The evolution of the Wayfinders Studio

2021

The AlphaPlus Educator Makerspace evolved out of a case studies project. We planned to go to programs where cool stuff was happening so that we could observe those practices and create video case studies about how the practitioners developed their lessons, methods and teaching philosophies. This idea did not happen because that was the year of COVID. We did interviews about the pivot to remote learning instead - 2021: The Pivot. It is an amazing collection of insights and teacher wisdom.

2022

As we were planning the case studies for the next year:

• We went to a webinar on Maker Learning at Digital Promise and learned about the Tinkering Studio. 

• We looked at the concept of masterminds, especially the way it is described by the people at Teach, Learn, Thrive. 

• We started to think about how practitioners could be wayfinders for other practitioners and how AlphaPlus could foster that kind of leadership in our community of practice.

• We looked at what Wade Davis has to say about about wayfinding. 

We thought we could pull from these ideas to develop a makerspace where practitioners could talk about how they develop their practice. We stayed on the case study theme for the first makerspace starting in June 2022. We asked practitioners to create a video story about their practice. We worked with three people in the pilot and two of them created videos and shared them at Community Gabfests: Learner Agency and Personal Web.

We use what practitioners told us about what different audiences in this first makerspace – and focus on the innovator audience when planning themes and the theoretical underpinnings for each Makerspace. 

In January 2022, we attended the DRAW EdTech Maker Space to build the Digital Skills Library. The experience of this model got us thinking about other ways of doing makerspaces. We liked the idea of engaging teachers in conversations about how they use resources to engage learners and enhance and extend learning.

2023

In 2023, we shifted from the case study focus to a model where we take a pedagogical theme and match it with a technology. We started with the idea of engaging learners with interactive activities and the technology we demonstrated was H5P. The idea for using OERs to create H5Ps came from colleagues who are working on the OER collection at AlphaPlus. For two participants, the makerspace dovetailed nicely with projects they were working on and they were abole to apply what they were learning immediately. Some participants used the makerspace as an idea incubator rather than a production process. For them, the outcomes of their participation may evolve over time unseen by us. 

In December 2023, we attended another CrowdED Learning EdTech Maker Space: Activity Design Guide. We used Skillblox as the tech and the Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) framework as the theoretical grounding. This model matched closely what we were experimenting with and we learned a lot about how teachers approach questions of engaging learners with varied content and interactive activities.

As Ontario literacy teachers often apply unique combinations of frameworks (Skills for Success, the Ontario Adult Literacy Curriculum Framework and others) and methodologies that meet the needs, goals and desires of the learners they work with, in our makerspaces we try to present pedagogical possibilities through a general adult-learning-principles lens and leave it to individual teachers to mash it up with the whatever remix of frameworks they are using. We are learning how to support practitioners as they navigate the conundrums they are faced with.