"You Have to Make a Makerspace": Intra-Active Scaling of a Youth-Serving Makerspace

• In Event: 14.046 - Poster Session 1
  In Poster Session: 14.046-4 - Design and Research in Learning Environments

Abstract

Making durable and reliable youth-serving makerspaces means that the materials purchased today foster and support tomorrow’s unanticipated learning goals. This is a challenge of scale, where purposes and possibilities grow while furniture, tools, and craft supplies remain. Taking a material feminist perspective on scale as recursive transformation of educational possibilities, we observed three material assemblages in an urban youth-serving, out-of-school makerspace in the Eastern United States: a 3D printer workstation, a centerpiece project, and table furniture. We found that intra-active encounters in loosely joined assemblages caused unexpected relationships that casted new educational goals, replicated educational values, and spread new educational goals. Looking at scale as intra-active becoming helped recognize specific material aspects that supported recursive transformation of the learning space.

Authors

• Anna Keune, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington