#makerpedagogy

Students often enter English classrooms with preconceived notions of 12-point Times New Roman, Microsoft Word essays about literature by "dead white guys." Similarly, there is a preconceived notion of what one might encounter in a makerspace: 3D-printed Arduino robots soldered by "rich, white guys." However, many multimodal composition scholars like Cheryl Ball, Cynthia Selfe, Jody Shipka, and Anne Wysocki have demonstrated the potential not only for students to be makers but also for English classrooms to be makerspaces. If we understand making to encompass analog materials as well as digital technologies, we recognize a greater potential to prototype arguments. 

The best practices to appropriate from makerspaces to English classrooms are to make new technologies unintimidating by scaffolding projects and to foster collaboration for peer-learning. Significant outcomes of this maker approach are that students come to recognize how much of what they consume on a daily basis is mediated and designed, they gain a newfound appreciation of the difficulties of making everyday objects, and, most importantly, they seem proud to share what they have created.

-EB