Maker pedagogy can be a political, and even radical, approach to learning. The best learning experiences emerge when students approach making as an exploratory and self-reflexive process that brings them into closer conversation with the concerns of the course.
And herein lies my concern. I actually think that the best learning experiences emerge when students approach making not only as the acquisition of a marketable set of skills (though I have nothing against skill-acquisition in itself) but as an exploratory and self-reflexive process that brings them into closer conversation with the concerns of the course. The “best”-ness of those learning experiences emerges when my concerns and goals enter into dialogue with those of my students: I want them to be activists, they want to be publishers, but in the best case scenario we collectively learn about the productive spaces where publishing and activism might overlap. In this sense, I share Ben Harley’s understanding of “education as an event — an unpredictable engagement between students, material, and instructor — that takes place within the confines of the university.”