Content area
Full Text
In this essay, Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan provide the context for research on the maker movement as they consider the emerging role of making in education. The authors describe the theoretical roots of the movement and draw connections to related research on formal and informal education. They present points of tension between making and formal education practices as they come into contact with one another, exploring whether the newness attributed to the maker movement is really all that new and reflecting on its potential pedagogical impacts on teaching and learning.
The maker movement has garnered a lot of recent attention in the popular imagination. This year, at the first ever White House Maker Faire, President Obama declared, "I am calling on people across the country to join us in sparking creativity and encouraging invention in their communities" (White House, 2014).
Tens of thousands of kids, adults, and families are drawn to the exciting new technologies, expert marketing, and strong word of mouth that characterize this movement. Maker culture has become a way to express creative and communal drive, and this excitement has led to an explosion of makerspaces around the United States (and the world) across a range of instructional environments, including libraries, museums, independent nonprofit and for-profit organizations, K-12 schools, and institutions of higher education.1 Some spaces focus on the emergence of new technologies for designing, building, and manufacturing, while others value the return to face-to-face, garage-style work that the maker movement engenders. Across these perspectives, there is growing enthusiasm for the potential for new technologies and old forms of communication to transform the educational landscape.
In this essay we describe activities and features of the maker movement and, more significantly, the emerging role the maker movement is playing (and could play) in education. We begin by introducing the maker movement broadly and describing its theoretical roots and connections to prior research in formal and informal education. We then describe three components of the maker movement-making as a set of activities, makerspaces as communities of practice, and makers as identities-each of which inspires different theoretical and empirical approaches, research questions, and areas of study reflected in the two empirical pieces on the maker movement presented in this issue: Sheridan and colleagues' (2014)...