Preparing students for the gig economy
Makerspaces prove worth, Ann-Louise Davidson and Alan Shepard write.
As students and their teachers head back to school, many educators are reflecting on how they can help better prepare students to be valuable contributors in the 21st century. Citizens in the new gig economy will need to retrain more often, juggle several jobs, or invent their own.
How can we equip our young people to be more resourceful, adaptable and resilient?
One traditional practice — making things with your hands — shows promise. And for good reason.
Learning through doing, or “active learning,” is at the heart of contemporary maker culture. Its DIY activities take place in a social setting — often called “makerspace,” “fab(rication) lab” or “hackerspace.” These next-generation shop classes, equipped with 3D printers and other new technologies, as well as traditional artisan tools, are springing up around the world in various contexts — schools and universities, community centres, public libraries, and even mobile units to serve remote regions.
Why? Makerspaces, it turns out, have profound benefits — for individuals and society.
Makerspace facilitators report that many students who have difficulty concentrating in traditional classrooms come alive in a makerspace. At the Maison des Jeunes, a not-for-profit youth association in Côte-des-Neiges, Concordia University experts help young people build traditional arcade video game tables. As these teenagers and young adults follow the problem’s internal logic, they become absorbed, lose all sense of time, and enter a state of flow. With each step intuited and executed, with each mistake learned from, a sense of competence, even mastery, grows — an intrinsic motivation, where the process trumps the prize.
But the prize counts, too. When the game finally lights up, so do their faces. They’ve accomplished something concrete. Linking fun and pride with learning helps students stay in school.
In an era of on-demand everything, instant gratification through screens, and shortening attention spans, working with one’s hands takes on an even more meditative, therapeutic quality. In makerspaces, things unfold in real time, in real threedimensional space. However far they get in their journey from passive consumer to active creator, makers learn to fix things along the way.
Manual dexterity creates a sense of control over the physical trappings with which we still live: squeaky doors, leaky faucets. Ultimately, it creates a more sustainable society.
People drop in to Concordia’s Technology Sandbox to learn new skills through workshops, to get their hands dirty, but also to meet others. Through problem-based learning, they consult and teach each other. As they progress to bigger projects at other Concordia or Montreal makerspaces, they form informal communities, try out various roles — leader, organizer, technician, designer, engineer, builder — and find their comfort zone.
Like co-op work-study programs, makerspace experience builds networks, develops career skills and informs career choices.
More and more, world-leading research crosses traditional boundaries because the complex problems we face do. As noted in Canada’s Fundamental Science Review, interdisciplinary research has been slowly rising since the 1980s. That’s something the federal government recognized in its 2018 budget, earmarking $275 million over five years for research that is international and interdisciplinary.
These days, forward-thinking, evidence-based policymaking stands out. One of education’s chief tasks is to teach citizens to distinguish between clear communication that effectively simplifies a complex issue and oversimplification or deliberate obfuscation. Here again, makerspaces can help.
Concordia’s MilieuxMake teems with students bridging disciplines from our faculty of arts and science and our faculty of fine arts. Collaborating on real-world problems shows participants that any challenge often involves more than meets the eye. They see that solving it may require multiple skill sets, from people of different backgrounds, genders and generations.
Taken together, the benefits of making and mixing improve self-confidence, self-direction and respect for diversity — perhaps the best attributes for resilience in the 21st century.
Ann-Louise Davidson is research chair in maker culture and an associate professor in the department of education at Concordia University. Alan Shepard is president of Concordia.