Leadership Dynamics Between Teachers and Students in a School-Based Makerspace

• In Event: Making the Future: Addressing Critiques, Transitions, and New Challenges in Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives: As a response to the current curriculum reform in Finland, schools are locally implementing novel learning environments, such as makerspaces, to foster student-centered, interest-driven, collaborative, and creative learning (e.g. Authors, 2019a; Dougherty, 2016; Peppler, Halverson, & Kafai, 2016). Instead of teachers acting as experts, in school-based makerspaces students are provided with opportunities to take responsibility over their learning (Authors, 2019b; Penney, 2016; Stevens, et al., 2016), and to take leadership in organizing their learning activities (Authors, 2019a; Griffin et al., 2012).
Although earlier research has pointed out the changing roles of the teacher and students in makerspaces, little research attention has so far been directed to understanding the dynamics and conditions of leadership in these settings (Authors, 2019a). In this study, we examine leadership dynamics between teachers and students in a school-based makerspace by utilizing the concept of distributed leadership, which views leadership as shared, and emerging in the interactions between individuals and the social environment (Gumus et al., 2016; Mercier et al., 2014; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004; Sun et al., 2017). We ask, how leadership is manifested and distributed between teachers and students in a school-based makerspace?
Methods: The data were collected in a school-based makerspace, the FUSE Studio (Stevens et al., 2016), in a Finnish elementary school. The FUSE Studio constitutes of a web-based studio environment and hands-on material kits, which the students use to complete STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) design challenges. Through an inductive interaction analysis (Derry et al., 2010; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) of video records of 6 teachers and 94 students (aged 10-12 years old), we focus on analyzing how leadership was distributed between the teachers and students working in the FUSE Studio makerspace. Using an interactional episode as a unit of analysis, we identified qualitatively different leadership dynamics, namely teacher-led, shared, and student-led interactional episodes (see also Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond, 2004).
Results: The results show that teacher leadership was characterized by the teacher taking control over the tools and materials the students were using, giving guidance, and/or organizing the collaborative work. Shared leadership was realized in interactional episodes in which both the teacher and students steered the activity, coordinated collaborative work, mapped available resources, and engaged in exploring new ideas and taking part in the design and making activity together. In student leadership, the students took a clear lead in organizing and managing their collaborative work. The teacher typically stood back, looking over the students’ activity, and facilitated the student-led work when needed.
Significance: Our study makes an important conceptual contribution to analyzing the complex social activities in a makerspace learning environment via the notion of distributed leadership. However, as leadership depends on how it is shared, received, and enacted (Harris & DeFlaminis, 2016), it is useful to further investigate the type of infrastructure and conditions that give rise to and can promote varied leadership dynamics between students and teachers in different types of school-based makerspaces.

Authors

• Jasmiina Leskinen, University of Helsinki

• Anu Kajamaa, University of Helsinki

• Kristiina P. Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki