Recognition in makerspaces: Supporting opportunities for women to “make” a STEM career

Abstract

Making is a playful exploration of tools and materials to design personally meaningful artifacts, providing a particularly impactful entry point for traditionally underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. However, it remains unclear how these constructionist explorations translate to eventual professional and educational STEM opportunities, especially for women. This paper tracks an exemplary case in a makerspace to theorize, describe, and analyze the behavioral patterns of young women as they engage in making and move toward expertise in STEM. Building on a material-based and constructionist notion of making, we use mediated discourse analysis to examine how recognition (materialized in artifacts as displaying, legitimizing, and circulating emergent STEM expertise) leads to transformational development over time. We introduce the notion of tinkering with development, which conceptualizes playful project design, spatial project placements, and emergent online project sharing as drivers of human developmental trajectories. Implications of this work include a set of design principles to support makerspaces and other constructionist learning environments to foster participation in STEM. Further, implications for constructionist theory and STEM gender representation are discussed. Among the hustle and bustle of a digital filmmaking course, a few youth crowded around an artifact that was pushed against a wall in the urban youth-serving makerspace: a digital jukebox piano, a technologyaugmented player piano that played pop songs and lit up an LED light strip when users pressed keys. The artifact was constructed out of an upright piano similar to those commonly found in schools and was covered in black chalkboard paint that featured drawings of the White House and the US flag. Other emerging technologies were layered on the jukebox piano (see graphical abstract). Most centrally, a Makey Makey computational breakout board adorned the top center and an LED strip was taped along the piano's fallboard. The Makey Makey board and the LED strip were connected to the copper tape-covered piano keys by the visible wires and alligator clips typically used in prototyping. Inside the piano box, copper tape was precariously soldered to the alligator clips, and a bunched up white shirt was placed on top of unused keys to prevent them from sounding notes. When turned on, the screen that was mounted onto the piano's musical board displayed songs that anyone could play by pressing individual piano keys. Once selected, the LED strip lit up to the rhythm of the music. A small, neatly written card on the upper-left corner read the artifact's name and the name of its maker: Sierra, 1 a 15-year-old aspiring photographer who was one of the first female participants at the makerspace who had little interest in electronic tinkering when first joining the program. This lack of interest shifted into a desire to study electronic engineering in college. In what ways did the construction and placement ...

Dismantling the products of global flows: A model for a children’s global (un)makerspace

“…Many international studies highlighted the overlapping between new pedagogies and the educational makerspace culture (Lahmar et al, 2017) and in their review of the literature, Vossoughi and Bevan (2014) showed how the makerspace culture of peer support and scaffolding aligns with Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) theory, the interest-driven activities from a makerspace reminding of the learner-driven approach and inquiry-oriented pedagogies and of Freire’s (2005) critical educational theory. But arguably, the most influential pedagogy was the constructionism (Papert, 1993), regarded as the foundational theory of the maker movement in education (Keune et al, 2019; Marsh et al, 2017; Martinez and Stager, 2013; Tan, 2019). Advocating for the use of technology in school not as an add-on for the instructional process, but as ‘object-to-think-with’ for children’s development (Papert, 1980), Papert considers that learning happens best when one concretely makes and publicly shares or displays objects.…”

“…Apart from the alignment of new pedagogies with the pedagogical approach from makerspaces, another reason for which they are so appealing to the education system is the recent emphasis across the world on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and digital literacies and the promise makerspaces make in this regard (Barton et al, 2017; Keune et al, 2019; Marsh et al, 2017). As much need for STEM education as there is (Kelley and Knowles, 2016), this sole identification of makerspaces with STEM and digital technologies could create some problems with their implementation and the attracted audience.…”

“…The story shows how the creative process in a makerspace could take the form of stories. There are many studies that talk about the importance of displaying the output of the making process and sharing the process (Keune et al, 2019), studies that ground in general in Papert’s (1993) constructionism theory. The process of making-by-words within the storytelling-driven engagement (Velicu and Mitarcă, 2019) was not explored as much as the making process, but was nevertheless intrinsically linked with the materiality.…”

Intra‐active entanglements: What posthuman and new materialist frameworks can offer the learning sciences

“… 1 1 Researchers in the learning sciences have an ongoing interest in how makerspaces can encourage girls and women to pursue STEM related fields (see Keune, Peppler & Wohlwend, 2019). …”

Successful Strategies for Attracting More Female Students to Engineering Majors in Emerging Economies: The Case of Southern Mexico

“…The purpose of this study is to know what women who have been students at our school as well as those currently enrolled have to say in order to improve the overall experience for new students and to increase the number of female students enrolled at our school. As in many other countries, the number of women in higher education and in our case, in STEM, can be an indicator of equal opportunities for women [2][3][4]. This work is the beginning of a project to improve the overall experience of our female students and to improve our attraction of talent processes so that more girls choose to study Engineering and Science in the most impoverished region of Mexico.…”