Designing Maker initiatives for educational inclusion

Abstract

The “Maker” movement is a cultural as well as educational phenomenon that has the potential to offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. The research reported in this paper, however, suggests that the simple provision of “Maker Spaces” for such activity is simplistic and not sufficient to realise this potential. The research involved a mixed methods study of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 26) in an Australian school located in a socio-economically disadvantaged outer-metropolitan region. The cohort undertook a range of Maker activities at a new “creativity centre” built at the school. Results indicate that the activities had positive impact on student attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) overall, but that the impact was highly specific across attitudinal constructs. A strong ranging effect was also evident, suggesting that the impact of the experience was highly dependent on students’ initial attitudes. Reflecting on these results, the paper also offers a reference framework that may help keep equity in mind when designing different kinds of Maker experience.

Problems of Education in Indonesia and Alternative Solutions

“…All of these variables underlie the stages of curriculum management starting from planning, organizing, implementing, supervising, and evaluating. Furthermore, in the educational curriculum, each child is conditioned to be able to develop all his abilities well by maximizing experience in his daily activities (Leonard et al, 2022).…”

A learning design framework based on UDL principles to develop maker projects for pre-service teacher and educator training

“…Therefore, iteration is not limited to the recursive cycle of making, prototyping and testing necessary for the construction of artifacts and for the solution of problems, but also concerns the iterative and expansive cycles necessary to take into consideration the socio-cultural context of the students. Thanks to Design Thinking, maker environments or maker educational initia-tives can then be created in areas at risk of marginalization involving the community itself (Repetto, 2020;Leonard et al, 2022), in addition to the students who may also be part of it, in the planning of activities and in the management of the environments themselves. Thus, both learners and audiences of a community are stimulated to imagine and implement new forms of active citizenship, that can contribute to create a new collective identity and to emancipate themselves from the label that place that community on the margins.…”

“…To this end, maker education can offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage or with learning difficulties (Leonard et al, 2022). Maker education is a cultural movement that is spreading in the educational field and is focused on the innovative use of digital tools, which combines creative approaches to scientific activities inspired by industrial design and engineering.…”

“…Students and young people who already possess know-how or who are more inclined to participate in maker activities as they are more interested in science subjects, have greater learning opportunities than others, who end up being excluded from these experiences, or to exclude themselves. Nevertheless, even those groups of children and young people most at risk and who historically do not have equal access to disciplines pertaining to STEM, could provide an innovative con-tribution to these activities, drawing on their own interests, cultural practices and on those of communities to which they belong (Barton and Tan, 2019;Repetto 2020;Leonard et al, 2022).…”

Factors of educational inclusion to improve learning: Teachers' perspectives

“…Researching the level of educational inclusion and learning factors in students will help to improve the quality of teaching through public policies where the teacher will not only be in charge of solving the problems of social inclusion [18] but he will also be responsible for designing initiatives through cultural movements and to achieve these significant effects in areas such as mathematics, science, engineering, technology and letters will have to achieve union and collaboration of the experience of teachers [19]. Education together with ICT has a significant effect on students with special abilities within all educational levels as ICT is very important for the implementation and improvement of their learning as well as allowing them to have and enjoy benefits within the curriculum to engage in social inclusion activities [20].…”