Assessing Making Experiences in Public Library Programs

• In Event: Measuring Making: Methods, Tools, and Strategies for Capturing Learning, Participation, and Engagement in Maker Activities

Abstract

Public libraries occupy a prominent place in the Maker Movement as democratized spaces that serve as community hubs where a range of participants access tools and resources for learning. Unlike makerspaces that often require membership fees and regular attendance, or museum-based makerspaces that sit behind a museum admissions paywall, library-based makerspaces are free resources that attract a diverse group of participants through inreach and outreach programming. Many librarians, maker educators, and independent maker groups have embraced the libraries as spaces for making and innovation across diverse communities (Hamilton & Schmidt, 2015).

In our own community, we have been engaged in a multi-year program design and research effort around Bubbler, the maker arm of Madison Public Libraries. Bubbler’s mission, “Learn. Share. Create.” has helped making to become a core service of MPL. We call Bubbler a “systemwide makerspace”, created through external partnerships that brought different groups together at the same time, specific structural features that mark a commitment to a systemwide perspective, and a set of practices that afford multiple, simultaneous constructions of diversity (Halverson, Lakind, & Willett, 2017). The structural features have allowed maker programming to flourish: Each library has a Bubbler Rep who oversees local programming; Bubbler leadership has built a Bubbler Menu for shared programming as well as a series of kits that can be used in-house or taken to outreach programs for mobile making experiences and; Bubbler has partnered with Maker Ed to participate in the Makercorps program that brings young maker educators to MPL for the summer.

Because libraries have historically served as places for informal learning where patrons choose their own path through library resources and programming, assessment has not figured prominently in the work of library-based making. However, the emergence of libraries as thought leaders around maker education has created a need for tools and practices of assessing what participants are getting from their making experiences. During this phase of our work, we have sought to develop and test tools for examining what young people are getting out of their participation in Bubbler programs, both in and out of the libraries.

In this poster, we share three types of “on the ground” assessments that we have developed and tested for assessing young peoples’ learning in and through making:
--Artist-interview assessment. In this process, we use a series of questions developed in earlier work on how young artists learn about representation and literacy through art-making (Halverson, 2013).
--Reggio Emilia-inspired documentation. Drawn from the documentation practices of the Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 2008), maker educators document youth making in action through photos and field notes, ask makers questions as they are making, and represent this collection of artifacts online as a representation of developing understanding.
--Learning dimensions framework. A set of tools inspired by the Exploratorium’s Learning Dimensions Framework (Gutwill, Hido & Sindorf, 2015) that allow us to identify evidence of engagement, initiative, and social scaffolding throughout a single program session.

Authors

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Rebecca Millerjohn, Madison Public Libraries