Making to Empower Teacher Problem Posing and Design

Research on educational making and makerspaces, especially in school contexts, concerns students’ experiences and learning in makerspaces. We position disciplinary classroom teachers as learners and focus on their experiences of maker skills and technologies, specifically how they identify and design solutions to problems of their own classroom practice. Across a semester-long, 60-hour course, 16 pre- and in-service teachers from 10 different disciplines identified problems of practice and iteratively designed technologies to address them. We characterize the problems they identified as well as the solutions they designed. We also illustrate how an interdisciplinary community of practice arose as an unexpected but noteworthy resource in teachers’ reflections on their workshop experiences. Our findings underscore the value of opening the constructionist learning opportunities afforded by making not only to student learners but to their teachers as well.