Emma Horton from the University of Sheffield discusses what has been learned from research looking at the impact of maker pedagogies in education
A growing movement internationally, maker education encourages children to create, make and mend things as the basis for learning. Through allowing children opportunities to use high- and low-tech tools, materials and technologies, it provides learners with the skills, knowledge and mental habits to make projects that relate to real-world problems.
Maker{School} works to understand how and why maker pedagogies might make a valuable contribution to addressing current problems in education. In October 2023, Maker{School} received funding from the University of Sheffield Knowledge exchange to carry out research, evaluation and to develop of our work. This article is based on my work with two incredible teachers: Susan (Reception class) and Jessica (year 2 class). Here are four things we learned:
THE MAKER{SPIRIT}–OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESILIENCE
The Maker{Spirit} (see below) outlines capacities that help children engage with their education. We originally referred to the Maker{Spirit} as Maker{Mindsets}, drawn from psychology (think Carol Dwek’s work on growth mindset ) and the 21st Century skills agenda (take your pick from the following Cs: collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, character, citizenship, computational thinking). However, our work with teachers and children led us to understand the embodied, fluid and ephemeral nature of these capacities. They are not proficiencies in the sense that once learned they can be deployed at will, but fluid and contextually dependent. It is not the case that a child’s resilience while making a castle out of cardboard on their own will show up in the same way while coding a robot as part of a team. So, the analogy of spirit better represents the situatedness of the capacities rather than mindset which invokes fixed notions of competency. While we have learned a great deal about the impact maker pedagogies can have on developing these spirits, there is no prescribed formula. They remain elusive albeit highly regarded ingredients for success.
As a team, we are concerned about the way resilience has been used to help legitimise the increasingly early formalisation of learning with questions, such as how can we ensure children are more resilient so they can write a sentence by the end of Reception? Instead, we have worked with teachers to see how resilience becomes increasingly evident when children are engaged in making. The question we have been asking is not how can we build resilience, but how can we create the right conditions for resilience? We have noticed two interesting ways:
1. Providing opportunities for children to come back to projects rather than tidying them away or moving on to something else.
2. Publishing, performing or presenting work increases motivation and resilience when things get tricky.
SIMPLICITY: HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS
It is easy to see some of the work Maker{School} does and be ‘blown away’ by the possibilities – of VR for immersing children in other worlds, of 3D printing to produce quality products, and of the baffling array of apps which will almost certainly engage children. All of them look amazing but they also have the potential to be one-off ‘set pieces’; flown in and out quickly and then moving on. Our classrooms can end up feeling a little like a pick-and-mix stall where children flit from one ‘engaging’ activity to another.
There is, of course, space for this type of exploration, but we have been working with teachers to see what happens when we keep things simple and spacious. This approach uses a few basic elements and revisits them in multiple contexts. This might mean working with cardboard: manipulating, making holes and connecting cardboard for an entire school year… or even an entire phase! Teachers have described the impact this has had on their practice:
‘Normally with an area of provision I would enhance and have to change quite regularly, but with this new tinker approach with the cardboard and the foam, the children have been using it continuously so I haven’t changed it … it stayed there for five months and has been used every day with different children in different ways, children coming back to it and playing with it in different ways … I stopped printing out colouring sheets (that I used to put around just in case) because the children just didn’t need them any more.’ (Susan).
The focus on a few materials really invites children to explore and interrogate them in multiple and complex ways. What are the affordances of this material? It helps them to use these skills to generate theories and share ideas. Let’s look at an example pictured below. The second and third photographs below were taken one month apart. The second one was selected by Susan because of how unusual it was for this child to be exploring for such an extended time, absorbed in one activity. He seemed to be enjoying the physical feedback – the banging and popping. The size of the box enabled Susan to sit alongside, joining in and narrating with key positional language but without interrupting. The third picture was selected because it shows the same child but now with increased sophisticated dexterity, using precision tools in a more confined space and now working alongside a partner. For Susan, this was significant not only because of the practical skills but also for how much the making had opened up possibilities for relationships with others: ‘Small world and imaginary games would be totally inaccessible to them, but here they are working alongside each other because they had a purpose for their play.’
How might we sustain this?
