Critical Making Takes a Holiday

In 1954, Hannah Arendt identified the existence of a perpetual “crisis” in (North) American education, a rhetorical theme since the middle of the 20th century that persists to this very day. One pervasive manifestation of the crisis currently making its rounds is a shortage of science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) graduates. In part as a response to this purported crisis, policy-makers and educators have demonstrated immense enthusiasm for “maker” or “production” pedagogies as a state-of-the-art solution. The Maker Education Initiative describes making as “a strategy to engage youth in science, technology, engineering, math, arts, and learning as a whole” (no emphasis in the original). In this context, educational making is an attempt to engage students in subject-specific learning, though clear emphasis is places on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). An example of its political support is the 2016 U.S. Department of Education Career and Technology Education (CTE) Makeover Challenge which invites schools to compete for $20,000 grants to build makerspaces. As schools – K-12 and higher education alike – rush to establish makerspaces and fabrication labs, critical analysis of the phenomenon has lagged. This paper attempts to interrogate the popular maker movement’s “state of the actual” in education with respect to its criticality. I will begin by conceptually clarifying the movement with respect to its semantic disarray. Next, I will situate maker and production pedagogies philosophically, and discuss how their thrust and emphasis create both hidden and overt curricula that can either cultivate or silence criticality. Finally, I will problematize the effects of uncritical exuberance for educational making against philosophical thought on the aims and practices of transformative education by contrasting the state-of-the-art against the state-of-the-actual. In that discussion, I will call attention to the departure from making’s original, critical roots as well as its effects on identities of those who embrace and resist the maker-moniker.