This case study is an examination of the emergence of leadership in students’ group interaction in a school-based makerspace. The data comprised video records of 20 primary school students’ group work within this context, encompassing student-driven creative engagement in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) learning activities. Interaction analysis was applied to analyze the students’ leadership moves and to depict how students’ leadership was related to their collaboration. The analysis resulted in a typology of students’ leadership moves in a makerspace context, namely, coordination of joint work, exploring new ideas, seeking out resources,
and offering guidance and supporting others, adding to the existing literature on student leadership and collaboration in novel learning environments. The study also illustrates how the students’ leadership moves in group interactions can lead to dominating and/or shared leadership, with consequences for students’ collaboration. The study points to the importance of more research and development of pedagogical practices that support students’ symmetric participation and opportunities to lead collaborative work and to promote advanced collaboration in school-based makerspaces.
This study investigates and maps students' maker literacies as they relate to digital competence. The study builds on sociocultural theorizing and on the scholarship of digital literacy that defines maker literacies as social practices that entail making and remaking artifacts and texts using various materials and technologies. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of video data from an ethnographic case study of students' (N:11) interaction in an elementary school's makerspace in Finland, our study presents and applies a framework of analysis for maker literacies and discusses how the school's makerspace enhanced the students' digital competence across operational, cultural, and critical dimensions. The study shows how the makerspace context afforded the students ample opportunities to engage in the operational dimension of maker literacies. However, there was less engagement in cultural and critical literacies. The implications of these findings for students' digital competence in makerspaces are discussed.
The need to foster citizens’ innovation skills is widely recognized. Although current research acknowledges the potential of makerspaces to promote innovation activities, research still lacks an understanding of underlying mechanisms that can lead the creation of innovations in makerspaces by students. Moreover, research to date has overlooked how innovation practices are formed in K–12 makerspaces. In this sociocultural study, we used ethnographic video data from a Finnish primary school’s makerspace and applied methods of abductive Video Data Analysis to investigate how innovation practices are constructed in first to sixth grade students’ and teachers’ interactions. The results of this study show that the innovations created by the students in the makerspace were an outcome of students’ and teachers’ collective innovation practices. The study provides a typology of these collective innovation practices, namely: taking joint action to innovate, navigating a network of resources, and sustaining innovation activities. Further, our results reveal that the collective actions encouraged students to use skills deemed to be important for innovation creation. Also, adding to existing research knowledge, our results reveal two mechanisms that potentially promote students’ learning to innovate. These mechanisms include the teachers’ orientation to facilitating open-ended STEAM projects and practices that emphasize students’ ownership over their personal projects.
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