Making to Empower Teacher Problem Posing and Design
Digital fabrication skills and interdisciplinary community of practice help teachers address classroom problems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21240/constr/2025/96.XKeywords:
Educational making, Teachers as learners, Teachers as designersAbstract
Research on educational making and makerspaces, especially in school contexts, concerns students’ experiences and learning in makerspaces. We position disciplinary classroom teachers as learners and focus on their experiences of maker skills and technologies, specifically how they identify and design solutions to problems of their own classroom practice. Across a semester-long, 60-hour course, 16 pre- and in-service teachers from 10 different disciplines identified problems of practice and iteratively designed technologies to address them. We characterize the problems they identified as well as the solutions they designed. We also illustrate how an interdisciplinary community of practice arose as an unexpected but noteworthy resource in teachers’ reflections on their workshop experiences. Our findings underscore the value of opening the constructionist learning opportunities afforded by making not only to student learners but to their teachers as well.References
Akuom, D., & Greenstein, S. (2022). The Nature of Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Designed Manipulatives and their Potential as Anchors for Conceptual and Pedagogical Knowledge. Journal of Research in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 5, 109–125.
Blikstein, P. (2013). Digital fabrication and ‘making’ in education: The democratization of invention. FabLabs: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors, 4(1), 1–21.
Blikstein, P., Davis, R. L., Rosenbaum, L. F., Zheng, Y., Halverson, E. R., Martin, L., Peppler, K., Thomas Murphy, C., Vossoughi, S., Worsley, M., Yankova, N., & Hooper, P. K. (2023). The Future of Maker Education. Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, 1650–1658.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101.
Brown, M., & Edelson, D. (2003). Teaching as design: Can we better understand the ways in which teachers use materials so we can better design materials to support their changes in practice. Evanston, IL: The Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools.
Fernandez, C., Hochgreb-Haegele, T., Eloy, A., & Blikstein, P. (2024). Making for science: A framework for the design of physical materials for science learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 72(1), 59–82.
Greenstein, S., & Olmanson, J. (2018). Reconceptualizing pedagogical and curricular knowledge development through making. The Emerging Learning Design Journal, 4(1), 2.
Halverson, E. R., & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 495–504.
Harron, J. R., Jin, Y., Hillen, A., Mason, L., & Siegel, L. (2022). Maker math: Exploring mathematics through digitally fabricated tools with K–12 in-service teachers. Mathematics, 10(17), 3069.
Henriksen, D., & Richardson, C. (2017). Teachers are designers: Addressing problems of practice in education. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(2), 60–64.
Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2010). The teacher as designer: Pedagogy in the new media age. E-Learning and Digital Media, 7(3), 200–222.
Kali, Y., McKenney, S., & Sagy, O. (2015). Teachers as designers of technology enhanced learning. Instructional Science, 43, 173–179.
Kim, M. S. (2015). Empowering prospective teachers to become active sense-makers: Multimodal modeling of the seasons. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 24, 610–627.
Kirschner, P. A. (2015). Do we need teachers as designers of technology enhanced learning? Instructional Science, 43, 309–322.
Martinez, S. L., & Stager, G. (2013). Invent to learn. Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Torrance, Canada: Constructing Modern Knowledge.
Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books.
Peppler, K., Halverson, E. R., & Kafai, Y. B. (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Volume 1) (Vol. 1). Routledge.
Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1991). Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete. Constructionism.
Wilson, L. O. (2016). Anderson and Krathwohl–Bloom’s taxonomy revised. Understanding the New Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Downloads
Published
Conference Proceedings Volume
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Leah Rosenbaum, Paulo Blikstein, Engin Bumbacher
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
