Session 2b: Access, Equity and Engagement in Making

This was a theoretical session where we explored notions of equitable engagement in Maker spaces. We had been given a pre-session reading, I had read "Making Sense of Making: Defining Learning Practices in MAKE Magazine" by Brahms and Crowley (2016). The text focused on the community of self-appointed "makers" who read and contribute the the making community whose pivot is MAKE magazine.

The paper focused on one particular making project, made by a father and son team, who created a rocket ship tree-house that had numerous technological features. Focusing on this make allowed the authors' the ability to demonstrate the inequity seen in making; that it is the pursuit of white, middle-aged and incomed men who are higher educated.

As a group, we discussed the paper and recorded out findings in a mind map, which can be seen below:

I think out discussion generated two important considerations which could not be found in the paper. The first involved ability or disablity and the lack of entry, profile and consideration for disabled makers within the maker community. 

The second consideration we had was who are the makers? I brought up the idea of model boat makers I see regularly at the boating lake in Victoria Park, all of who are clearly white and middle-aged. But is there form of making accepted as making within the MAKE magazine community. This ideas was paralleled with the Women's Institute, who are not male but middle aged and probably middle incomed and would make things on a regular basis such as craft, textiles, food and horticulture. Are they not makers too? Making parallels with different groups enabled us to identify the importance and drawbacks of clubs and the exclusive nature of clubs. Yet the values are shared, but the name, MAKER, excludes.

After this, we had another practical activity involving programming. We were split into 2 groups, one group would tackle an activity to reproduce sound using the Scratch visual programming environment, the other group used the physical programming language Code Jumper which has been developed by Microsoft for the visually impaired. This was particularly relevant for me, as I teach computer science and I also have had students how have no visibility, who have had to have alternative lessons when the classes use Scratch in Year 7 due to its exclusive visual nature. This always makes me feel bad.

As an experienced user of Scratch, I was able to complete the tasks quickly and spent most of our half of the session helping colleagues in my group. Here are some photos of our solutions:

We then moved to Code Jumper, which I found initially very confusing, but the use of iteration and sequence became quickly apparent:

We required a lot of guidance, but were eventually able to understand how the blocks fitted together. Sadly, I think creating the same programs in Scratch in advance of this activity prevented us from getting the full experience of creating programs without seeing code, as we had seen solutions in Scratch.