One of my favorite people in the world is Adam Savage - @donttrythis (I follow him on twitter). He is most famously known as one of the two members of MythBusters, but he is also a huge advocate of the maker movement and makerspaces.
In researching this and looking into it for this lesson, I gained a lot of context to the different videos and images he retweets. There is a certain passion and creativity in the maker culture that was hard to understand as an outsider. Sure, you can make a Tie-Fighter out of a tissue box but why would you want to? However, while reading I learned that making is about more than extrinsic reasoning. The exploration, tinkering, and failure is reason in itself.
(On a side note, I forget which of the research links focused on failure, but I found it profound and important. Working in the City School District, I spend a lot of time thinking about privilege, and what characteristics or experiences in my life have brought me success. One aspect that keeps coming up is the fact that I have had a safe space to fail, and that I have been encouraged and supported through failure, rather than blamed for it.)
In watching the videos of maker spaces, I found myself torn: on the one hand I could come up with a million reasons to nervous or why it wouldn't work. How would my students react to the freedom? Would the materials go missing? When (and where) could we fit it in when so many of our students need more time in the classroom not less?
But then I thought: isn't this exactly what we are looking for in our students? Creative, inquiry based thinkers who are not just about solutions but about exploring the problems themselves? How can we expect a culture to change regarding learning without creating a space for that culture to change? I often hear people lament the attitudes of our scholars; that they are effort oriented, they just want to get the work done and don't care about the quality, or other perspectives. How do we change that without changing us?
I actually feel inspired to find a way to pilot this in my school, even if its' on a small scale to begin.
Wow! Terrific post. Thanks for sharing your thought process as you were reading and exploring. You're reflecting exactly the attitude we all need, and that we need to demonstrate for our students. Nice!!
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