6. Tensions Between Formal Education and the Maker Movement

Since I unfortunately had to miss class this past week due to an illness, I’ll use this post to assess the readings about the conversation surrounding the maker movement and formal education. In his chapter on learning, Dougherty pontificates on the value of making as a subversion of a failing, bureaucratic formal education system. Meanwhile, Halverson and Sheridan highlight this debate surrounding standardization and making and its democratizing. The tensions of incorporating making into the formal, K-12 educational sphere reveal the underlying anxiety of how children are educated in the United States and how entrenched elements of the public education system especially are difficult to reimagine.

First, I wanted to tackle the standardization versus democratization debate as it seemed to be a central fear in the maker movement that incorporating making into formal education would institutionalize what should be a self-driven, innovative process. Dougherty states that “our formal education system should adopt the practices of informal learning and bring them from outside school to inside school.” [1] Basically, Dougherty advocates for a learning approach that emphasizes play, tinkering, and self-exploration as the driving forces behind a child’s educational development. However, this runs right up against what Halverson and Sheridan term “the need to standardize,” [2] as educators must justify why and how these maker activities match the curricula or accommodate the needs of each student. Even if a teacher directs a hands-on activity for a class, if it’s in support for a curricular goal, “it is not a maker project” [3] because it is not coming from the students as a self-directed initiative. It seems that while making and maker activities have the ability to democratize knowledge on how to use technologies in pioneering ways, tensions remain on the best ways to actually implement these maker lessons so that the true spirit of making is incorporated into that learning.

This debate on how to implement making in public schools reveals the tenuous confidence that teachers and makers alike have with our formal education system in the United States. One of the few areas of agreement was that our current system does not adequately address challenges of our world and does not enable creative thinking. While it seemed that the makers’ idealism could never fully meld with the teacher’s realism, one point of compromise that I found intriguing was Dougherty’s idea of a maker portfolio, which would serve as an evaluation piece. As Dougherty contends, “making is its own form of assessment for authentic learning.” [4] Finding these middle ground spaces in which maker ideas can integrate with classroom realities is a useful way for the maker movement to be applicable in an educational setting, while also showing compromise in an uncompromising age.

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[1] Dougherty, Dale with Ariane Conrad. Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds. (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016), p. 178.

[2] Halverson, Erica and Kimberly Sheridan. “The Maker Movement in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 84, No. 4. (2014): p. 500.

[3] Dougherty, Free to Make, p. 179.

[4] Dougherty, Free to Make, p. 194.