My recent work can be explained in three main strands: school integration, awareness of learning, and critical making.
School Integration
While practices that align with constructionist learning have long been incorporated into many out-of-school learning contexts, integration into formal school environments is still at its early stage. Believing that school integration is a key to truly reaching the most diverse learners, I have explored the role of constructionist learning in classroom settings and how it can be integrated into ongoing educational practices meaningfully.
Ongoing project:
Completed project:
- Integrating Creative Learning into Middle-School Curriculum
- Learning Creative Learning: Massive Open Online Courses for Creative Learning Educators
- Unhangout for Educators: Participant-driven Online Professional Development for Maker Educators
Awareness of Learning
The assessment system plays a significant role in how we consider what counts as learning. One critique of current assessment practices is that they do not equally capture all forms of learning that happen in the classrooms. In particular, for constructionist learning that is, by nature, embodied, culturally diverse, both individual- and peer-based, and process-oriented, existing assessment is often the greatest challenge involved in integrating it into school systems. I am interested in how alternative forms of assessment enabled by constructionist pedagogy may help support learners and educators to gain an expanded and more nuanced understanding of how they are learning.
Ongoing project:
- Co-designing Assessment for Computing and Making Classrooms
- Understanding Learning in Maker Classrooms
Completed project:
Critical Making
While constructionist learning is not limited to digital making, emerging technologies have the potential to support constructionist learning by affording new ways of interacting with materials and representing learners’ thinking, that traditional materials and tools for making do not provide.
Ongoing project:
- Learning Data through Play
- Roles of Makerspace in Higher Education (upcoming)
Completed project: