School Maker Spaces are Killing Consumerism

How the “maker movement” is revolutionizing K-12 education by training students to be creators, not consumers.

This month I was back home in South Dakota for winter break after my first semester at Whitman College. About a week ago, I wrote about my political road trip to Iowa. This week I am changing pace and tone to focus on another experience which defined my time back home: helping my mom at her library “maker space.”

My mom is the librarian at Memorial Middle School, a school that I attended from 2012 to 2015. Since my time there, the library that I remember has taken on a different form thanks to a 2016 “Classroom Innovation Grant” which granted South Dakota schools collectively about $1 million to aid in the creation of STE(a)M maker spaces.

Memorial Middle School in Sioux Falls, SD

These days, twice a week before school, dozens middle school of students flock to the Memorial library where tables are decked out with all sorts of different materials for, well, making things. The curriculum at this particular maker space offers a broad array of materials and project guidelines, ranging from knitting hats to programming Arduino boards.

While I had awareness of the maker space movement from hearing my mom talk about it, I have to admit that for years I did not at all understand the point of it. Due to some formative experiences during my public school education, I have become profoundly jaded and critical of fads in teaching. I find it of the utmost importance to protect our schools from the massive influence of “Ed Tech” marketing, a sort of mutated consumerism which is eating it’s way through the walls of our schools (more on this later.)

However, through my experiences sitting in on the Memorial Middle School maker space program, I will admit that I have finally drank the Kool-Aid, and now view maker spaces as a pivotal component for combating the shortcomings of our education system. In this article I will chronicle some of my memories from observing maker space education in action, and try to connect them with the more broad ideas behind the maker movement as at exists today.

Journals From a Maker space

My first maker space experience was on a cold Tuesday morning. I woke up early so that I could drive with my mom to her library. We arrived 7:30 am, about 15 minutes before the students, and set up tables which were dedicated to specific projects.

A table in the library with supplies for craft projects

Of the kids who gradually filed in from the bitter cold air, a portion resumed projects that they had begun the previous week, and the rest took to the tables to experiment with the “new stuff.”

On this morning, there were 2 main activities that students seemed to gravitate towards, both with the common theme of circuitry. At one table was a paper circuit kit, where students would use sticky flat copper tape and LED lights to create circuits on a sheet of paper. At the other station, circuit-making took on a more artistic form as small “flashlights” made of a button battery, an LED light, and a felt casing that the students could sew themselves.

A copper circuit kit in the Memorial library. Photo credit to Laura Allard.

As the students dove into the activities and started interacting with the supplies, I began to see something that is very rare in many classrooms today: genuine engagement. The free form nature of the maker space model seemed to be pivotal in the appeal of the program to students.

I noticed the following three effects as a result of the less structured learning process inherent to the maker space model.

Students were forced to run into road blocks while completing projects. When kids were trying to make their circuits with the wiring-on-a-page kit, the light would not always illuminate on the first try. The first instinct of many students was to proclaim “It’s broken” or “It doesn’t work” and simply give up. This reaction is understandable, given the way that kids are usually taught: through worksheets, memorization, and regurgitation (at least that’s how I remember getting through school.) The reflex to give up is uniquely challenged by the projects in a maker space. In order to complete the task, students had to engage with the “debugging” process by hypothesizing reasons for the failure of their product and then addressing it with another prototype.

When kids were trying to make their circuits with the wiring-on-a-page kit, the light would not always illuminate on the first try. The first instinct of many students was to proclaim “It’s broken” or “It doesn’t work” and simply give up. This reaction is understandable, given the way that kids are usually taught: through worksheets, memorization, and regurgitation (at least that’s how I remember getting through school.) The reflex to give up is uniquely challenged by the projects in a maker space. In order to complete the task, students had to engage with the “debugging” process by hypothesizing reasons for the failure of their product and then addressing it with another prototype. Creativity and imagination is fostered. Since the sticky-circuit curriculum was only loosely structured, it seemed to evoke in students a sense of limitless possibility. All of the materials they needed to create any variety of simple circuits were right in front of them. I specifically remember hearing a conversation between a few students who were imagining what would happen if, instead of the circuit being powered by a small button battery, it was connected to a massive car battery. They came to the conclusion that it would result in a spectacular fire. While this exchange might not seem significant, to me it was a sign that the maker space environment was able to stimulate student’s creative instincts enough where they felt free to push the theoretical limits of their surroundings. Too often, kids are taught through a strictly hierarchical system where diversion from the immediate curriculum is discouraged as students are forced to complete the “task at hand.” While necessary in certain contexts, it is my belief that the inculcation of obedience and reverence for rigidly structured classes over time has a chilling effect on creativity.

Since the sticky-circuit curriculum was only loosely structured, it seemed to evoke in students a sense of limitless possibility. All of the materials they needed to create any variety of simple circuits were right in front of them. I specifically remember hearing a conversation between a few students who were imagining what would happen if, instead of the circuit being powered by a small button battery, it was connected to a massive car battery. They came to the conclusion that it would result in a spectacular fire. While this exchange might not seem significant, to me it was a sign that the maker space environment was able to stimulate student’s creative instincts enough where they felt free to push the theoretical limits of their surroundings. Too often, kids are taught through a strictly hierarchical system where diversion from the immediate curriculum is discouraged as students are forced to complete the “task at hand.” While necessary in certain contexts, it is my belief that the inculcation of obedience and reverence for rigidly structured classes over time has a chilling effect on creativity. Communication and camaraderie arise naturally. Even advocates for more traditional models of education acknowledge the importance of developing students’ communication and cooperation. In the status quo, this is accomplished through highly structured and forced group work. During the course of my maker space sit in, I noticed that the creative vigor which was cultivated from the activities also seemed to set a lighthearted tone for social interaction between students. Kids were naturally encouraged to cooperate, share ideas, and problem solve together.

A collage of students’ finished products. Photos by Laura Allard.

Seeing this deep student engagement quickly shifted my view on the merits of K-12 maker spaces. After my time at the middle school, I went home and began my research into the roots and philosophies guiding advocates of this form of education.

The “Maker Movement”

To help me understand the goal of the maker movement at large, I recruited the help of A.J. Juliani, a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Juliani has written extensively on the “design thinking” ethos in education, which in many ways laid the groundwork for the rise the modern maker space. In our email exchange, Juliani pointed me to his rich collection of work, including a manifesto, where he writes the following about the importance of design thinking in education…

“We believe that creative thinking is as vital as math or reading or writing. There’s power in problem-solving and experimenting and taking things from questions to ideas to authentic products that you launch to the world. Something happens in students when they define themselves as makers and inventors and creators” — A.J Juliani and John Spencer

Juliani’s philosophy of design based education emphasizes the benefits that arise quite naturally when kids are doing something original, creative, and tangible. Once the importance of these values is accepted, a “maker space” then becomes just a means by which this teaching model is implemented.

What I took from the work of Juiliani and others is that in many ways, the proliferation of maker spaces could serve to instill creativity and inspiration in students. This goal is incredibly important in an era where standardized testing is at the core of the student experience, and where teachers rely on pre-made, slickly marketed ed tech and lesson plans, which do little to engage students.

The Maker Space as a Means of Dismantling Consumerism

Modern youth, like myself, have been forced into the role of the consumer. The moment that we depart the hospital after birth, we are instantly subjected to gendered infant clothing produced by children just a few years older than us working for slave wages. Our well meaning parents are doomed to occupy their unwitting roles as instruments of the corporate overlords who rule our postmodern hellscape. The perpetual injection of advertising and mass-media into our brains by our parent’s opiate-like addiction to the consumption of mass media has left us paralyzed and dependent on the consumption of information.

By the time we enter school, we are already well on our way to becoming like our parents; hollowed-out human-resembling shells whose only purpose is to consume and chase more opportunities to consume.

As I mentioned earlier, the disease of consumerism has demolished the walls of our schools. Teachers and school boards have become very profitable sheep which can be manipulated and exploited for their genuine interest in student success. Consumer technology has fully saturated schools as districts waste millions of dollars per year to satisfy their perverted desire for consumption in mislead efforts to “innovate education.” Such corporate slurs are used by ed tech companies to destroy the sanctity of the school as a place separate from the scorched-earth consumerism that students are forced to endure at home.

The maker space, then, by its nature is perhaps our best shot at re framing the position of the student as a maker rather than a consumer. When students are sitting at a table playing with electronics and creating genuinely original products, they are not imbibing the garbage, overpriced, prefab curriculum that school boards adopt like pigs lining up for their slop. The student is instead in a radically autonomous position free from the damaging influence of consumption-centered education.

I do not advocate for a full overhaul traditional education. Rather, I posit a hybrid pedagogy, where classical education is mixed with tactile, independent, and creative learning. A student must, as part of being a good citizen, learn history, mathematics and read literature. Rather than working against this curriculum, the maker space is a way for students to awaken the starved creative which exists in every one of us. Teachers are instrumental in the traditional classroom, however it is vitally important that there are also spaces where students can develop independent, critical, and creative thinking skills through trial and error.

Moving Forward

Clearly, my brief time in the maker space had a profound impact on my view of public education as a whole. Further, I have become quite interested in becoming an advocate for this style of education. This blog post is my first shout at those who are trapped on the hyper-connected hyper-consumerist conveyor belt as a result of our weak barriers against corporate interests. As I progress at Whitman, I would like to see the maker movement expand and change form naturally, fitting and and thriving in infinite different contexts.

Here are my final thoughts…

The maker movement’s expansion in popularity during the 2010s ought to be viewed as a watershed moment in how we educate our children. Teaching students to create rather than to consume is our best bet at reversing the damage of decades of anarcho-capitalism in this country.

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