Maker assignments provide opportunities for students to frame their inquiry through creative expression. One strength of maker assignments is they often outlive the length of a course because they have meaning and purpose to students. This is termed “a renewable assignment.” “Disposable assignments” only have value in the immediate course and are often thrown away after.

Some of the most engaged students I ever taught were in our department’s Urban Citizen community activism courses pioneered by Jerry Jacks and Jana Everett, and later taught by me and more recently by Jim Walsh. 

Why were the students so engaged? The projects had real-world consequences. Often students partnered with disadvantaged populations, which gave them greater understanding of systemic inequality. The projects taken on, most often democratically chosen by the students themselves, empowered them by building relationships and life skills.

Students believed what they did mattered beyond an intellectual exercise or learning abstract concepts independent of praxis.

The fruits of the students’ labor would extend well beyond their classroom experience. These Urban Citizen projects are maker assignments and renewable. 

As an instructor, it was like capturing lightning in a bottle. Student engagement was off the charts. 

Similarly, student engagement was also at its highest in my Film and Politics courses and in final presentation weeks in other courses. In Film and Politics, we take the movie as text and collectively unpacked its political meaning in energized discussions. It required active student participation rather than passive listening. I brought themes and ideas to the table, but I stressed these were only one way to see it. The students understood everyone had unique perspectives to contribute. There are multiple ways to consider the political dimensions of any film. We collectively discovered those meanings.

The maker assignment qualities were also present in final presentations with the added benefit that the students designed their presentations and tackled topics they were passionate about. In the book Limitless Mind: Learn, Live, and Lead Without Barriers (which I blogged about here) author Jo Boaler said that interpretation and group discussions were one way to engage and connect different parts of the brain involved in learning. In my previous expereinces that level of student engagement relied on things unique to the face-to-face classroom. Professor Jim Walsh often uses theater, which is a type of maker assignment. Students create and stage plays based on social justice issues they are studying.

How can these lightning-in-a-bottle moments be facilitated in the online classroom?

Film and politics discussions translated well to online discussion forums because students have more time to think and reflect before posting in an asynchronous learning environment. As before, the course focuses on interpretation, political, cultural and historical context, and visual and symbolic processing. Online final presentations are no longer group presentations, but still give students an opportunity to connect course themes to their passions and interests. I also encourage a muti-media, creative end product in formats ranging from video to Powerpoint. 

I was introduced to the idea of maker assignments increasing student engagement in an online context in this August 2020 Chronicle of Higher Education article.   

I also recommend this YouTube video from Vadim Keyser, the philosophy professor featured in the Chronicle article on student engagement linked above. In the video he further explains his course design.

I immediately went to work applying a maker approach on select assignments for three classes for Fall 2020. Some of reason for the success of the assignments, as gauged by student engagement and understanding, may go beyond student agency and creativity. These assignments also use the multi-modal approach connecting different parts of the brain to learn as discussed in my post on the book Limitless Mind. Boaler writes “Students can be invited to engage with the content in multiple ways in any subject area and at any grade level.”  

For example, in my learning journal assignments I include the following: “The format is your choice depending on your comfort level with technology and what you feel best fits your topic and creative inspiration. It could be a written Word doc. It could be a video. You could include your own creative work such as photographs, memes, graphics, artwork, poems, songs, graphs, diagrams, and tables. You can also use PowerPoint (link from Google Drive in your assignment post), Prezi, or an audio file.”  

One Introduction to Political Science student, a communications major, created a near-professional narrated newscast style video on racism and policing that synthesized the major points in an amazingly creative way. Others have created PowerPoints with strong visuals/symbols expressing ideas with words and visual processing, both essential to more effective learning. 

I still ponder how to equal the level of engagement from the Urban Citizen course. Maker assignments online are pointing the way to new approaches.