The Maker Movement is a broad international movement celebrating making with a wide range of tools and media, including an evolving array of new tools and processes for digital fabrication such as 3D printers and laser cutters. This article discusses who makers are in education, what that making entails, and where that making happens. akers are people of all ages who find digital and physical forums to share their products and processes. Educators and researchers in the Maker Movement in education are working to expand who makers are, providing critiques of traditional conceptions of maker identities and seeking to broaden participation in terms of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and ability status. Making entails a diversity of media, tools, processes and practices. Likewise, the Maker Movement in education purposefully transcends academic disciplines, drawing both on traditional academic subjects like engineering and math along with everyday life skills like sewing, carpentry and metalwork. Making happens across a variety of spaces where there is an educational focus, both informal (museums, community centers, libraries, and online) and formal (from K–12 to higher education, to teacher education). In these spaces, the specific goals and practices of the supporting organizations are woven together with those of the Maker Movement to support a range of learners and outcomes, including family inquiry, equity, access to technology, virtual community and support, social interaction, creativity, engineering education, and teacher candidate confidence. Maker education is often framed as a reaction to more “traditional” educational approaches and frequently involves the incorporation of making into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) approaches.
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The Maker Movement in Education
Abigail Konopasky and Kimberly Sheridan
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Marxism and Educational Theory
Mike Cole
While Marx and Engels wrote little on education, the educational implications of Marxism are clear. Education both reproduces capitalism and has the potential to undermine it. With respect to reproduction, it is informative to look at key texts by Althusser and Bowles and Gintis (and the latter’s legacy). As far as challenging capitalism is concerned, considerations are given to both theoretical developments and practical attempts to confront neoliberalism and enact socialist principles, the combination of which Marxists refer to as praxis. There have been constant challenges to Marxism since its conception, and in conclusion we look at two contemporary theories—critical race theory and its primacy of “race” over class—and intersectionality which has a tendency to marginalize class.
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Mentoring Epistemologies Beyond Western Modalities
Carol A. Mullen
Commitment to mentorship, while necessary to benefit mentoring parties, is insufficient to work with the complexities of contemporary educational settings, especially in pursuit of engagement and learning for all. Mentoring that makes a profound difference for all participants, worldwide, is oriented at the outset to call into question such organizational constraints as hegemony, hierarchy, and culture. Traditional versus alternative approaches to mentoring is a critical binary that can be differentiated in the abstract. However, context and culture are existing organizational realities for which mentoring forms, enactments, and activities (such as mentoring circles) either perpetuate the status quo or produce significant change. Thus, alternative mentoring approaches work within both the traditional view of mentoring and any alternative to it.
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Motherhood and Education
Koeli Goel
Motherhood is the institution on which state and society have traditionally depended for preparing a well-socialized populace even before formal educational systems begin to have an effect. Mothering has taken a new urgency in a 21st-century globalized, neoliberal, and intricately connected world in which the social contract between the state and the individual has been in profound revision. Mothers are being expected to adapt to rapidly changing educational environments with on-site school systems disrupted in response to global health crises and homeschooling assuming spectacularly new meanings. New blended roles for tutoring, mentoring, and counseling while also nurturing the child are now the newest normal for mothers. Considering the pivotal role played by mothers in a human being’s birth, socialization, and education, perhaps educational research can progressively encourage a more nuanced incorporation of motherhood studies. It might be useful to examine the relationship between motherhood and education within a framework of familial power relations combined with a global studies in education perspective. The different facets of motherhood as well as the entangling of care and power are critical to the project of education. Motherhood as institution, motherhood as identity, and motherhood as experience thus become crucial coordinates for an interdisciplinary engagement with motherhood’s relationship with education. While educational technologies and online communication platforms have incrementally transformed the field of education, the mothers role has evolved and mothers often need to be educated so they may best guide their digital native wards. Parents jointly take many decisions regarding children’s education and future, but it is most often the mother who follows through with the agenda. This close personal involvement brings additional responsibilities, authority, and power—all of which have epistemological consequences, highlighting areas that might help establish nuanced connections between motherhood and education.
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Museum Education and the Epistemological Turn
Irene Pérez López
Education has been part of museum identity since its inception. However, in the second half of the 20th century, the educational role gradually became the main goal: the museum has become a social institution whose educational nature legitimizes its social relevance and secures its survival in the 21st century.
The spread of education to all areas of the museum, commonly called the “educational turn,” is the reason behind the conceptual change that is taking place in the postmodern museum, which has its origin in educational theory. In the last decades of the 20th century, the concept of learning as the transmission of information from an informed source to a passive receiver was replaced by the constructivist notion that learning is an active process dependent on the learner’s previous knowledge and experiences. At about the same time, critical pedagogy—as critical museology—brought a critical attitude within the museum, directed to identify structures of power and authority in order to give voice to traditionally excluded communities, and postmodernism added the idea of knowledge as something unstable and skepticism about the Western metanarratives of modernity. Constructivism, critical pedagogy, and postmodern theory contributed to the epistemological turn that the 21st-century museum faces.
The change in learning theories and communication models in the postmodern museum, as a result of the epistemological turn, threatens the role of the institution as the only interpretive authority, by turning its message—previously considered a universal truth—into a point of view. The museum faces the challenge of becoming a meaning-making scenario where visitors can make connections and design their own learning experiences. The museum of the 21st century has forged a more egalitarian relationship with society.
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Music as Curriculum
Robert Lake
Throughout history, music has been a dynamic force in both formal and informal settings of education for all ages, places, and cultural identities. Music as curriculum is focused on this phenomenon in and through a wide array of cultural and historical contexts. Connections between music and curriculum may be understood through Joseph Schwab’s four commonplaces of curriculum which are milieus, teacher, learner, and subject matter. These connections are recognized and understood in greater detail by exploring the role of music in creating or affirming solidarity, empathy, cultural identity, content acquisition, educational connoisseurship, as well as learner-centered curiosity. Music as curriculum explores these aspects holistically as a way to maximize educational experiences through multiple ways of knowing that are actively present in music.
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Oral History Illustrated by the Case of Cyprus
Nicoletta (Niki) Christodoulou, Miranda Christou, and Maria Hadjipavlou
Oral history offers unique meaning for curriculum studies by presenting, analyzing, and interpreting experiences and memories of participants in an educational situation. The situation and context of Cyprus, an island with protracted conflicts and ethnical division, provides sites of illustration for oral history in curriculum studies. Couched in an historical background of oral history and definitions, as well as characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of narrative inquiry, the essence and application of oral history can be conveyed through the case of Cyprus. Oral history projects undertaken in Cyprus are conveyed, with prominent reference to the Cyprus Oral History Project (COHP), which has delineated the nuances of language, performance, and creation of pedagogical spaces. For example, COHP established a link among oral history, curriculum, instruction, and education, which has been used in Cyprus to understand memory as curriculum and to rethink issues of language and curricular questions in light of the knowledge drawn from oral histories. Further, oral history projects in Cyprus have delineated refugee trauma through the description of loss, painful memories, and silence; how narratives worked as significant evidence and material in conflict and reconciliation workshops; and the importance of the gender lens of oral history in Cyprus. The themes of cultivating historical consciousness, shaping responses to conflict, discomforting pedagogy, memory and trauma, and their role in the reunification process have been explored extensively through such projects; yet, more extensive work needs to be done. The number of oral history projects is still limited, yet there is still so much to be uncovered through people’s narrations. In the case of Cyprus, oral history is considered as a source of information about ordinary people’s lives but also for the role it can play in understanding how being dispossessed and returning to the homeland can reconstruct and reorganize education and culture. The uses of oral history to understand curriculum in Cyprus is offered as an example for modified use for exploring a broader sphere of curriculum studies in other settings.
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Place-Based Education
Gregory A. Smith
Place-based education is an approach to curriculum development and instruction that directs students’ attention to local culture, phenomena, and issues as the basis for at least some of the learning they encounter in school. It is also referred to as place- and community-based education or place-conscious learning. In addition to preparing students academically, teachers who adopt this approach present learning as intimately tied to environmental stewardship and community development, two central concerns of Education for Sustainability. They aim to cultivate in the young the desire and ability to become involved citizens committed to enhancing the welfare of both the human and more-than-human communities of which they are a part. At the heart of place-based education is the belief that children of any age are capable of making significant contributions to the lives of others, and that as they do so, their desire to learn and belief in their own capacity to be change agents increase. When place-based education is effectively implemented, both students and communities benefit, and their teachers often encounter a renewed sense of professional and civic satisfaction.
In most respects, there is nothing new about place-based education. It is an attempt to reclaim elements of the learning processes most children encountered before the invention of schools. Throughout most of humanity’s tenancy on this planet, children learned directly from their own experience in the places and communities where they lived. They explored their world with peers, imitated the activities of adults, participated in cultural and religious ceremonies, and listened to the conversations and stories of their families and neighbors. Most of this learning was informal, although at important transition points such as puberty, initiation rites provided them with more direct forms of instruction about community understandings regarding the world and adult responsibilities. In this way, children grew into competent and contributing members of their society, able to care for themselves and for others in ways that sustained the community of which they were a part. This outcome with its focus on both individual and social sustainability is also the goal of place-based education.
It is important to acknowledge that a range of educational innovations over the past decades have anticipated or included elements of place-based education: outdoor education, civic education, community education, environmental education, and education for sustainability. What differentiates place-based education from many of these is its explicit focus on both human and natural environments and its concern about equity and social justice issues as well as environmental. Not all programs that call themselves place-based incorporate these elements, nor do all include opportunities for students to participate in projects that benefit others and the natural world. This, however, is the aspirational goal of place-based education and what sets it apart from similar approaches.
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Postcolonial Philosophy of Education in the Philippines
Noah Romero
Postcolonial philosophies of education in the Philippines emerged from a newly independent government’s desire to unite disparate populations under a common national identity, which was heavily influenced by Western conceptions of personhood and patriotism. The islands collectively known as the Philippines, however, are home to nearly 200 distinct ethnolinguistic groups. The imposition of a universal national identity upon such a diverse populace entails the erasure of identities, knowledge systems, practices, and ways of life that differ from state-imposed norms. Education is a critical site for this subjugation of difference, as evidenced by the state’s imposition of a national curriculum. Yet the national curriculum not only serves to submerge difference, as decolonizing pedagogies and philosophies of education in the Philippines often rise out of collective resistance to the marginalizing aspects of schooling in the region. Postcolonial philosophies of education in the Philippines are, as such, situated within the historical tensions between the national curriculum, the central government’s economic and political agendas, collective calls for human rights, and the philosophies, practices, and knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples (IPs).
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Qualitative Research in the Field of Popular Education
Alfonso Torres Carrillo
Popular Education (PE) is an educational movement and pedagogical current that emerged in Latin America in the seventies. It was a result of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical proposals in a context of radicalization of popular struggle and cultural and intellectual movements. During the past five decades, hundreds of groups, practices and projects have identified themselves as part of the PE movement. As a pedagogical current, PE is understood as an educational perspective and practice, which is critical of institutionalized education and identifies with emancipatory political perspectives. Its purpose is to help populations that experience oppression or discrimination to strengthen their capacity to change their conditions, relationships, practices and ways of thinking and feeling by means of cultural, educational, dialogical, participatory, interactive and expressive practices. With respect to the history of PE in Latin America, its social contexts and educational practices, four stages can be identified:
1. The liberating pedagogy of Paulo Freire at the end of the sixties.
2. The foundational stage PE in the seventies.
3. The re-foundation and expansion of the PE in the eighties and nineties.
4. The reactivation of the EP in the current context.
During these periods, a constant interest in PE has been producing knowledge from and about its contexts, themes and practices. From its origins, it has created and incorporated qualitative research strategies in coherence with its political and epistemological options.
As evidenced in each historical phase of the PE, the use of a qualitative methodology predominated: thematic research in Freire’s pedagogical proposal; participatory action research (PAR) in its foundational stage; collective reconstruction of the history and critical ethnography in its expansion phase; systematization of practices since the 1990s; and the emergence of innovative and aesthetic strategies at the present century. A set of methodological principles derive from this historical path of qualitative research in PE:
1. Maintaining a critical distance from institutionalized research modes in the scientific world, acknowledging their subordination to hegemonic powers.
2. Assuming PE to be both critical and emancipatory. This option is identified with values, willpower, and projects that involve new meanings of the organization of collective life.
3. Recognizing the place of the cultural and the intersubjective, both in social phenomena and in social research processes.
4. Linking it to emancipatory organizational processes and collective actions.
5. Not subordinating it to the institutional logic of disciplinary research.
6. Promoting group and organization participation in research process decisions.
7. Ensuring that it promotes formation of knowledge collectives.
8. Maintaining a critical and creative use of the theory.
9. Recognizing the plurality of subjects and promoting a “dialogue of knowledge.”
10. Incorporating diverse cultural practices within communities in order to produce and communicate their knowledge.
11. Assuming methodology to be a flexible practice.
12. Assuming research within PE is a permanent practice of critical reflection.
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Refugee Girlhood and Visual Storied Curriculum
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis
Decolonizing girlhood illuminates an attempt to refuse and recover the pathological representation of Indigenous refugee girls by going beyond the discourse of the Western construction of girlhood. It takes an anticolonial, critical race feminist approach to the understanding of girlhood that challenges the intersectional, racialized exclusion and the deficit representations of Indigenous refugee girls, which are often reinforced by humanitarian schemes of embodied vulnerability. The digital visual fiction stories created by Karen tribe refugee girls in a media arts summer workshop reposition their presence by creating spaces in which they can speak their own desires, share their imaginings, and portray their struggles. Through this experience, these girls challenge colonial social realities and the fantasies of democracy. Ultimately, their futuristic visual fiction acts as a form of counter-storytelling that illustrates an alternative curriculum space and flips the hegemonic script for empowerment.
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Self-Directed Education—Unschooling and Democratic Schooling
Peter Gray
Education, broadly defined, is cultural transmission. It is the process or set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires and builds on the skills, knowledge, beliefs, values, and lore of the culture into which they are born. Through all but the most recent speck of human history, education was always the responsibility of those being educated. Children come into the world biologically prepared to educate themselves through observing the culture around them and incorporating what they see into their play. Research in hunter-gatherer cultures shows that children in those cultures became educated through their own self-directed exploration and play. In modern cultures, self-directed education is pursued most fully by children in families that adopt the homeschooling approach commonly called “unschooling” and by children enrolled in democratic schools with no imposed curriculum. Follow-up studies of “graduates” of unschooling and democratic schools reveal that this approach can be highly effective, in today’s world, if children are provided with an adequate environment for self-education—an environment in which they can interact freely with others across a broad range of ages, can experience firsthand what is most valued in the culture, and can play and thereby experiment with the primary tools of the culture.
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STEM Education
Stephen M. Ritchie
STEM education in schools has become the subject of energetic promotion by universities and policymakers. The mythical narrative of STEM in crisis has driven policy to promote STEM education throughout the world in order to meet the challenges of future workforce demands alongside an obsession with high-stakes testing for national and international comparisons as a proxy for education quality. Unidisciplinary emphases in the curriculum have failed to deliver on the goal to attract more students to pursue STEM courses and careers or to develop sophisticated STEM literacies. A radical shift in the curriculum toward integrated STEM education through multidisciplinary/ interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary projects is required to meet future challenges. Project-based activities that engage students in solving real-world problems requiring multiple perspectives and skills that are authentically assessed by autonomous professional teachers are needed. Governments and non-government sponsors should support curriculum development with teachers, and their continuing professional development in this process. Integrating STEM with creative expression from the arts shows promise at engaging students and developing their STEM literacies. Research into the efficacy of such projects is necessary to inform authorities and teachers of possibilities for future developments. Foci for further research also are identified.
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Study Circles
Staffan Larsson
The study circle is a “free and voluntary” pedagogy that has become a mass phenomenon in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It was initiated within the popular movements in the first years of the 1900s as a tool for education among their members. Around 10 adults typically meet a few hours a week to develop their interests, for example, in art, political topics, music, or foreign language. The “study circle grammar” includes voluntary participation, an extremely wide span of topics to be studied, no requirements of a teacher, and no entrance qualifications, grades, or exams. Tradition stresses deliberations among participants, but practical topics often have a workshop pedagogy. They have received subsidies from the state and from municipalities through various organizational structures depending on country since the early 1900s. They grew and spread fast, reaching a peak in participation in the late 1900s, but have since stagnated; however, a substantial share of adults in Nordic countries continue to engage in them.
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Systemic Supports for Antiracist Practice in International Baccalaureate Classrooms
Whitney M. Hegseth
When considering how to (re)build educational systems for equity, one might explore the potential of a system’s supports to facilitate changes in perceptions and pedagogy in classrooms, so that both become increasingly antiracist. A disciplinary incident in an International Baccalaureate (IB) elementary classroom in Washington, D.C., helps illustrate how the IB system’s educational infrastructure can support teachers in (re)framing and responding to problems in their classrooms. The infrastructure that may support such (re)framing includes system-level guidance around (a) outcomes, (b) instructional methods, and (c) the use of local resources. Although the IB system is not yet an antiracist system, its educational infrastructure can support a transformation in perception and pedagogy for IB teachers. This existing infrastructure, then, has the potential to help IB teachers and schools move toward increasingly antiracist practice. Exploring such a synergy between infrastructure and antiracist practice may help the IB system, and other educational systems, in their efforts to (re)design system supports to redress long-standing inequities in schools and society.
