Teacher Education for Maker Education: Helping Teachers Develop Appropriate PCK for Engaging Children in Educative Making

Abstract

Despite the potential of the maker movement to influence how we teach students in school, thus far, most research on maker activities have taken place in informal spaces, such as museums and after-school programs, which are inaccessi- ble to some populations. To ensure maker education reaches all students, it must find its place at school. However, classroom-based maker activities have different constraints and may require teachers to hold different types of knowledge. We drew from the body of research on maker education to create a course that prepared pre- service elementary school teachers to implement activities that were consistent with the maker ethos and met state and district standards. As a course assignment, the teacher candidates designed and hosted a School Maker Faire for elementary school children, providing an opportunity for local children to participate in maker activi- ties and for pre-service elementary school teachers to design, facilitate, and reflect on maker education as a method of teaching science. In this paper, we delineate the constituent parts of maker pedagogical content knowledge and describe how pre- service teachers developed the appropriate knowledge for integrating maker educa- tion activities into their classroom curriculum. We propose that the knowledge teachers need to facilitate and assess student learning through maker education is more complex than either science pedagogical content knowledge or engineering pedagogical content knowledge.