Maker Educator Convening

This presentation will disseminate findings from a study exploring how youth and educators use the term failure during making activities, and what pedagogical strategies educators use to support youth through struggle. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on their own practices and review materials designed to support educators and their youth in planning for experiences where it can feel safe to fail. Many voices in the educational maker movement have cautioned the field about using the term “failure” with youth in inappropriate or insensitive ways. However, many of us—and many of our young students—use the word to describe when something doesn’t work out like you expect it to. In this presentation, we unpack what the term failure means, from interviews conducted with 133 youth and over 25 educators, as well as survey results from over 100 maker educators. We look across contexts and tasks to describe a taxonomy of failures within a making context.