Abstract:

This work reports Sesc’s initiative to disseminate the maker culture by implementing Maker Spaces in its schools under the guidance of its Education Department. The project was supported by several training actions for teachers focusing at promoting the Maker Culture and introducing it as an active learning methodology.

The training initiatives focused on raising awareness among teachers of their key role in the success of the deployment and operation of the maker spaces. Training sessions were offered to teachers from all states in the country with the purpose of increasing their repertoire since, like BEVAN (2017), we understand Maker Education mainly as "as a pedagogical tool".

In this context, several questions appeared, such as: "wouldn’t a Maker Space be serving only STEM subjects?", "would it be possible to offer activities for Early Childhood or Primary Education?", “should the activities happen after school or should they be included in the daily routine of the class, integrated to the school curriculum? ", “how to make the space attractive to students and teachers?”, “should the spaces be implemented in small towns in the interior of the country, away from the technological conveniences of the big capital cities?”.

Initially planned to be implemented in the High Schools and in the Adult and Youth education centres, the Space Maker Project also involved financing for the purchase of equipment and tools, setting up the space, consultancy hiring, besides investments in the training of the Education Program team of analysts.
Our major training actions were workshops – in which were developed activities with the “hands-on” methodology –, distance learning and face-to-face courses. However, the development of the project brought up the realisation that we were not dealing with a simple transfer of knowledge and technology and that we could not simply copy existing models. Setting up spaces within schools in such different regions would require adaptations, that is, we could not work with ready-made packages, but with customised plans that would meet the immense social, cultural and economic diversity of each site to receive the project.

As a result, we had four face-to-face courses attended by 77 educators, seven lectures / workshops attended by 385 education professionals (mostly teachers) and a distance learning course that had 519 participants. Therefore, the Maker Project reached all the states of the Federation and it did not privilege the major centres and capitals – in fact, it had its largest public in the North and Northeast, where the states with less resources and the lowest human development indexes are located, contributing to the diffusion of the maker culture among Brazilian teachers.

Keywords:

Makerspace, active learning, teacher training.