Schooling makerspaces : on the promises and tensions of implementing this much-touted innovation in a high school

This dissertation explores the tensions and contradictions that manifest when implementing a makerspace in a high school. This writing is the result of a two-year ethnographically informed study of a makerspace housed on the high school campus of a K-12 independent school located in Austin, Texas. My goal was to provide a rich and detailed account of how the makerspace changed over the years, in response to the various ‘forces’ that impinge upon the system, and to triangulate these observations with issues of educational relevance that have animated discussions about the benefits of making activities. I draw on Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999b) to help focus these efforts, in particular in following how tensions and contradictions in the various elements of an activity system drive changes to the environment and its culture. While this account is by no means generalizable to other settings, this analytical strategy can help articulate themes that are likely to be manifested (in one way or another) across various other implementations of school makerspaces.