Given that the first assignment for ETL401 – Introduction to Teacher Librarianship was starting this blog I always knew I would get more out of assignment 2. Essay writing is the force majeure of university learning and I did enjoy getting to pick my own topic though was disheartened to hear that it was the one that “everyone picks” according to a recent online meeting.
I chose makerspaces for my discussion essay and corralled my research into makerspaces within school libraries though my interest is much broader. When I was an Education Officer at the National Museum of Australia and “A History of the World in 100 Objects” toured to our temporary exhibition gallery one of the displays that affected me was “Durer’s Rhinoceros Print”. The curation of this work was done through a holographic plate, as well as the original, and as part of our offerings we also offered a downloadable CAD file for a 3D statue based on the work. Seeing my role as the connector of all things I started advising people that the ACT public library Civic branch had a makerspace with a 3D printer and that if they wanted to engage this way then that would be awesome. I never heard if anyone actually went ahead and did it. Another exposure that peaked my interest was when I visited a startup hub in NZ and one of the projects they had going on was to visit schools and get kids to design and redesign rockets in an iterative process which would get them not only excited but also engaged in making practical decisions with outcomes resourced by the business’s makerspace. None of these educational makerspace engagements have involved any school libraries that I am aware of. But the projects I discussed in my discussion essay of ways of memorialising and physicallising the process of grief through badge making, of iterating transmedia storytelling all the way through to an automatic animatronic outcome, and exposure to the fields that students would have to select to focus on in secondary school using the creative, playful, and powerful potential of a school library makerspace all resonated as successful projects also. I theorise that whether a project is internally driven or externally driven is more about where the personal and resources are located within a community. As to what drives that location it is a matter of socioeconomics, norms, and the sustained passions of the participants of those communities.