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Systemic Supports for Antiracist Practice in Montessori Classrooms
Whitney M. Hegseth
When considering how to (re)build educational systems for equity, one might explore the potential of a system’s supports to facilitate changes in perceptions and pedagogy in classrooms, so that both become increasingly antiracist. A disciplinary incident in a Montessori elementary classroom in Washington, DC helps illustrate how the Montessori system’s educational infrastructure supports teachers in (re)framing problems and solutions in their classrooms. The infrastructure that supports such (re)framing includes (a) teacher training; (b) system standards around class size and composition; and (c) system guidance around community relations, paired with standards around the structure of the school day. Though the Montessori system is not yet an antiracist system, its highly elaborate infrastructure already supports a transformation in perception and pedagogy for Montessori teachers. This existing infrastructure, then, has potential to help Montessori teachers and schools move toward increasingly antiracist practice. Exploring such synergy between infrastructure and antiracist practice may help the Montessori system, and other educational systems, in their efforts to (re)design system supports to redress long-standing inequities in schools and society.
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TACKLE: Supporting Learning and Identity Formation in a Native American Community
Lorraine Orosco, Olga Vásquez, and Charles Underwood
Identity development involves complex processes through which individuals enhance their senses and come to understand themselves. This follows in the contextual state of the various cultural demands and the norms of the society. The development of identity could be viewed as a process that is crucial to adolescents and that enables individuals in transiting from childhood dependency into adults responsible of their needs, aspirations, interests, and desires. The process of transition includes a cognitive reorganization in the way the youth think and their relation to other individuals as they mature. Identity development is often associated with adolescence, but it is a continuous process throughout adulthood. It creates a sense of belonging in a bigger and contextual cultural transition. In Native America, universities and indigenous communities have had collaborative work to support learning and identity development among the communities. It has, however, had its share of challenges for a long time as the collaborative processes are complex in nature. One of the collaborative processes in the Native American community was the Technology And Culture Kumeyaay Literacy Education (TACKLE). The historical development of TACKLE as a university–community partnership is described in terms of the emergence of two key strategies—participatory collaborative activity and context embedded change—which came to guide the partners’ interactions as they worked together to bridge their cultural differences in developing the TACKLE program.
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Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum
Emily Pringle
Activities that actively and deliberately support museum visitors’ engagement with art and promote learning occupy a distinct, though contested, place in the history and current framing of the art museum across the globe. Despite its many benefits, educational work in art museums has grown erratically, frequently without formal structures, systems, or strategies, and it has been critiqued in the past for lacking a robust theoretical framework and consistent methodological principles. It remains the case that the field is broad, diverse, and continually evolving; in the early 21st century, the boundaries are shifting, for example, between what constitutes curatorial practice and learning practice in contemporary art museums. This fluidity and heterogeneity has enabled the emergence of creative and responsive practice that encourages visitors to learn with, through, and about art, but it poses challenges when the goal is to present a coherent overview. Therefore any summary of this complex domain will necessarily be selective. Nonetheless, taking the practice as it has been developed in the United Kingdom and the United States, where this work has been theorized and communicated to the greatest extent (and with reference to the practice in Europe, Canada, and Australia), it is possible to identify common historical developments, shared philosophical and pedagogical principles, and collective challenges and opportunities that contribute to a comprehensible picture, albeit one that is replete with contradictions. As a field, art-museum education continues to define itself. And although valuable research and theorization have been undertaken, in part by practitioners drawing on their own experiences, further work is required, not least to broaden the understanding of the practice as it is manifest globally and to make explicit the increasingly important role of art education within the art museum.
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The Artist-Teacher
Esther Sayers
Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of the artist-teacher in contemporary educational contexts, the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice; a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever-changing identity of the artist-teacher. The answer to the question of how to teach art comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of “reproduction” and “production” as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by artist-teachers when they develop strategies for learning explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: What to teach? The answer lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought.
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The Impact of International Experiential Learning and the Community and University Partnership Supporting Global Citizenship in U.S. Schools
Elisabeth Krimbill, Lawrence Scott, and Amy Carter
As global citizens, we have an increasing international interdependence that now impacts the way we solve problems and interact with one another. Intentionally planed travel abroad has the potential to transform lives by creating a greater global and personal awareness, where adolescents see themselves as not just members of their local community, but also a global community. In an attempt to prepare students for an international and interdependent world, one inner-city nonprofit agency partnered with a local university in South Texas to provide overseas experiential learning opportunities paired with service-learning projects. Through one innovative program, more than 600 students have traveled to more than 20 countries as a full-immersion experience, most of which were centered on service-learning opportunities. The students in this program had the opportunity to examine their prejudices, assumptions, and fears while learning about themselves and developing deeper relationships with members of their school and local community through global outreach.
