Building Students' Literate Agency through Makerspace Activities in a Two-Year College

Abstract

This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.

Maker Activities and Academic Writing in a Middle School Science Classroom

“…Three studies investigated writing in a makerspace. In Lee's (2022) study, students in a community college engaged in a making activity, reflected on their making experience, interviewed a peer on the making experience, and wrote a digital literacy analysis paper on how technologies changed their lives. The analysis of the products students created and interview with one student showed how students' digital literacy was cultivated.…”

“…As a common learning context for promoting science and the engineering design cycle, makerspaces have become more prevalent in educational institutions, particularly in Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, the United States and China (Freeman et al, 2017). Having founded the Make Magazine in 2005 and launched the Maker Faire in 2006, Dale Dougherty is the founder of the maker movement (Lee, 2022). The movement places value on working with materials or objects to solve problems.…”