Making as Learning: The Case of Families With Young Children

• In Event: Toward Building Makerspaces for All: New Theories and Practices to Design Inclusive Makerspaces

Abstract

In this paper we will draw upon a number of case studies of family making that we are collecting at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Our primary objective in analyzing these cases is to identify the core practices of family making activity and to trace the ways that the tools, materials, and human facilitation in the museum support and enable the practices.

We describe our framework as a practical learning theory that draws from several traditions that are currently being used to research making, including constructionism, socio-cultural theory, and distributed cognition. We build from prior work that has identified maker practices among adult and youth makers (Bevan, et al., in press; Authors, in press).

Families with children ages 4 to 7-years old were videotaped as they used the museum making space. For some families, there were also interviews about other activities outside the museum. Videotapes were transcribed and analyzed in various ways, depending on the specific study for which they were collected.

The videotaped archives of the family learning project at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh serve as data sources. We are constructing a collection of cases that illustrate the range of activity we observe in the MakeShop, a range of ages of children, and a range of demographics in families. The eventual collection will be about 15 families.

Analyses are still ongoing and results are preliminary at this point. From the literature and our preliminary analysis we have identified a preliminary set of core practices: explore & question; tinker, test, and iterate; seek out resources; hack and repurpose; combine and complexify; customize; and share. We present evidence for how these practices are enacted, focusing specifically on the role of facilitators, who play a critical role in creating a culture of learning within the space. We will explore how practices develop across multiple making experiences. We will note whether some practices are earlier and foundational for the youngest children and others are more advanced and appropriate for older children. We will ask how family resources (such as making experience or access to particular tools, material, and expertise) are supported, or not supported, within the space.

The integration of making into the design of informal learning environments is pushing the fields of research and practice to reconsider previously held models of what family learning looks like in the museum setting, and how to design to support such learning. Broadening our lens of analysis to account for the function of flexible material and social resources as mediators of social practice helps us to better define, locate and trace the elements of design that influence learning through making as a domain of participation, and to support museums and their changing role in the learning lives of families.

Authors

• Kevin Crowley, University of Pittsburgh

• Lisa Brahms, Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

• Peter Wardrip, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh