Making Goes to School: A Comparative Case Study

• In Event: 65.057 - The Maker Movement in Education

Abstract

Making is characterized by interest-driven engagement in creative production at the crossroads and fringes of disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, art, and math, and has developed into a recognized social, technological, educational, and economic movement. However, most of the maker programs designed for learning that have been developed in the past few years have been the purview of museums, libraries, and afterschool programs (Honey & Kanter, 2013). The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a comparative case study of two maker implementations within schools.
This study takes place at two suburban, middle-class elementary schools in Western Pennsylvania: Folk and Stratford Elementary Schools. The schools partnered with a museum known for maker programs and received support of materials, professional development, and weekly collaborative opportunities with a teaching artist/instructional coach. We collected and analyzed three sources of data for this study: pre- and post-interviews with teachers, online surveys administered at three time-points through the year, and three interviews with the teaching artist/instructional coach at intervals similar to the survey.
Positioning making as an educational innovation, we used Fishman et al.’s (2004) framework for scaling innovations as our starting point of analysis. In their framework, they identified capability, culture, and policy & management as key indicators of success for integrating innovations in schools. This framework enables one to place an innovation within the framework to understand the gaps between what exists within a school and what needs to happen for an innovation’s potential to be realized. In other words, “The creation of usable innovations (and successful reform), conceptualized in this manner, is a process of working to ‘close the gaps’ that exist” (Fishman et al, 2004, p. 51). We inductively found three factors emerge that have been important to the implementation: the allocation of space, the role of school leadership, and the approach to curricular integration.
Leadership: The principals of each school varied in how deeply they understood making and what role making could play for classroom learning, and subsequently how they were able to support their staff in its integration.
Space: The two schools differed in their allocation of space for making. Folk Elementary had a dedicated classroom for making while Stratford Elementary utilized a cart to carry supplies from classroom to classroom.
Curricular Integration: In order to “fit” into the school, Stratford typically integrated making within a station-rotation model of classroom instruction. On the other hand, Folk was able to have whole-class maker projects with teachers connecting their content and curriculum to the making activity as they could.
This work makes several contributions. First, as an early example of research on school-based maker programs, this study provides empirical evidence of an implementation of making in schools. Furthermore, this study suggests implications for future implementations with respect to capability, culture, and policy & management, such as the cost/benefit of space allocation, the importance of leaders’ understanding of making to support instruction, and the role making may play in supporting and transforming school-based learning communities.

Authors

• Peter Samuelson Wardrip, Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

• Lisa Brahms, Children's Museum of Pittsburgh