Abstract
In 2016, the CCC Maker initiative provided the California Community Colleges with an influx of resources and energy designed to foster maker-centered learning (MCL). These hands-on practices have the potential to support the broader CCC mission by providing opportunities for engaged, empowering, and collaborative learning for the system’s diverse student population. As a relatively new phenomenon, the ways community college maker educators engage in MCL and conceptualize it within the context of their professional practice remains unstudied.In this constructivist grounded theory study (CGT), semi-structured interviews of 19 faculty, staff, administrators, and informal educators revealed participants’ perceptions of the processes by which they became makers and integrate making into their professional practice; and the institutional contexts in which they practice MCL. Against a backdrop of equity-based critiques of the maker movement, and informed by principles of design thinking, analysis of study data led to the development of the Maker Educators Making Meaning (MEMM) framework, comprised of the following theoretical categories: Making Connections, Making Meaning, and Working (Within) the System. This theoretical framework explains the phenomenon of interest and is applied to a series of four storylines that emerged from the data: Maker Peer Bonds, Multigenerational Makers, Fiber Arts and Gendered Making, and The “Younger Generation” to demonstrate its utility.
Study results reveal tensions between the goals of MCL at the system level (reflected in the economic focus of the CCC Maker initiative) and the meaning of making for study participants (as creative, contextualized education), a potential contradiction which could call into question the long-term sustainability of the practice in community colleges.