Rotating the types of cardboard – thicker cardboard requires different techniques, strengths and tools. Ask the children which cardboard would be useful for different things and why? Peeling away the top layer of cardboard to reveal corrugation.
Adding attachment tools like screws and treasury tags to connect elements. Split pins can produce simple mechanical movements. Children might go on to use these to produce levers and linkages for pop-up books, theatre shows, showing systems and processes in geography or science, or causes and consequences in history.
SPACIOUSNESS: WE NEED TIME TO COME BACK TO IT
Education scholar Gert Biesta emphasises the importance of understanding what education is for. He explains the word ‘school’ comes from the ancient Greek word ‘schole’ meaning ‘free time’ – the time we give to children unaccounted for by society. Time to engage and practise with knowledge, theories and each other without needing it to be functional. So how might maker pedagogies help create time and space for children and teachers?
Jessica developed a unit of work on castles using the Maker{School} three-element approach: Exploration, skill builder and tinker time. Jessica told me about one child who was not usually focused and tended to get frustrated in formal learning situations. During the hours of tinker time, she saw something else: ‘He spent a very, very long time trying to figure out how to make it work and he tinkered…he kept trying out different things.’
Jessica reflected on the importance of spaciousness in helping this resilience: ‘It wasn’t about “it’s going to end today, but we are going to come back to it on Wednesday” or whatever, that was really important … there’s that need to get to do it again and get to go back to it and like keep going with it rather than it just being like a special treat.’
This reinforces the importance of providing educational spaces for children that do not have high stakes. Children become confident this will not be the only chance they get. Jessica also noticed effects elsewhere – like playtime. When children have less structured time in class, they experience the challenges of working with others, so at playtimes, they can navigate moments of tension more easily.
PARTNERSHIPS: DOING CPD DIFFERENTLY
We heard from teachers of their frustration with professional development. Much of it was in the form of external experts, ‘one size fits all’, one-off sessions where teachers are left to ‘implement’ or ‘deliver’. We wanted to change this and see how Maker{School} can develop ways of working alongside teachers so they are influential in deciding what gets researched and how this might be done. We wanted to bring the expertise and experience of teachers out of the classroom and make it ‘do some work’ in research. While still in its early stages, we have begun to carve out spaces where teachers can come together to consider challenges, articulate hunches, develop plans and share findings.
What did we notice?
Crucially it takes time and requires space to think, to get to know one another. We all know that teachers are incredibly busy. We aim for long-term partnerships, understanding the reality that deadlines change. We build flexibility into our planning. We are trying to challenge the direct, causal link between professional learning and measurable outcomes for children. We are not trying to create ‘cookbook’ teachers following recipes. Instead, we are building up expertise and evidence teachers can use as part of their planning and decision-making.
We aren’t promoting making as the only way, but to understand where, how and why it might be important educationally. We don’t just want brilliant-looking bits of making. We want to see the mess, the challenges, and what doesn’t work! This requires brave teachers who are working within outcomes-led cultures of best practice.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE
1. Acknowledge the distinct role physical and digital making can play in children’s education, revising statutory guidance and National Curriculum.
2. Cultivate a maker{spirit} by providing opportunities for children to access and return to their own projects within and beyond the formal curriculum.
3. Provide opportunities for educators to develop their experience of maker pedagogies through access to high-quality, ethical and long-term professional development.
Castle project using the Maker{School} approach Three elements Events Exploration – cultivating curiosity Class visit to a local castle Visit to a local magical theme cafe where Jessica borrowed a ‘dragon’s egg’ to inspire the theme of knights and dragons and related this to protection Class stories related to castles, dragons and knights were read and explored (e.g. Zog) Skill Builder – developing confidence and competence Direct teaching of specific skills in cardboard and attachment techniques – short focused 15/30-minute sessions. Short tutorials on Octostudio – a free mobile coding app from the same people who developed scratch Tinker time – fostering deep engagement Over several sessions, children worked in small groups to build fortresses of protection. They developed mechanisms for drawbridges using cardboard tools and techniques to recreate features of castles. Tour guide for the castle they had visited using octostudio. Children coded pictures of their physical models and pictures taken of the castle.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Maker{School} can be found at https://makerfutures.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/home
References
Dweck C. S. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books
Biesta G. (2021). World-centred Education: A view for the present. Routledge
