what reason, and understanding that design can always change.
How Are Students Sensitive (Or Not) To Design?
Students must see themselves as the makers of their experiences, not just consumers of objects and systems.
Students must feel they have the right to tinker with design dimensions of the world.
Sensitivity to design = maker empowerment
Maker-Centered Teaching and Learning in Action
A Framework for Maker Empowerment
Looking Closely
Close, careful, mindful observation; looking past the first impression of an object and focusing on each intimate detail.
Practiced by making lists, drawings, naming and describing parts, writing descriptive observations, etc.
Exploring Complexity
Think about how all parts work together in relation with the other parts in order to complete their function.
Uncover layers of what you can see, and speculating about what you can't see.
Encourages critical thinking by understanding interactions and causes, and questioning the why, how, and for whom.
Finding Opportunity
Redesigning/ Hacking the system to make it more efficient or entertaining.
Tools and Techniques for Supporting Maker-Centered Thinking and Learning
Dispositional Development and Thinking Routines
Short, engaging, two or three-step patterns of intellectual behavior; designed to be easy to use remember, and transfer.
Parts, Purposes, and Complexities
What are the pieces or components? What are the purposes for each of those parts? How is it complicated in its parts and purposes, and the relationship between the two?
Parts, People, and Interactions
What are the parts of the system? What are the people connected to the system? How do the people in the system interact with each other and with the parts of the system?
Think, Feel, Care
How does this person understand this system and their role within it? What is this person's emotional response to the system? What are this person's values, priorities, or motivations with regard to the system?
Imagine if...
In what ways could it be made more effective? More efficient? More ethical? More beautiful?