Earlier this month, Citizen Schools’ Maker Fellows participated in the Maker Fellows Institute, a 4-day immersive learning experience focused on introducing this year’s cohort to the pedagogy and research, techniques and tools that will support their efforts to create more opportunities for K-12 students to engage in maker-centered learning. We define maker-centered learning as students physically engaging their bodies in the tactile processes of designing, creating, prototyping and building.

The Maker Fellows program will connect over 25,000 K-12 students to maker-centered learning opportunities that help students build the academic and social emotional skills key to their success in school, postsecondary enrollment and workforce placement. Through service in their local communities and participation in targeted professional development, Maker Fellows will launch a career as leaders and champions of maker-centered learning and mentorship for underserved students.

During the Institute, the Fellows engaged in a combination of hands-on activities, whole group discussion and processing and individual and group reflection. The Institute serves as a launch pad for the Learning Pathway, a year-long professional and leadership development program that all 26 Fellows will go through as they serve at their host sites in 20 communities across the U.S. Citizen Schools partnered with Maker Ed to co-design, host the Institute and support the first 6 months of the Learning Pathway. Maker Ed is a leading non-profit organization focused on harnessing the potential of making to transform teaching and learning.

The Fellows kicked-off the Institute by immersing themselves in an exploration of light and shadow, experiencing maker-centered learning first-hand as learners. They then reflected on their experience and the design of the activity as educators, using the Exploratorium’s Learning Dimensions of Making and Tinkering to identify learning key values and outcomes. . Throughout, they also had the opportunity to share and reflect together about why they chose to serve as Maker Fellows. 

Equity is a focus in Fellows’ efforts to grow maker-centered learning in their communities. During the Institute they discussed how Barbara Love’s work on liberatory consciousness and Zaretta Hammond’s research on culturally responsive teaching could be used to design maker activities that enable students to develop their cognitive capacities and critical consciousness.

The Fellows also spent time working with their host-site supervisors on mapping existing stakeholders that they work with. They then identified new stakeholders that they would like to collaborate with on a project or initiative and what outreach to these organizations could look like.

To better understand how to address some of the key challenges related to the work at their host sites, each Fellow identified an essential question that they felt needed further exploration and investigation. Based on these questions, the Fellows then worked in small groups to decide on three overarching questions which will drive the activities of three separate inquiry groups over the next 6 months:

• How do we create partnerships with community stakeholders which will last for years to come?

• How might we best facilitate the connections between makerspaces and students, students and teachers and across disciplines in an equitable way?

• In what ways can we redefine a makerspace to effectively use adapted resources to make a difference for ALL students? 

On the last day of the Institute, the Maker Fellows and host-site supervisors were joined by key program supporters, which included leaders from Arconic Foundation, Corporation for National and Community Service, Department of Defense, National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship and Schmidt Futures for an interactive conversation.

Louie Lopez, Department of Defense (DoD) STEM & Cooperative Agreement Manager, Defense Stem Education Consortium (DSEC) described DoD’s commitment to supporting hands-on STEM learning: “The Department of Defense is very much invested in STEM education. In 2020, in all of our Components, from the Army, Navy, Air Force and some of our intelligence community we invested just a little over $200 million in activities across K-20.”

Jeff Smith, Director of Innovation and Equity, National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship wrote and performed a beautiful song to express how important the Maker Fellows are at this moment in time.

Maggie Crum, a Maker Fellow at Northern Kentucky Makerspace described how her experience during the Institute further reinforced the ways in which “maker-centered learning is a perfect way to meaningfully engage students from diverse cultural backgrounds.” 

David Roy, a Maker Fellow at Columbia Memorial Space Center described how the week made him think “about the many different ways that making can exist; it resists a singular definition.”