Makerspaces at Scale: Hacking the Design and Technology Instructional Strategy of Singaporean Schools

• In Event: 34.028 - From Making to Agentic Participation: Perspectives on and Approaches to Fostering Epistemic Engagement in Making

Abstract

Makerspaces have enjoyed recent media and scholarly attention as innovative sites for STEM learning, with much of the actual research being carried out in small settings, and with a fairly wide diversity of approaches to makerspace instruction. While not opposed to diversity, this state of affairs also means that the possible educative value of makerspaces can become diluted as interpretations of what making and maker education constitute compete for educators’ and policymakers’ attention. In school systems with strong pressure to comply with increasing accountability practices, makerspace instruction may become co-opted to obtain fairly low level outcomes for students, replicating the effects of early adoption of information technology in schools circa the 1980s.

In considering the educative value of makerspaces, the low hanging fruit appears to be concepts in the STEM subjects; especially with the recent introduction of Common Core standards advocating engineering principles; it is fairly obvious that experiences in makerspaces appear as an ideal instructional strategy. However, for teachers with experience in science laboratory classes, such lessons can easily become modified ‘lab sessions’ heavy on communicating certain privileged, explicit forms of knowledge, and less on the nurturance of dispositions and tacit knowledges that can come from material interactions with an ‘unruly reality’ that may not behave as the equations predict. Further, if making is to be a goal of makerspace activity, and there is a desire to not make spurious objects destined for the landfill, then an emphasis on conscious attempts to design for an authentic, pro-social purpose needs to feature in the making experience too.

The Singapore education system presents an interesting case to study; while on the one hand possessing an education system producing students who regularly top international comparisons of Science and Mathematics performance, it does not have a rate of technological innovativeness that appears to have demonstrably taken advantage of this expertise in novel ways. While the reasons for this are complex, one implication of this state of affairs is that there at least ought to be a part of schooling where students have a chance of experiencing innovation for themselves. With this consideration in mind, design and technology was chosen as subject to modify to achieve these goals. With three basic instructional principles, we proceeded to advise teachers of instructional strategies to address this perceived innovation gap. Key to understanding these pedagogical innovations was a deliberate strategy to devolve epistemic authority to students—teachers were advised to help students see value in their creations, and to help bring these initial ideas into a more complete ‘blossoming’, rather than seeing partial ideas not up to canonical forms and therefore found inadequate.

In this presentation, I will reveal initial data from an exploratory mixed methods study across eight different schools of varying demographics. The data presents an interesting look at how much change can happen when makerspace principles are applied at scale through numerous idiosyncratic interpretations of a rather liberal set of principles, and what stands in the way of more desirable change.

Author

• Michael Tan, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University