Journal Article

Innovation from Below: Infrastructure, Design, and Equity in Literacy Classroom Makerspaces

Nichols, T. Philip

2020

Overview

A growing research base has examined the possibilities of makerspaces in education; however, there has been little exploration of how such innovations are folded into formal school structures, like English language arts classrooms. This article addresses this by following theformation of literacy classroom makerspaces in the Innovation School-an urban public high school organized around principles of making. Using ethnographic research conducted over the school's first two years, it traces how teachers integrated making into literacy instruction and how the contours of classrooms were reshaped by making's ideals and assumptions. In particular, it focuses on resulting shifts in the infrastructures of literacy education-the often-invisible mechanisms that support, sustain or undermine reading and writing in classrooms. Findings show how the interoperability of these literacy infrastructures with those of making produced frictions that had uneven consequences for students, at times reproducing forms of deficitization that making education is often purported to ameliorate. These outcomes elucidate possibilities and challenges for educational equity when literacy learning is refashioned in the image of innovations like making. They are also instructive for understanding how educators might imagine \"innovation\" otherwise, wresting it from experts and entrepreneurs and relocating it in the lived dynamics of classrooms.

• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English
• Subject: Adult Literacy / Education / Equal Education / Innovations / Language arts / Learning / Literacy / Literacy Education / Makerspaces / Students / Teaching / Teaching Methods / Writing instruction