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In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for workingclass students and students of color. After reviewing various perspectives on making as educative practice, they present a framework that treats the following principles as starting points for equity-oriented research and design: critical analyses of educational injustice; historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. These principles are grounded in their own research and teaching in the Tinkering Afterschool Program as well as in the insights and questions raised by critical voices both inside and outside the maker movement.
In an interview for The Atlantic entitled "All Immigrants Are Artists," Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat (2013) ruminates on the forms of artistry and reinvention embodied in the everyday lives of immigrant families. Through the story of her mother, she describes the historical conditions that simultaneously necessitated and constrained creativity and locates her mother's seamstressing in both material production and the quotidian beauty and dignity of survival: "If you can't afford clothes, but you can make them-make them. You have to work with what you have, especially if you don't have a lot of money. You use creativity, and you use imagination" (Danticat, 2013, para. 8). Significant in this essay, Danticat does not recast her mother as a maker or use the now-popularized language of making to legitimate her capabilities. Rather, through what she calls "the prism of art," she locates her own work as a writer in a tradition that includes the ingenuity born of tight circumstances (McDermott, 2010), an everyday practice that was both enmeshed in racialized and gendered hierarchies and provided dynamic resources for her development as an artist.
Danticat's revelations about her parents also invite us to recognize the skill and artistry demanded by the sociopolitical realities of migration, displacement, and economic hardship. She writes, "I realize now I saw artistic qualities...