Interview with a Leader in Maker Education

Assignment: You are asked to schedule an interview with a leader in maker education of choice, and to summarize the interview in 2-3 double-spaced pages due in week 2. The primary purpose of this interview is for you to gain familiarity with a good role model for your project work. Therefore, attempt to identify someone doing similar work to that you plan to do. You may ask your interviewee about his or her background, relevant preparation and education for his/her work, goals and motivation for the work, implementation strategies, strategic partnerships or alliances, measures of success, and other topics that will be useful to you.

For my Leader in Maker Education interview, I decided to have an hour-long round-table with three women in STEM education to gain a variety of perspectives. This was important to me because my capstone project needs to be adaptable for both formal and informal settings and incorporate both strong science and engineering components and maker education. The people I chose to meet with represented a cross-section of the types of people who are in the audience for the Sun Camp program.

My round table included educators with a wide variety of experience who were leaders in their fields. Kathy Ceceri is a STEAM Author and Educator. She started as a freelance newspaper reporter who was also homeschooling her two children. As their interests grew, she began writing about their adventures. She has now published 14 books on STEM, STEM, and Maker education activities. Kathy also hosts hands-on programs for community groups and libraries and speaks on Maker education at conferences. Tiffany Lucey is the PreK-12 Supervisor of Educational Technology, Life Skills, and Career and Technical Education for the Toms River NJ school system. A former mathematics and computer science teacher, Tiffany now promotes STEAM equity by providing students with opportunities within and beyond the classroom. She creates learning resources, content, and experiences for students, including the Jersey Shore Maker Fest. Corinne Rywalt is the Director of the STEAM Program at the Berkshire School in Sheffield, MA. A recent graduate from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a background in physics and engineering, Corinne teaches high school science and engineering classes in addition to running the makerspace and radio station.

We started our talk by discussing how you motivate students and strategies to encourage participation. Everyone agreed that the most important element was connecting the project to the real world and making it authentic. The educators stressed that any work done in a design space has to be relevant to the students and matter to their lives. They have to care. Kathy expanded on this with ideas for building engagement. She suggested connecting what you want to teach with what students already know and experience and extending from that. She felt it was very important to ensure students could relate to the project deeply, even if that meant taking extra time to go out into the environment to explore or spending time asking and answering lots of questions (i.e. they need time for research). Then students could take that knowledge and apply it to the project at hand, essentially transforming divergent thinking into convergent thinking.

Because I need to provide an assessment strategy for my Sun Camp project, we discussed how educators assess success in a STEM or maker setting. In all cases, the focus was “process over product”. Kathy stressed the importance of informal assessment, asking students to explain why and how they did the project. She suggested having children do this at the end of an informal project by explaining their work to a parent or sibling. She also suggested that older students could write out instructions or create blogpost about their experiences. Meanwhile, in a formal high school setting, Corinne suggested having students communicate what they’ve learned in a variety of ways from formal Powerpoint presentations to simply “sharing out” to the class at the end of a session. Tiffany expressed how challenging traditional school structure can be when teaching to a Maker Mindset. She shared how challenging it was to create high school programs, for example, where students were not evaluated by grades to gain acceptance to the program but instead by their interest in the topic. She said that making that shift helped to focus the entire program on the experience rather than grades. It also made the program less exclusionary, which has led to more students participating, more diversity in the program, more creativity from the students, and more students graduating from the programs with valuable skills and career training.

We also discussed how to get parents, administrators, and community stakeholders to support STEM and Maker education. Kathy reflected that she didn’t often have to convince people that STEM was important. Because she teaches informal programs in many types of communities– from rural to urban–she finds that the parents who bring their children to her activities already value the type of education she provides, often specifically because they don’t get it in school. Likewise, Corinne, who works at a private boarding school, found both the parents and the administration were supportive of her work, but often focused on the career connection. They were interested in producing scientists and engineers. However, Corinne found that wasn’t often enough for her students. Instead, she focuses on the problem-solving skills and mindset that students could learn in the makerspace and STEM classes, which they can apply to any career path. Tiffany likewise finds the career opportunity drives interest in her programs. She has been able to turn that interest into financial support for her ever-expanding programs that cover diverse topics like biomedical engineering, digital arts, sustainability, and entrepreneurship while inviting local businesses and industries to serve as experts and mentors for students. This was her inspiration to host school-wide events based on Maker and STEM programs. As a result, teachers across the curriculum developed an interest in Maker education both for their students and themselves.

The entire conversation is available as a video at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15quyQyqNnwacXs5IWzlRsZvfZwXqDrQK/view?usp=sharing

The transcript is available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F4I4XmBrTDkTlxsT-bvbVO5lYRu8m1a9/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=112173178456566497541&rtpof=true&sd=true