Building a Culture of Making; Not a Cult
“Experience is the teacher of all things.” This little bit of educational wisdom comes from Julius Caesar, so as pedagogy goes it is pretty foundational. Almost 2000 years later Albert Einstein would say, “The only source of knowledge is experience.” There is a lot of wiggle room in both of these statements despite their all inclusive language (do I have to have the experience or can I learn from your experience? Is reading a description of someones experience enough to allow me to gain knowledge? Is that reading an experience in and of itself?), but the key fact is that experience is the best way to gain knowledge. How much better may be open to debate, but it is hard to argue that making a discovery for yourself does not stick with you better than reading about a discovery made by others. After shouting Eureka! Eureka! it is unlikely that Archimedes forgot many of his revelations about the displacement of water. Certainly not as much as I have forgotten from the physics text book where I learned about his story.
But the story of education in America has been one largely built on knowledge acquisition without direct experience. A teacher stands at the front of a room and drops some knowledge on their students, which they soak up like sponges to be squeezed out at test time. This is an especially apt metaphor since every teacher knows that after the test most of that knowledge truly does seep away and will need to be soaked back up again for the final exam… and again for the standardized exam. There have been a few direct experience venues in schools and they center around the arts, athletics, and sometimes the sciences. Science, in particular, is an interesting test case.
What is the real point of science class?
I come from a family where science was pretty central. Both my father and brother have PhD’s in the Biology branch of science. My mother, for most of her career, was a lawyer… which is kind of like being a scientist of the law. I am not a scientist, though science finds its way into my artwork and my casual interests. I had the same home life as my brother, went to the same high school and had many of the same science teachers. Why did he go down that path and I went down a very different one?
I found science classes to be incredibly pointless. Here’s how it seemed to me: There have been many scientists who have figured out incredible things. My job as a student was to learn all of these incredible things and then perform experiments that proved that these incredible things were, in fact, true. Occasionally these experiments failed and I was assured that no, I had not proved that Galileo was wrong about different sized objects falling at the same rate, but that I had simply performed the experiment wrong. Regardless of how the experiment went, I was expected to memorize the information for the test.
I never understood what the point of these “experiments” was. Not only was the outcome predetermined, but I had been told what the outcome would be before it was even set up. It would be more accurate to call these activities “demonstrations”. I do remember being taught about the scientific method but I don’t remember actually applying it to anything until my college Animal Behavior class when I designed an experiment about squirrels and different colored nuts (sadly unpublished to this day!). The scientific method was something that other people used to come up with brilliant discoveries. If I wanted to do that as well I would have to… become a scientist.
And that is the root of the conundrum. What is science class for? Is it to teach kids about what science has already done? Or is it to teach kids how to be a scientist? In order to teach kids to be scientists, you have to give them the experience of being a scientist. Part of that experience is learning about what has come before, but that knowledge now serves the purpose of doing science. Without that experience, it seems to me that the only way you become a scientist is by having a “talent” or some outside experience that makes you think about yourself as a scientist. That gives you the drive to jump through all the hoops necessary to get to the point where you can do “real science”.
Making Makers
Now many schools have a new venue for direct experience, the Makerspace. Here students can build, code, invent and design real objects. A space full of tools, technology, ideas and experiments seems like the perfect place in which to inspire experimentation and risk taking. This is why Makerspaces exist in the world after all. Joining a local Makerspace means gaining access to tools and materials to help you work on your projects as well as access to people who can help you along the way.
But just as a school may not be comparable to a science lab, a school is not a Makerspace either. A school's function is to educate, empower and inspire its students, all of its students. Simply putting the tools out there and waiting for like minded students to come to them does not seem to me to fit that goal. There should be as many on-ramps for students to experience the Makerspace as possible. Students who have already identified themselves as makers, tinkerers or hackers will find the space as soon as possible. Students who may not yet think of themselves in that way, or think that what happens in the Makerspace is "not for them" (either because of their perception of themselves, or worse, others' perception of them) should be given a chance to try it on for size. They might just find that it fits.
