Learning to enhance children's creativity in a makerspace

Maker education offers opportunities to stimulate the creativity of young people in various types of education. How to guide these learning processes, however, is an unexplored area for the supervisors (teachers and librarians). In the research-project presented, a professional learning community of librarians, teacher-researchers and maker educators investigates the pedagogy of ‘making’. The learning community consisted of twelve makerspace-coaches, three maker educators and three researchers. The interventions for enhancing creativity that were developed varied from redesign of the tasks to new forms of guiding students. It was noticed that the children came up with new ideas and were motivated to push out their frontiers. Furthermore, the coaches experienced that children’s creativity is not always visible in the final products of their making process, but rather in the process of making. The learning community turned out to be a fruitful approach for professionalization of makerspace-coaches.