Designing (and) making teachers: using design to investigate the impact of maker-based education training on pre-service STEM teachers

This qualitative study examined how a maker-based education workshop affected 20 pre-service STEM teachers’ views of the lessonplanning process. Design is used as both an epistemological link between making and teaching practices as well as an analyticallens through which lesson planning could be interpreted and understood. The findings of this study suggest that pre-serviceteachers who have been introduced to maker-based principles and practices are able to imagine a lesson planning process that ismore student-centered and active than the kind which they normally utilize. While there was a contrast between the content ofmaking-based and traditional lesson planning processes, the pre-service teachers’ designs of these processes were largely the same:linear, verbal, and only occasionally reflective or iterative. These characteristics match those of novice designers.