Uncovering maker educators’ heterogenous professional visions of agency within goal setting interactions

Abstract

Agency is a core pedagogical goal of the maker education movement. However, there are still many unknowns about how agency is identified in maker settings. To document maker educator professional visions of agency, we conducted video-cued interviews with eleven U.S-based maker educators using video clips of families making in a drop-in cardboard-focused museum makerspace. We found that heterogenous professional visions of agency are in use within the maker education field, falling across for distinct themes: agency as open-endedness, agency as progressive development, agency as pursuing-own-ideas, and agency as authority. Depending on which of these lenses was foregrounded during video-cued reflections, maker educators interpreted the same video-recorded moments as evidence for and against maker agency. Further, these competing visions held different underlying assumptions about power in makerspace interactions. This documentation of heterogeneity indicates the complexity of agency as a maker pedagogical goal, makes a case that researchers should adopt multiple perspectives when conducting video-based microgenetic analyses, and raises questions about how to grapple with and mitigate inequitable power dynamics in makerspaces.