In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for working-class students and students of color. After reviewing various perspectives on making as educative practice, they present a framework that treats the following principles as starting points for equity-oriented research and design: critical analyses of educational injustice; historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. These principles are grounded in their own research and teaching in the Tinkering Afterschool Program as well as in the insights and questions raised by critical voices both inside and outside the maker movement.

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In this 50th anniversary of the Jean Piaget Society, we have been asked to celebrate “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (2006) – winner of the 1988 AERA award for outstanding research contribution in the areas of teaching and teacher education, now in its 3rd edition, published on four continents, in 7 languages. We have taken the name that Inhelder gave to Piaget's research method — Critical Exploration — as the basis for the name of our approach to teaching — Critical Exploration in the Classroom. In this paper we talk about what that name and this book mean to our teaching and to constructivism.