Teaching Severe Weather: Examining Teacher Candidates’ Early Field Experience in a Makerspace Environment

Abstract

This qualitative study examines first-year teacher candidates early field experience designing and implementing maker workshops for an afterschool program. The maker workshops were offered as part of a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) enrichment club at a local elementary school. The participants engaged in 50 hr of guided design, planning, and facilitation of a weather-focused maker workshop. Findings illuminate the role early teaching experiences (e.g., makerspaces) can play in the early professional development of elementary teacher candidates. This study calls for further investigation regarding maker environments as sites for elementary field experiences for teacher candidates.

Teaching & learning in makerspaces: equipping teachers to become justice-oriented maker-educators

“…There is little empirical research on makerspace professional development for in-service teachers. This research focuses on the outcomes of these workshops including increased confidence in using making technologies (Stevenson et al, 2019), an understanding of the importance of collaboration through making (Cohen et al, 2017;Shively et al, 2020), the types of learning activities described by teachers , and teachers' conceptions and misconceptions about making after a one-day workshop (Cohen et al, 2018). Collectively, these studies highlight the importance of the use of an organizing framework for teacher learning of making, the benefit of engaging teachers in making activities, and the need for sustained learning opportunities for learning about making.…”

Accessible Maker-Based Approaches to Educational Robotics in Online Learning

“…This is even more pertinent in the context of making, since previous work has emphasized that teacher professional development for maker-centered activities should address the maker mindset [17]. As a matter of fact, an authentic making experience can provide insights for teachers to model their own maker activities to engage their students [37,39,61,67]. In the present work, five in-service teachers following a continuous professional development course participated in a maker-based ER activity conducted in an online learning format.…”

“…values such as creativity, problem-solving and digital literacy) and allow them to experience them firsthand, since planning and teaching in the maker context are different from conventional instructive teaching practices. In this context, it has been suggested that conducting maker activities with teachers can further help them gain expertise in these approaches [37,39,61,67].…”

Udvikling af andenordensdidaktisk praksis i læreruddannelsens Playlabs: En designbaseret undersøgelse af, hvordan eksisterende praksis kan udvikles i et andenordensdidaktisk perspektiv

“…De studerende betragtes fx som: "an indispensable part of the maker movement because they must enter schools understanding the possibilities of this innovative and creative learning space, along with the active learning pedagogies that should be used in it" (Jin, 2021, p. 78). Det pointeres dog, at de studerende mangler selvtillid og erfaring med at planlaegge og gennemføre undervisning i skolernes Makerspaces grundet manglende forberedelse (Bullock & Sator, 2015Cohen, 2017Cohen, , 2018aHeredia & Fisher, 2022;Jin, 2021;Jones et al, 2017;Koole et al, 2020;Lille & Romero, 2017;Rodriguez et al, 2018 ;Shively et al, 2021). Udfordrende er det i denne sammenhaeng, at det pointeres, at der er behov for at understøtte udviklingen af praksis i laereruddannelsens Makerspaces, da der er en kløft mellem etableringen af det fysiske miljø og udviklingen af praksis: "the focus has largely been on the design and not on pedagogical practice" (Phillips & Finn, 2020. p. 1).…”