What are your tracking methods to quantify your research? I think supporting hands-on experiences for young learners is crucial to reach a wide variety of learners. What are you doing to promote diversity and inclusivity in your project? Are there methods with recruiting and implementation that you use to promote student engagement? Great project!

Hi Araina,

Thanks for the great questions! We are not quantifying our work. Our work is mostly ethnographic. We are working in two sites now that are almost completely students from ethnic groups underrepresented in STEM. We hope that our project helps to expand what is possible in makerspaces and in schools by observing a diverse range of young people. With recruiting we have partnerships with informal sites and schools and so we recruit through them. We will be trying out our literacy tools in the year to come.

Dear Eli, Brian, Aditi, and your team,
This is an interesting project and your findings will undoubtedly have very useful implications for STEM educators in elementary, middle, and high school. I especially love the idea of bridging in-school and out of school learning. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the ways in which the activities in each of the three years relate to and inform one another. Are you hoping to see whether or not the literacy practices that you discovered during your initial work with adults translate directly to maker spaces with children and young adults, or are you looking for new literacy practices? It sounds like Year 3 is really the year when you “apply” what you’ve learned in Years 1 and 2 – do you expect to get teachers involved at that phase? Thank you very much for sharing your work!

Hi Victor – thank you for the excellent question! We designed the study to build from year to year. In our first year, we interviewed experienced makers from a variety of making areas – artists, engineers, entrepreneurs – where we we began the work of developing our frameworks for making processes as well as literacy practices. The analysis of those interviews led to a version of the frameworks that was used to develop observation protocols and coding schemes for understanding the data from our observations in the two adult makerspaces in the second part of Year 1. Year 2 has focused on taking the frameworks iterated on in Year 1 into spaces where youth are making in order to look for similarities, differences. Ultimately, we want to describe ways of connecting the literacy practices youth bring to the spaces with those STEM literacy practices we observed the adult, experienced makers enacting in their work. We don’t necessarily want young people to emulate the adults, we want to expand the possibilities for what counts as STEM learning in informal spaces and in schools. As we continue to refine and focus the frameworks, we have begun to design supports that will hopefully encourage the development of STEM literacies within youth makerspaces, both in informal settings and in schools in Year 3. In a way, you are correct that year 3 is where we will “apply” our work, but the development of our framework is an application of our work as well. We have also begun piloting supports in year 2. In year 3, we will work closely with teachers at our partner sites to think about their content needs, existing literacy practices, and ways of engaging students in making to further develop bridges between learning in school and learning in after-school, makerspace contexts. We hope this work will help to not only describe supports for students interested in learning STEM through making, but also present ways of connecting the “stuff schools need to do” to activities in makerspaces using literacies as a substantive, and generative bridge. Thanks again for your question! Happy to answer more.

Dear Eli, Brian, and Aditi,
What exciting work! Thanks so much for sharing. Can you expand a bit more on the supports you will be developing for students, schools, and informal science education institutions in years 2 and 3? And, how will you disseminate these? I’d love to know more.

#teamEli – I love that you are working with makerspaces! Could you speak a bit more about the population of students you are working with and how often the students are engaged in the makerspace? Are these students opting in to attend the makerspace (versus compulsory attendance), and if so, how could you broaden the group that attends? Great video!

A very interesting project! How often and for how long are students in phase 2 and 3 involved in making activities? How do you decide what types of making activities to offer? Do you work with the facilitators in these settings?