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The hum of voices punctuated by laughter and occasional mechanical beeping could be heard from outside the classroom door. Inside, clusters of sixth graders gathered around cardboard boxes. In one small group, a student stood on a chair holding lengths of string while their teammates tried tying them to a SnapCircuit™ fan. In another group a tween held open a picturebook and heated voices argued: "But Klassen used three probablys,' not just two so we have to use three!" Yet another group exploded in giggles and pleads "You need to burp when I say go!" Large print on the whiteboard explained the situation: LitMakerSpace Week.
Makerspaces and "LitMakerSpaces"
Makerspaces (hands-on, inventive projects that incorporate STEM) have become a popular trend in public and school library programming. These collaborative spaces have the potential to spark creativity, ingenuity, and build STEM-concept knowledge (Hatzigianni et al., 2020). As literacy educators, we were interested in finding a way to use the flexible, creative, and experiential learning environment of makerspaces to help middle-grade students develop literacy skills in the classroom. Observing their possibilities, and considering Blakemore (2018) and Jackson et al.'s (2018) ideas to use literature as a springboard for makerspaces, we created "LitMakerSpaces": makerspace-inspired projects that utilize high-quality picturebooks as the base for engagement in both engineering and writing processes and development of a specific writing skill.
Underlying makerspaces is the design thinking sequence of problem definition, need finding, ideation, prototyping, analysis, and revision (Hatzigianni et al., 2020). While some makerspaces utilize scientific and technological approaches, many engage students through the engineering design process: asking questions, imagining possibilities, planning a project, designing and creating the project, and improving it by making adjustments (Lachapelle & Cunningham, 2014). We noticed that this engineering problem-solving process, rooted in design thinking, aligns with the writing process developed from Flower and Hayes's (1981) model of writing. This model frames writing tasks as rhetorical problems solved through the composing process: inquiry (asking questions about topic/genre), pre-writing (imaginingpossibilities for writing), planning (determining a course of action for writing), drafting (creating the product), and revision (improving the product). The strong parallels between these two cycles (see Figure 1) underlie the principles at work in our "LitMakerSpaces."
The recursive nature of the writing process has clear overlaps with...