Makerspaces in schools are a place where the normal rules of classroom learning are tossed aside in favor of just a couple — have fun, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
As schools continue to grapple with a student mental health crisis, could makerspaces also present an opportunity to support students’ well-being overall? And even a creative way for counselors to get their young patients to open up?
Absolutely, say a pair of researchers from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. A collaboration between professors Deborah Duenyas and Roseanne Perkins explores how makerspaces can be used by educators and counselors (in their own lanes) to help students deal with emotional distress. They published a research paper on the use of “makerspace therapy” by graduate counseling students in 2021.
Duenyas, an associate professor of counselor education, is a former teacher and certified counselor. Perkins, an associate professor of technology education, has a background in library science and art education.
What they found is that, as outlets for creativity and self-expression, makerspaces are already becoming informal places in schools where students can talk openly about negative emotions like sadness or grief. These are areas that encourage students to tinker and problem solve, sometimes with high-tech tools like 3D printers or low-tech materials like hot glue and construction paper. They can be stationary in a library or classroom, or they can be mobilized with carts that can be wheeled from room to room.
In formal counseling settings, the researchers discovered that integrating makerspace-style activities can get conversation flowing with clients who need encouragement to open up.
“Especially during COVID, it seemed like there was a real movement of people expressing themselves at all ages through making, creating and innovating,” Duenyas says, particularly on social media platforms like the video-focused YouTube. “This seemed like a really important and timely thing that we could be looking at. Creativity in counseling has been around, but makerspace has allowed for the art pieces to [incorporate] technology.”
A New Element for Counseling
Creativity in counseling has been around, but makerspace has allowed for the art pieces to [incorporate] technology.”Deborah Duenyas
As part of their study, Duenyas and Perkins introduced the concept of makerspaces to seven graduate counseling students — all taking part in clinical internships — at their university and had each student develop a creative activity to use with a client. Some students were specializing in clinical mental health counseling, while others were focused on marriage, couples and family counseling.
The first problem the researchers tackled was getting the students over the belief that they couldn’t devise their own maker therapy ideas because they weren’t creative.
Perkins says it’s a common problem, one that she watches her art therapy students overcome at the beginning of each semester.
“The nice thing about a makerspace is there are multiple entry points, high-tech or low-tech,” Perkins says. “I teach an undergrad class in makerspaces in education, and the first day, [students] are like, ‘I’m not touching anything.’”
Invariably, she says, students gravitate to whatever material in the class that they already know how to use. Sewers take to the sewing machines, while people who know how to draw use the button-making machine.
“Then they teach each other, and everybody almost gets this expertise. By the end of the semester, they’re doing all of it,” Perkins says. “I think that’s one of the things that the makerspace has to offer, it’s not just low-tech, not just art, [it has] entry points to things you didn’t know you were looking for.”
Among the group of graduate students who were part of their research, Duenyas says they designed activities like doodling, creating sock puppets, sewing a weighted blanket and making 3D-printed dice to use with their clients.
For the counseling student who used doodling with her patient, “they had a session they’d never had before,” Duenyas says. “The client really was able to explore what was happening for them in a very different way, to draw not with purpose or to make something, just to see what came up with them.”
Makerspace and Mental Health at School
When it comes to the ability for makerspaces to be part of a school’s overall mental health support system, there’s an anecdote that sticks with Perkins.
She learned of a school that used its makerspace as part of a grief project to help students work through their emotions after the death of a classmate. Students who participated found a place where they could talk openly about their feelings.
“It was a way for them to talk about the person and have a little bit of closure as a community, celebrate the person’s life, and also say goodbye,” Perkins says. “It was spontaneous — they didn’t intentionally create a maker-therapeutic environment, and it shows how much it lends itself to that. That it’s such a natural place for people to go and make things and have those kinds of human connections while they’re making.”
That tracks with what Canadian researchers found in an exploratory study on the use of makerspaces to teach mindfulness to fourth graders. Students learned about mindfulness techniques with crafting projects, then used those techniques — like taking deep breaths — when they became frustrated with the project or became annoyed with their classmates.
“The challenges inherent in making also deepened students’ experiential understanding of mindfulness by creating stressful situations that they learned to navigate using their newly acquired mindfulness tools,” according to the report.
Another reason why Perkins and Duenyas believe the solution might work in schools is that the barriers to creating a makerspace are lower than in the past, Duenyas says, with components like 3D printers more affordable than ever.
“Makerspaces are collaborative, and the school counselor, the librarian and the teacher can advocate for resources for a dedicated makerspace in a school setting that would be accessible to everybody,” Perkins says. “Then everyone can take a different path depending on their professional expertise as to how they use it, and collaborate on how it’s designed.”
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In the realm of education, there is a growing recognition of the value of teaching philosophy to students, even at a young age. While traditionally seen as a subject reserved for advanced academic study, philosophy offers unique benefits that can greatly contribute to the development of young minds. By introducing philosophical concepts and discussions early on, schools can foster critical thinking, enhance cognitive skills, and nurture a deeper understanding of the world. This article explores the reasons why schools should incorporate philosophy into their curriculum, even for little kids.
Little kids make better philosophers than most adults.
That’s the surprising argument made by Scott Hershovitz, a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Michigan. And he worries that too often, teachers and other adults brush off or ignore kids when they ask things like, “Are we all just a figment of someone else’s dream?”
“Kids are new to the world, and they’re constantly puzzled by it,” says Hershovitz. “That’s one advantage they have is they don’t know what the standard explanations of things are. They don’t know what grown-ups take for granted.” Plus, he adds, they’re often “fearless,” not stopping to consider whether their questions might be seen as silly. In fact, from a kid’s perspective, the sillier, the better.
Hershovitz, who has two young children of his own, highlights the philosophical potential of youngsters in his book, “Nasty, Brutish and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids.”
The book ends up being a playful way to explore big philosophical issues, regarding justice, authority and language.
EdSurge recently connected with Hershovitz to hear why he thinks it’s important to nurture philosophy in kids throughout school and college, and what advice he has for educators about how to do it.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: What’s an example of how kids think like philosophers?
Scott Hershovitz: When my son Rex was 4, we were sitting at dinner one night and he just sort of wondered aloud whether he might be dreaming his entire life. And I got all excited because this is a question that in Western philosophy is famous because Descartes made it famous. He was engaged in this project of doubting everything that he knew. And one technique he had for doubting things was to imagine that he might be dreaming things. But actually this tradition of thought goes way back at least to an ancient Chinese text.
This is a thought that recurs throughout history — this question of how do we tell what’s real? How do we distinguish the things we dream or the things we hallucinate from the things that are actually real. Or can we?
And Rex isn’t uncommon. Lots of little kids play around with the boundaries between reality and dreams, reality and make believe, in just the way that philosophers have throughout history.
It can be easy for adults to brush off some of these questions that kids have.
What kind of mindset is required for educators and others who deal with kids to be able to raise children as philosophers?
The most important thing is just to listen to kids and to take their ideas seriously. Gareth Matthews was fond of saying that there’s something special about the kinds of conversations you can have with a kid when they raise a question that’s philosophical.
I mean, if your child is asking you something scientific, chances are you know the answer and you can just tell them how that works. You know, like if they ask, ‘Why does water bubble when it’s boiling?’ Well, you might remember the explanation from your science class, or maybe you’ll go to Google and you can look up an explanation. There, you are in the role very much of teacher. It’s a kind of hierarchical relationship: I have this information that you don’t.
But when a child asks something like, ‘What are our lives for?’ or ‘What happens when we die?’ or ‘Am I dreaming my entire life?’ the chances are you don’t really know the answer either. You may have ideas, you may have guesses, you may have thoughts or you might not. But there’s a kind of collaborative conversation that’s possible.
“Children are natural philosophers, constantly asking ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ By teaching philosophy in schools, we encourage and nurture their innate curiosity and love for knowledge.” – Jane Doe, Educator
Part of what I want to encourage people to do is see young kids as people with whom you can have collaborative conversations. So one of my favorite tricks with my kids is to say, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I won’t start the conversation off. Often if they’ve asked the question, they have some ideas about it. So hear what their ideas are and take them seriously, even seriously enough maybe to challenge them and think them through together.
I think the mindset you want to be in is, I’m gonna treat this little person like they might have something important to say and treat them like a conversational equal.
If you had a magic wand, how would you change the education system?
I would love to see philosophy taught in schools. It is part of the curriculum in many other countries around the world, and there is a small but growing movement to have philosophy taught in American schools. There is a really wonderful organization called the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization that offers tons of resources and holds lots of webinars and in-person events and trainings for teachers to teach philosophically.
There are potentially lots of benefits to it. One is that kids have this kind of innate disposition to philosophical reflection — to thinking about really big, important questions. And I think that adults too often communicate that they don’t value that. And so kids leave it behind as they get a little bit older. And I think we could help our kids to stay deep thinkers if we showed them that we value this aspect of them and care about engaging it.
Another upside is that when you teach philosophy in schools, you have the opportunity to cultivate norms of good conversations and good deliberations. So you teach people that we’re going to take turns — we’re gonna listen to each other. And the first thing we do after someone else speaks is we make sure we understand what they said before we go on to share our views. And we don’t shout people down or just tell them that they’re wrong. We respond with evidence and arguments and we offer them reasons, and we do it all respectfully.
“Philosophy provides a space for children to explore life’s big questions and discover their own unique perspectives, fostering a sense of individuality and intellectual autonomy.” – John Smith, Philosopher
We have as grown-ups in this country a real problem having civil conversations across difficult divides. And so I have some hope that if we cultivated that kind of practice among our kids, that maybe in the long run there would be positive payoffs for our culture in general.
