Maybe a Maker Space? Organizational Learning about Maker Education within a Regional Out-of-School Network

Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended targets of such investments learn to develop new maker related educational programs. Using the framework of Expansive Learning, focusing on organizational learning processes resulting in new and unfolding forms of activity, this paper begins to fill this gap through a case study of a community organization serving non-dominant youth that engaged in an 18-month learning process to create its own makerspace. Utilizing interviews, field observations and diverse forms of documentation, findings show that (1) regional organizational networks play infrastructural roles involving inspiration, validation and orientation in expansive learning through providing access to expertise and partnerships, (2) organizational learning around maker education involves dimensions of not only pedagogy and technology but also of social geography, institutional logics and organizational design processes, and (3) processes of object transformation within expansive learning around maker education by organizations rooted in non-dominant communities can act as sites of critique and, potentially, contributions maker education culture in ways that address issues of broadening participation and increasing equity. 

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