Teaching with and through Maps

More Labs & Maker Spaces

Adding these places/spaces where students can “make a thing” is supported within the “maker-movement,” which has many proponents in academia, the trades and in politics.  In Barack Obama’s proclamation for the National Week of Making in 2016 he states that we need to “foster "maker mindsets" by promoting skills like creative problem-solving, and to support the development of collaborative maker spaces so aspiring makers and manufacturers can turn their bold ideas into realities.”¹⁹

One of my program tenets is to support “green collar” career pathways. By this I mean I hope to open student’s experiences for them to consider sustainability in whatever future they engage in.  From a practical perspective I expose students to a range of sustainable focused post-secondary opportunities. It also means I try to provide a chance to learn practical sustainability skills such as how to grow and prepare food, how to care for trees, how to make and repair things, and to do hands on tinkering with energy systems and built environments towards improving efficiencies and carbon neutrality.

While explaining why maker spaces are essential to helping our young people prepare for their futures, IBM President, Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty coined the term “new collar” to describe emerging career paths in IT that require substantial skill but aren’t defined by traditional white- or blue-collar expectations. This speaks to a broader shift in skill sets. Employers say they struggle to find workers with soft skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability and communication.²⁰ So what I have been calling green collar fits into this paradigm of new collar jobs that emphasize practical hands-on experience and experience with systems thinking.

Maker spaces are proliferating in K-12 and higher education. “There isn't a single, definitive source that tracks all the makerspaces, fab labs and hackerspaces in the world, but estimates range in the thousands.”²¹ MIT’s Edgerton Center has been supporting maker spaces for college and K-12 education since 1992.  They have trained thousands of teachers and invited even more students on field trips to their facilities on campus. They offer numerous resources to justify the expense, and to get community buy in, for creating what they consider essential opportunities to “inspire your students to experiment, iterate, and become self-directed learners”²².  The maker movement seems strong, takes many forms, and has many supporters and resources for those inclined to try to make things with students as part of their school day.

As I mentioned earlier, our AFNR CTE program was conceived largely to bring additional resources to our school community.  These missing resources include as many real-world and hands-on learning opportunities as we can think of.  To provide these opportunities there needs to be supplies, equipment and expertise to manage the various hands-on projects that are relevant to learning.  Because our program is broad, effectively an intensive “sustainability studies” program with multiple pathways, the specific supplies and equipment required for a CTE “shop” spaces are less clear than if we were a bio-tech, automotive or culinary CTE program.

Since our school building does not have typical high school lab facilities with a ventilation hood or bunson burners, nor a dedicated fine arts classroom (paint/clay etc.), or many of the other amenities that one could argue are essential to engaging student inquiry, many of us teachers are instead trying to integrate hands on learning with mini-maker spaces where we can fit them.

We have few 3D printers in one of our math classrooms and pull them together with other equipment and supplies for a summer work-force program maker space.  We have built a small wood shop (staffed a period or two a week, and six weeks each summer, by one of our English teachers), a food preservation lab, and urban ag lab (indoor and outdoor growing spaces) in my classrooms.  We use extra funds to purchase and replenish arts and craft supplies, sustainable product packaging for urban ag product making, alternative energy kits, digital microscopes, and eco-building supplies to provide for some demonstration or hands on lab within every unit I teach.  After working at the Yale CEID to 3D print several topographic maps and models of Philadelphia we are working to upgrade our 3D printer capabilities at school, and have been using compostable bio-plastic filament to create our 3D models.