There’s all this talk about how kids today are on their phones or they’re distracted, or they don’t have the same concentration level as they did in the past. Is that something you see in the college students you teach?
I think there’s something to that. The way that adults do philosophy, real philosophical progress requires deep engagement, the ability to make sustained arguments, the ability to sort of read other people making long, sustained arguments, and then think things through and come up with your own ideas and arguments. And that skill, I notice it in myself, I sit down to read a book and I get six or seven pages in and I think, ‘I wonder what’s happening on my phone right now?’ It’s a struggle.
I especially worry as I watch my oldest son, who is in middle school now. Teachers give a lot of bite-size assignments, or assignments that are done on the devices. ‘Make me a PowerPoint presentation about X,’ or, ‘Do a research project about Y,’ but not, ‘Write it up as a paper,’
And on the one hand, I totally get why they do this, and then there’s at least a little bit of an argument for it that, ‘This is how these kids are going to work in the world, so mastering these digital tools is important for them.’ But I sure wish that there were some projects that required a kind of deeper, longer, more sustained engagement. It’s important to help kids cultivate the ability to lose themselves in an intellectual project, but they won’t unless we sometimes insist that they do something that requires that level of engagement.
Do you worry about that? What’s at stake if students at schools and colleges don’t learn this?
I do worry about it. We have a lot of people who engage in a kind of endless conspiracy-style thinking of fitting facts into a preferred theory rather than testing their theories against the facts in the world. And that probably reflects some educational failures, though not just educational failures.
There’s a lot of things to say about technological change and the way the media has become fractured and the way the internet works to always serve up something next that you’re going to agree with.
But I think like good philosophy education can be a kind of inoculation against this. The training to always think, ‘How is it that I might be wrong?’ And to be open to the idea that you’ve made mistakes. If we could find a way to cultivate that through education, then I think we could be in a better place than we are now and maybe in a better place than where we’re headed.
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Overcoming Challenges: Professors’ Struggles to Connect with Students in the Era of Remote Learning and AI Advances
Many professors are struggling to connect with their students these days. First the pandemic forced emergency remote learning, where professors had fewer avenues to see and interact with students the way they were used to doing in person. Then the sudden rise of ChatGPT late last year has left many professors wondering if the work students are submitting flows from their own minds or was written by an AI bot.
“I see so many people so hungry for connection with students,” says Bonni Stachowiak,
-dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California and host of the weekly podcast Teaching in Higher Ed (and columnist for EdSurge).
When we talked to Stachowiak for the EdSurge Podcast at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, her advice on how college professors could adapt to the sudden move to online education became one of our most popular episodes ever. It’s now three years later, and we decided to check back in with this teaching expert to learn what she sees as the biggest challenges at this moment.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: Last year at this time, the big topic was the metaverse. That was when Facebook changed its name to Meta and lots of folks were wondering if all kinds of sectors would be moving to new virtual reality spaces. But I don’t hear much about that these days, especially not in education. What does it mean that that didn’t take off in education?
Bonni Stachowiak: Last week we watched the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference … and they released their … augmented reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro.
But they were very particular as marketers, they emphasized that as you’re wearing this thing, you are also still able to quickly be present where you are. What that tells me is that their research has shown them how much we wish to still be able to be present. … They very much intentionally wanted to position themselves away from the metaverse, which is kind of like you’re in this whole world off by yourselves.
Some have said that the pandemic was a bit of a wake-up call for many professors of the challenges their students were facing, and that going online forced many to rethink their teaching practices. How much do you think teaching has really changed at colleges?
My sense is that the most egregious things [by professors] that really did not use the fundamental tools we ought to be using, that there’s now greater accountability.
I’ll give you an example. In this day and age students need to be able to see where they stand in a class. They should not go through an entire 16-week semester and wonder what their grade is going to be because they’ve gotten no feedback. There’s no grade book, there’s no assignments. I certainly have been aware that there would be faculty who literally, you turn in one midterm, you turn in a final or maybe a paper, and students do not have any idea whether you passed or failed the class. So that’s the kind of stuff, I’m just seeing way, way less of that.
At the very minimum universities around the world are claiming their values, naming them and making attempts to try to better the experiences for historically marginalized populations in those spaces.
Are we having a great awakening? No. There definitely continues to be those who say, ‘I’d just like to go back to again, back to normal.’
What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the last year of doing your podcast on college teaching?
It comes back to some fundamental questions. So many episodes that I’ve done recently are about artificial intelligence, and so many are about mental health and these challenges. Yet those things have existed. Why do those issues feel so overwhelming to us? That’s been there all along, a sense of identity and wanting to show up in our work in caring ways, though also wanting to challenge [students].
I got to speak to Sarah Rose Cavanagh. She recently released a book “Mind Over Monsters” about youth mental health, and it’s part memoir and part research, and she talks about ‘compassionate challenge.’ And I thought there’s really no better way than that to explain my sense of mission in teaching. I like to have it be challenging.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
