The assignment:
Read the Agency by Design blog post: Maker- Person, Identity or Cultureand share your response using the following Thinking Routine: connect, extend, and/or challenge. You do not have to do all three moves, only the ones that support you in sharing your thoughts on the post. We encourage you to use any format you like to respond to the article: a written response, a drawing, a diagram, an audio, etc. If you choose to represent your thinking visually, please upload an image of your diagram/drawing/etc and include a few words describing how the piece represents your thinking.
CONNECT: How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?
EXTEND: What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?
CHALLENGE: What is still challenging or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?
Reading response:
I am wary of sharing my contribution here as I feel my colleagues will think my answer is somewhat predictable- as I have spoken up often about the inequities I observe throughout our community and society and recently I feel like my voice has morphed into white noise (no pun intended however appropriate). About the “maker movement” – I have been involved in educational technology for almost 20 years now. The things that we now call ‘maker’ were once part of the A/V club at one time or perhaps the crafting club or some marriage of the two- then as we incorporated more commercially available electronic components, microcontrollers and mini-computers (arduino, raspberry pi, etc.) this became tinkering and now we have new language- ‘maker.’ The language is important. The shift from female ingenuity to male dominated explaining is important as part of this cultural phenomenon in my opinion.
Is Martha Stewart a ‘maker’-? I’d say yes but I doubt others might see it that way. The DIY crafting and home improvement phenomenon that had a resurgence in the 1990s was about ‘making’ and innovating- for your home. This movement was aimed at female identified 20 somethings who were trying to create hybrid lives that embodied the family homelife of the 1970s (which was an update to the 1950s) and the ‘modern era’ of working women, dual income families and shifting expectations about parenthood. I was a part of this phenomenon- as female identified twenty-something in the late 1990’s setting up a household of my own for the first time, on a limited budget, Martha Stewart and her ilk were the gurus of this movement. We ‘made’ a lot of things for the home. Was this a ‘maker movement’- of sorts, sure.
Without adding an additional 1000 words that cover the trends in education and what work we ‘value’ over the past 20 years- it was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung back toward a more physical engagement with the world around us.
The “maker movement” is white, male and middle class- and sometimes trust funded folks. That is the marketing around this movement- it is very middle class/upper middle class. There is a cost to these items- which speaks to someone’s disposable income, access to tools/tutorials and information. “Marginalized” people in the United States have been forced to be creative in repurposing items or curating and crafting items for their use. The whole ‘life hack’ and ‘DIY’ household movements have been centered around this type of ‘making’ for almost two decades- but would you call these people ‘makers’-? Would these people see themselves as part of the ‘maker movement’-? Is this another occurrence of “columbusing” for monetization?