Director’s Take: Making Culture
From the July 2018 ExCITeCast
This episode, we’ve focused on “making”, which is impacting all levels of education. Making links advances in technology, fabrication, design, learning sciences, and pedgogy to foster creativity and lifelong learning. Like many others, we view makerspaces as a transformative environment for learning and integrating knowledge, not just for innovation and entrepreneurship, but for making meaning of the world, which is the ultimate goal of education.
We just released our report, Making Culture, and its loaded with information and recommendations for those considering makerspaces, particularly in K-12. Our target audience is school leadership and decision makers, those who have or are considering creating makerspaces, but there’s relevant material for anyone interested in making. We hope you’ll give it a read and also send us your feedback at excite@drexel.edu.
As you know, the ExCITe Center was established by Drexel to champion a collaborative approach that tightly couples transdisciplinary research and education. The Center has become a leader in training undergraduate and graduate students across a range of maker efforts, also translating into STEAM outreach programs currently serving local middle and high school students. Our maker research lays the groundwork for the next phase of efforts at ExCITe. From the report, we know that most education makerspaces, are not as inclusive or welcoming to women and minorities as they should be. This is true at all levels, though it’s particularly impactful and potentially life-altering in K-12. At ExCITe, we remain absolutely committed to advancing not only cutting edge STEAM maker programs, but those that are fully inclusive of our city’s largely minority population. We fully believe this is the future of urban education.
In the upcoming months, we will be developing this next phase, which includes changes to our facility, new programs, and some new faces. I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Kareem Edouard, our postdoctoral fellow who led our research for the report who you heard from earlier in the podcast, will be joining the Drexel faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education. This speaks to Drexel and ExCITe’s unique commitment to this vision for the future of learning: transdisciplinary making that is inclusive to all. Look for more on this topic in our next episode, continuing our ExCITeCast series on education innovation.
The Director’s Take is my regular commentary and reflection for ExCITeCast, the monthly podcast of the ExCITe Center. An archive of all past episodes is available on SoundCloud. Look for new episodes on the first Tuesday of (almost) every month.
