Making as a Community Learning Practice: Textual Analysis of Make Magazine

• In Event: Learning in the Making: Studying, Understanding, and Designing Makerspaces

Abstract

Born from individual basement tinkers and garage-mechanic hobbiests, the Maker Movement has evolved to support a strong community among makers, which has been formed through three primary means of social meeting and exchange: Remotely, through the widely distributed publication Make Magazine™, as well as through the development of online creative communities where users can find, share, and often sell project ideas such as etsy.com, ravelry.com, kollabora.com, and makezine.com; nationally, through the momentous growth of Maker Faires, annual showcases of makers’ inventions and investigations which have become celebrated meccas of maker culture, attracting hundreds of thousands of makers of all ages and interests; and locally, through the development of makerspaces, hackerspaces, tech shops, and fab labs, where groups composed of diverse ages, genders and backgrounds are motivated to learn with and from one another how to use and combine materials, tools, processes, and disciplinary practices in novel ways.

In this study, we take up the question of making as a community learning practice—the ways in which the making community works to define participation, and therefore itself, through shared practice and forms of participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). To do so, we conducted a textual content analysis of Make Magazine™, arguably the most reified (Wenger, 1998) source of maker community communication and participation. As the dominant referential text of the community, this platform is a logical place to turn to identify and verify the community’s core practices and definitional perspectives.

Published as a quarterly since February 2005, Make Magazine™ is a hybrid magazine/book. Each 200-page volume contains approximately 40 articles, written and edited by makers, including profiles of makers and projects, how-two guides, product reviews, and thematic features. Through our inductive coding of the most current year of the publication, (Volumes 30-33; n-160 articles), we sought to identify the dominant patterns of practice and shared values of the making community, as well as other key attributes of the makers featured, such as gender, disciplinary affiliation, and community characterization.

We draw on the communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) framework as a theoretical and analytical touchstone, asking how this codified theory of learning can help us to better understand the learning practices and perspectives of an emerging community; and how this newly declared and championed community of makers can help us to reconsider a longstanding theory for a new era of learning, both within and across traditional community boundaries of participation. With an empirical understanding of the core practices and perspectives of the making community, we define the core maker practices and values, arrive at a definition of making as a learning process, and consider the implications of this analysis for the design of rich learning experiences of making for children, youth and families.

Authors

• Lisa Brahms, University of Pittsburgh

• Kevin Crowley, University of Pittsburgh