Poster – STEMLiMS: Investigating STEM Literacies in MakerSpaces

This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Makerspaces are social spaces with tools, where individuals and groups conceptualize, design, and make things using new and old technologies. Literacy practices are the ways people use representational texts to navigate and make sense of their worlds. They are used in particular contexts with particular goals. By “representational texts” we mean written words, talk, photographs, diagrams, videos, schematics, computer code, electrical circuit diagrams, mathematical notations, gesture, and myriad other representations. This project aims to describe the ways in which people use representations to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) while making; create bridges between informal spaces where the bulk of makerspace activities currently reside and formal spaces like schools; broaden what it means to participate in STEM disciplines in schools by recognizing the ways in which makerspaces promote expansive and creative STEM practices; engage new youth in making by building from the literacy practices that all youth bring to creative and personally meaningful activity; and design literacy supports for new makers to engage in makerspace activities and develop literacy practices that are useful across all STEM disciplines, in both formal and informal settings.