I believe that the mission of a good school Makerspace is to find relevant and meaningful ways to reach the students of every content area of the school. In the Makerspace that I coordinate I have worked with teachers in Foreign languages, English, History, Math, Science, Art and Health classes. Students get a chance to respond to content goals by creating objects that demonstrate their understanding of a unit or subject. Some of these projects are relatively specific and dictate a certain version of an end product, like this middle school fractions project. Others allow for a wide range of options with students taking the driver's seat on what the final result will look like, as in the African American history project:
These projects involve students who may never sign up for a Makerspace, tech or engineering class but who might still have interests in making related activities. They help them understand that digital fabrication applies to more than just robots and the internet of things. It can be used to bring their ideas into the world, regardless of content.
A Culture, Not A Cult
I didn’t have an experience in an art class that inspired me to be an artist. If anything, I had experiences in public school art that could have dissuaded me from it. I asked my father, brother and mother about what inspired them to take their career paths, and they all told a similar story. Experiences in the world, with family, outside of school, put them on their paths. Not experiences in classrooms.
A cult is a group of people who bond together due to a common belief; religious, spiritual or philosophical. It becomes a self-reinforcing society and usually the people who join look more and more like each other. Varying viewpoints, backgrounds and interests are not only not supported but are actively discouraged or shunned. In the tech world it is pretty easy to see this play out in the white, male dominated video game industry. The same problems are met with the same solutions; how to make action more realistic and exciting and the game characters look like the game designers. Games that don’t fit the mold are shut down because they don’t fit the standard market.
A culture, on the other hand, is open. Open to new ideas, open to diverse perspectives and open to diverse people. Culture is for everyone who is interested in taking part. An example of this is the Smithsonian Institution’s museums on the National Mall. Museums of art, science, history, engineering are all there, open to the public, willing to share their knowledge and help foster the creation of new ideas. It’s not perfect, no system is, but it tries to get better through inviting difference, rather than stamping it out. The success of the malls newest museum, the National Museum of African American Culture and Heritage, is an example of expanding what it means to be an American through inclusion of diverse stories, rather than exclusion.
A great school Makerspace should work to create a culture of making, not a cult. It needs to include self proclaimed techies, geeks, hackers and the like, but it also needs to invite artists, writers, performers, athletes, mathematicians, politicians, and those that are currently “undeclared” in their interests. The new industrial revolution of digital fabrication will apply to those fields as much as robotics and engineering.
The Maker Studio
I’m no sicientist, but I’ve recently had an early data point in this experiment. After two trimesters of being the coordinator at my school of the Bullis BITlab, I had the opportunity to offer an after school Maker activity called Maker Studio. In the previous two trimesters there had been engineering, maker, robotics and STEM classes in the Makerspace, and there had been content based classes with foreign language, history, English, math, visual art and science classes. The question I had was, who would sign up to do this activity? Would it be those who had already declared an intereste in STEM fields and had taken classes in the space? Or would others from different areas join as well? What would the Makerspace look like in terms of diversity of both background and interests?
With 18 students in the group, 9 of them have not yet taken a class or STEM related activity in the space. They are distributed among 9–12th grades. Several are interested in art related fields, others are interested in coding and physical computing, some in making, some in business. The group is fifty percent female and fifty percent non-white. I know enough from my high school science class that this is a small sample size and does not prove anything about my hypothesis, but I call it a good start.
Schools are building Makerspaces at a rapid pace. They range from certified Fab Lab’s like the one I manage to library corners with Legos and craft supplies. All of them include tools for creativity and innovation to allow students to experience what it is like to make their ideas into real things. The question remains, however, how that experience will be delivered. I believe the best practice for any school Makerspace is to create a culture of making for all students, not just those who already see themselves as makers. Because, after all, we are all makers.
