Читать книгу The Kickstart Guide to Making GREAT Makerspaces - Laura Fleming - Страница 14

4 Equitable

Create an inclusive learning environment that encourages tinkering, play, and open-ended exploration for all.

GREAT makerspaces are equitable. They democratize learning by making materials, supplies, and concepts available and accessible to all learners. By properly planning your makerspace, you can build an environment that provides equity of opportunity, as well as one that levels the academic playing field for your students.

One important attribute of an inclusive makerspace is that it encourages tinkering, play, and open-ended exploration for everyone. GREAT makerspaces are not open and available to just an elite portion of the student body, nor are they just a reward for students who are high achievers or behave well. The students who visit our makerspace most frequently are those who might otherwise never have earned the chance to do so. These are the same students who have gone on to do and make the most amazing things in our space. Take, for example, Brian. Brian was disengaged, uninterested, and withdrawn at school. He put forth no effort in his regular classes and therefore was not performing well. On his own time, Brian began visiting our makerspace. It was clear from the beginning that Brian got a lot of enjoyment out of working with his hands in the authentic ways our makerspace offered him. He began visiting our makerspace’s Take Apart Tech Station on a daily basis. He became so interested in what he was doing in our space that he started to show up to school early and stay late. He took apart so many computers that he eventually challenged himself to put them back together so they worked again, sometimes even using a cardboard box as a case.

Photo courtesy of Laura Fleming

Other children became curious about Brian’s work, and he began developing friendships. Those friendships led him and his peers to form a team in which each student had a role in the process of taking apart and reassembling the technology. Finally, the students realized that they had a story to tell. These students, who all refused to read and write in their classrooms, started blogging about their experiences. At first they were concerned that their lack of writing skills would keep them from being able to accomplish this. I emphasized to them that many would benefit from reading about their experiences and that they simply should not let anything stand in their way. So they went home and filled their nights and weekends with writing about their journey. They worked together as a team in developing the blog, with some of the students recruited by their peers to be the writers, others the editors, and others the photographers. The teachers of these students began seeing a change in each student’s affect. The love for learning that they experienced in our makerspace went with them back into their classrooms, and their teachers not only found ways to integrate the work these students were doing into their classes, but they discovered that these students, who were once the most disengaged, were now the most engaged.

Making curricular connections in your makerspace can serve as a powerful means of building equity into your makerspace. Pay special attention to the classes offered in your school, as well as clubs and extracurricular activities. Pull out concepts that are frequently taught or available to a select number of students and make them available and accessible in your makerspace to anyone who has an interest. For example, in my school, an engineering class is taught in my building; however, only one engineering class is available and most of the students who enroll in that class are boys. I decided to include engineering concepts in my makerspace, borrowing from what was happening in the engineering class but making those things accessible to all students.

GREAT makerspaces democratize learning, but the question is:

How do we ultimately reach all learners?

Equity and access are at the heart of ensuring that all students have the opportunities available to them that school makerspaces present. Makerspaces should be designed for the highest amount of accessibility, taking into consideration the practice of universal design in education.

Increasing student access to making related materials can broaden physical makerspaces and help reach more of our learners. Just as students no longer need to be tied to a computer lab, making doesn’t have to be confined to the makerspace. Mobile makerspaces can liberate learners from the limitations of a physical makerspace. By transcending the traditional makerspace, students don’t have to come to a makerspace; you can take your makerspace to the students.

Several years ago, Principal Brad Gustafson and the Greenwood Elementary team collaborated on a new way to deliver hands-on and cutting-edge learning experiences to students. They invested in a fleet of kid-friendly carts that can be checked out like library books. The carts contain high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech tools recommended by students and staff. Today, their mobile makerspace fleet is capable of transforming any classroom or hallway into a space where students and staff are empowered to engineer, experiment, and fail forward.

Photo courtesy of Brad Gustafson

By mobilizing their makerspaces, they paved the way to an ethos of innovation as opposed to a single “destination space” reserved for innovative thinking. Brad believes that by putting cutting-edge tools into the hands of students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to engineer (or kids who might not naturally gravitate to science and math learning tools), his team is breaking down barriers and empowering a new generation of learners. It’s a matter of equity. He emphatically shares that all students deserve the opportunity to collaborate, create, and invent their future.

Brad has shared countless examples of the culture-spreading power of a mobile strategy. He’s also seeing teachers create “pop-up” makerspaces in their classrooms. Another benefit of mobile makerspaces is the ability to collaborate with other schools by sharing resources (e.g., ideas, supplies, and carts) at half the cost. When “making” becomes part of a classroom, school, and district culture, all students win, regardless of what classes they take or who their teacher is.

Brad provokes the question, “If students are living in a connected world (and I think they are), why would we limit their learning based on bricks, mortar, and artificial boundaries?”

Great Makerspaces Democratize Learning

Perhaps the most powerful attribute of a GREAT makerspace is that it democratizes learning. Makerspaces allow you to democratize learning by making materials, supplies, concepts, and resources available and accessible to all students, regardless of their proficiency level, social status, or even level of language development. On a daily basis, I have seen our makerspace successfully demonstrate this.

Photo courtesy of Kellyanne Burbage

How will you ensure that you reach all your learners?

Brainstorm your ideas here: