The Adoption Journey From Makerspaces to STEAM classrooms

I was sitting at my computer trying to finish the final edits on a short video from my most recent STEAM residency. Five minutes. That was my goal. Keep it to five minutes.

Explaining how I engineered this game controller

How do you tell the story of a whole year of  learning in five minutes? How do you capture the aha moments of teachers gaining creative confidence while guiding their students through hands-on, minds-on projects? Or the moment a sixth grader stood in front of his parents at our culminating STEAM event — face absolutely beaming — explaining in real detail how he'd engineered his own game controller? His parents are trying it out, laughing, asking him questions, and he's just lit up. Easier said than done.

This  was a different kind of STEAM  residency model for me. Instead of coming in for a week or two and leaving, we spread the Graded 4 - 6 residency across  across the  school year. I kept coming back (onsite and through Zoom) coaching teachers through the various stages of project-based learning with a STEAM-integrated focus. We had time to build something deeper — a relationship with the teachers, a chance to try things, see what happened, adjust, and try again.  The residency wrapped up with a culminating event engaging the community, a debrief with educators about how extending this project might enrich their curriculum, and a folder full of both lesson plans and resources that could expand on what we created collaboratively. 

Community engagement during our culminating event - STEAM Night

 By the time I sat down to edit, I had plenty of media, plenty of moments, plenty of evidence of what learning through creating and making can look like when connected to Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics — not to mention English Language Arts and Computer Science.

As I scrolled through photos and video clips, I started thinking about how my maker residencies were now called STEAM residencies. The educators I know who used to call themselves Maker Educators — people who built makerspaces, who found funding for laser cutters in school libraries, who handed kids copper tape and LEDs and said "figure it out" — a lot of them are now calling themselves STEAM educators. I found myself reflecting about this shift from Maker Education to STEAM education.  

I got curious enough to ask my AI assistant to help create a timeline of how both movements moved through their adoption cycles.

Two Movements - PDF version

I was surprised to find that Maker Education and STEAM grew up almost at the same time but spread through schools in completely different ways. Maker education bubbled up from individual teachers who loved the pedagogical promise of learning through creating and making. STEAM mostly came down from school leadership looking for a framework that connected to academic subjects — especially science — and one that helped the arts, engineering, and practical arts survive budget conversations.

I have witnessed many shifts during my own history with emerging technologies.  I've been doing project-based learning since the 1980s, and I've always been the person helping schools adopt emerging technologies. Typewriters to computers, computers to the internet, web design with html  to Google tools, creating digital games to coding physical artifacts with circuit boards, laser cutters, and 3D printers. Sure, the emerging technologies were cool, but it was never about the tools — it was about transforming what learning could be.  As I reflected on the shift from MAKER EDUCATION  to STEAM focused learning, I started to ask questions like: 

"Was it just a label change, or did something more fundamental shift? Does it matter? And what does it mean for students? Does it change our professional development needs? "

Create Make Learn Summer Institute

By 2012, I had come to believe that educators didn't just need to learn new tools to transform learning — they needed to actually feel what it was like to learn through creating and making  themselves. Immersively. Hands-on. Not a tutorial, but the real experience of what learning through creating feels like from the inside. That's where Create Make Learn came from. And as it happened, 2012 was right around the moment the maker movement was picking up steam in education (pun very much intended). Making gave project-based learning new materials, new processes, new ways for kids to turn ideas into physical, shareable things. The Create Make Learn community grew up around that energy — educators learning from each other, trading ideas, finding connection with people who were excited about the same hands-on, minds-on approach. The students were always the real beneficiaries, but the educators needed each other to get there.

That community grew steadily from 2012 to 2020. Then the pandemic hit, and all of it went into storage — literally. Every ounce of energy in a school building went toward getting kids back in the classroom and keeping them six feet apart. Hands-on, collaborative, materials-heavy learning simply wasn't possible.

The post-pandemic return has been harder than I expected. Schools are searching for ways to include the hands-on learning  from the maker movement while simultaneously dealing with learning loss, higher social-emotional needs, funding cuts, and teacher attrition. It's a much harder landscape than the one I started in.  However, we are seeing some schools shift from makerspaces in schools to STEAM classrooms. 

STEAM had been quietly developing in parallel to the maker movement the whole time. But where maker education was wonderfully open-ended, STEAM offered something school leaders could point to — a clearer connection to academic subjects, a name that survived a budget meeting, and a visible place for the arts. To a lot of school leaders, it felt more anchored and more fundable than an open-ended makerspace. So the energy of maker education, in many schools, quietly turned into STEAM programming.

But this was much more than a label change.  Maker education was mostly driven by individual early-adopter teachers who wanted it and pushed for it.  For over a decade, Create Make Learn was a vehicle for maker educators to connect, collaborate, and grow. 

Meanwhile STEAM is gathering momentum in a different way  — school leaders deciding they want STEAM programming and then looking for teachers to design and run it. That's a fundamentally different starting point, and it creates a fundamentally different professional development need.  

Teachers and students learning to use laser cutter in a
in a residency at  Newport City Elementary 

As I find myself really working with teachers to build meaningful STEAM experiences or STEAM residency,  I start with the first stage of DESIGN THINKING -- EMPATHY!! and a close look at the each school's unique landscape — its space, its tools, its goals, its culture.   Only then, can we start to DEFINE the outcomes we are looking for from a STEAM residency.  The "How might we " question leads to a wild BRAINSTORMING or IDEATE stage which eventually leads to a PROTOTYPE design for the residency. Together we TEST  our prototype and gather feedback from both teachers and students. 

I'd always been familiar with the artist-in-residency model — an artist visits a school for a stretch of time and works with students toward something real: a mural, a concert, a finished piece.  I started to similarities with my work with teachers and students and  the residency model.   They both have similar  ingredients: sustained time in a school, modeling, hands-on experience, and a product or event that teachers and students build together.  With  mentoring and coaching as teachers learn, you have both embedded professional learning and engaging student experiences.   I started to more deeply  reflect on the past decade from my early work with the Tarrant Institute to my most recent collaborations with the Vermont Arts Council.

With the help of my AI assistant, I started to more  examine my recent STEAM residencies to identify the elements that made it a powerful practice.   Here is the visual representation that my AI assistant created from my reflections. 

PDF Version - Potential of STEAM Residency

But this is just the beginning of an inquiry that I hope you'll take with me.   The "What if"  question that frames my thinking these days seems to be ....

 “How might we design STEAM based residencies that fit inside the constraints that our schools face,  while still carrying the spirit of what made the original Create Make Learn institutes work: the inspiration, the immersion, the community."

If you are a school that  would like to prototype  STEAM residencies with me (ranging from single days, to multi-day, to a year long STEAM residency),  let's talk. 

You can reach me at ldelabruere@gmail.com