Introduction

In an old mayonnaise factory that has been repurposed as a tinkering school in San Francisco, California, a group of children measure, saw, and screw together wood planks and other building materials to make a functional ice rink that they fully expect to play hockey on within a matter of days. Meanwhile, across the country, unschooled and homeschooled students working in a storefront outside of Boston mash together an assortment of spare electronic parts to make tiny robots that scamper across the floor. While families in Detroit gather in a church basement after Sunday service to make snow globes out of household materials and learn the basics of bicycle maintenance, families in New Mexico visit rural libraries to learn how to connect fruits and vegetables to a device called a Makey-Makey. At the same time, visitors to a children's museum in Pittsburgh are learning the basics of electric circuitry alongside their siblings and parents. Back in California, first-generation public high school students work with their teacher to redesign their school's outdoor spaces, just as students at a private school around the corner research, design, and construct new furniture for themselves and their community. Across these disparate contexts, each of these learning environments provides a glimpse into an educational transformation that is sweeping across the United States-and around the globe.

The first Maker Faire, held in San Mateo, California, in 2006, marked a resurgence of interest in making things-as opposed to merely consuming them-while at the same time celebrating the gizmos and gadgetry of contemporary life. Since that event, small and large-scale maker events have drawn crowds and inspired makers throughout the United States and around the world (Figure I.1). From basement workshops to massive cooperative makerspaces, interest in making has since been growing. Noting the significance of this trend, in 2014 the White House hosted its first ever Maker Faire and established June 18 as a National Day of Making.1 In his address to the makers assembled for this historic event, President Barack Obama remarked:

FIGURE I.1: Young visitors to the 2014 World Maker Faire engage with an interactive LED exhibit at the New York Hall of Science.

This is a country that imagined a railroad connecting a continent, imagined electricity powering our cities and towns, imagined skyscrapers reaching into the heavens, and an Internet that brings us closer together. So we imagined these things, then we did them. And that's in our DNA. That's who we are. We're not done yet. And I hope every company, every college, every community, every citizen joins us as we lift up makers and builders and doers across the country.2

Beyond the White House, scores of advocacy statements emphasizing the importance of making have spread throughout the media and the popular press.3 As author and inventor Chris Anderson noted in his book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, the next wave of manufacturing and entrepreneurship will be borne of the talents and shared ideas developed by makers.4 A surge of voices from government, industry, and education further argued that to equip our young people for this next wave of entrepreneurship and innovation, it is important to support maker-centered learning in various educational environments. Whether in schools, after-school settings, libraries, or museums, an interest in providing opportunities and spaces for making has spread everywhere. This renewed interest in making has come to be known as the maker movement-a rising interest in sharing and learning from others while working with one's hands within interdisciplinary environments that combine a variety of tools and technologies.

Intrigued by the relationship between maker experiences, arts, and education, the Bay Area-based Abundance Foundation began to take notice.5 With a deep commitment to public health, arts education, and empowerment initiatives, members of the foundation asked some compelling questions: What is the potential of bringing maker activities into educational settings? What might young people uniquely learn through maker experiences? What does making in schools currently look like? With these questions in mind, the foundation reached out to Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see if there might be an opportunity to explore these questions together.

Project Zero was founded in 1967 by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to study and improve education in the arts. Goodman believed that arts learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity but that "zero" had yet been firmly established about the field; hence, the project was given its name. Over the years Project Zero has maintained a strong research agenda in the arts while gradually expanding to include other areas of inquiry related to thinking and learning. With its current emphasis on interdisciplinarity, creativity, and multiple modes of learning, the maker movement presented an interesting opportunity for Project Zero to expand its research and to investigate if (and how) educational interventions could support maker-centered learning-and what their benefits might be. Thus, in spring 2012, backed by the support of the Abundance Foundation, the Agency by Design project was born.

Since its inception, the Agency by Design research team has endeavored to gain an understanding of the benefits of maker-centered learning and the pedagogies and practices that support it. To better understand this opportunity space, the Agency by Design team pursued three strands of inquiry: (1) a review of literature associated with maker-centered learning; (2) a series of site visits to a variety of maker-centered learning environments paired with formal interviews conducted with maker educators and thought leaders at the forefront of this emergent domain; and (3) a program of participatory research carried out first with a group of educators in Oakland, California, and later with a national learning community consisting of individuals representing maker-centered learning environments throughout the United States.

What the Agency by Design research team quickly discovered was that, while making in the classroom was not a new concept, maker-centered learning suggested a new kind of hands-on pedagogy-a pedagogy that encourages community and collaboration (a do-it-together mentality), distributed teaching and learning, boundary crossing, and responsive and flexible teacher practices. This book, Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds, presents what our team has learned about this new pedagogical trend throughout our three years of research.

What Is a Maker? And What Is Maker-Centered-Learning?

As authors of a book titled Maker-Centered Learning, we feel responsible for articulating what we mean by maker and maker-centered learning. We recognize that some readers will arrive at this text with strong associations, and others may be unfamiliar with how they have come to be used. With this in mind, here and in the chapters ahead we have made a concerted effort to discuss maker-centered learning in a way that both invites newcomers into this landscape and also pushes the boundaries of what more-established maker-centered educators and advocates understand about this work. Whether readers of this book are members of the initiated, the uninitiated, or somewhere in between, we hope that the definitions offered will be illuminating for all.

For most people, the word maker conjures up images of people working with their hands-designing, building, and crafting. Seen in this light, maker is a noun: a way to describe someone who engages in the act of making, perhaps even a profession, like artist or sculptor or crafter. A maker might be someone who bakes bread or someone who quenches steel; she might be someone who builds chairs or someone who paints portraits. Ultimately, a maker is not a special title one achieves after gaining entry into an esoteric social club but rather is someone-anyone-who makes things. By understanding maker in this way, the maker community can be viewed as being inclusive, embracing, and welcoming to all those who make.

Often, though, a quick scan of the media coverage of the maker movement emphasizes a certain type of maker: hackers with expertise in robotics, information technology, and electronics, working with innovative tools and technologies such as 3-D printers, microcontrollers, and computer numerically controlled (CNC) tools. As designer, engineer, and educator Leah Buechley criticizes,6 this narrow representation of makers places limits and constraints on the types of people who are identified as makers. To be more specific, she argues that the maker movement, as it has been portrayed in the popular press, can be seen as favoring the work and interests of white, middle-class males.7

Conjoining the terms maker with movement may add to the exclusivity of the phrase, because participating in a movement implies belonging and identity. As educational researchers Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan note, the word maker "describes the identities of participation . that people take on within the maker movement."8 Being part of a community implies being connected to its practices, norms, and responsibilities, which may leave some people wondering: Can I...