This is the best question to ask students when they enter your library. Many libraries today make many things including items for the community, projects for class, creative thinkers projects and readers of tomorrow. We really can do it all in a library, you just have to think outside of the box. When students are checking out a book, they are making their own choices. We, the librarians, don't pick their book for them. In a makerspace this is the same concept. This "lets them know that they are their own agents, responsible for determining for themselves the path of their own making and learning" (Angevine & Weisgrau, 2015).
There are so many great libraries that have created wonderful makerspaces. Her are a few that I find inspiring.
Gina Seymour of Islip High School, NY, created a makerspace that allowed students to help the community. They created dog toys, items for the homeless shelter and dresses for girls in Uganda. Seymour recently inspired many librarians in South Carolina when she was the Keynote Speaker at the 2020 SC Association of School Librarians (SCASL) Conference this past March.
The
University of South Carolina, Rhodos Fellows program at the South Quad
Residence Hall created an amazing “garage” out of an old dark study space. This
took over 2 years to develop by researching many other university makerspaces
and training the students to help others. This residence hall is
primarily for freshman at USC and is a special place to develop our creative
thinkers of the future.
Jackson Elementary School, Camden, SC is located in Kershaw County. They
have around 600 students in this school from K-Fifth grade. I
really like how the librarian designed and organized the makerspace. Every
space is designed to challenge the student and includes ideas and directions
for a student to work independently. To me this is a great place to
start for any small library with a small budget.
So how do we begin?
There are some great tools that I have included to get your started.
But the best thing is to just get started. We can make
students a place that doesn’t judge or grade them. We just want to “encourage
hands-on, collaborative learning, sharing and creating” (Jones,
2016) .
So I ask you again…What are we making today?
Angevine, C., & Weisgrau, J. (2015, September 24).
Situating makerspaces in schools. Retrieved from hybridpedagogy.org:
https://hybridpedagogy.org/situating-makerspaces-in-schools/
Jones, K. (2016, March 21). Digital curation: A
makerspace guide. Retrieved from Evernote :
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s210/client/snv?noteGuid=243a99ba-a99a-4afb-8a7e-92f19ec7853e¬eKey=b65a5cb0af531c79582b3035157c220a&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs210%2Fsh%2F243a99ba-a99a-4afb-8a7e-92f19ec7853e%2Fb65a5cb0af531c79582b303515
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