Chapter 9. Making-based participation techniques

Chapter 9

Participatory teaching for the polycrisis in Higher Education using: Making-based participation techniques

Preamble

This Chapter is part of the PolyCIVIS Handbook on Participatory Methods for Teaching about the Polycrisis in Higher Education. The objective of this Handbook is to serve as a reference resource for teaching about the polycrisis in Higher Education in a participatory manner, a need which has not only been foreseen by the PolyCIVIS project in its inception phase, but also confirmed and further substantiated in a number of meetings and workshops during the project’s lifetime.

This Handbook is not a coursebook to teach what the polycrisis is, but a methods book, to provide instruments for teaching about the polycrisis in a participatory manner. It is to be made available online as a multimedia live resource, presenting different participatory teaching methods for uptake by the Polycrisis-interested community in Higher Education, together with supporting materials such as method descriptions, references, examples and case studies.

The different methods proposed are presented in one chapter for each group of methods, which also includes, in the digital edition of this Handbook, a live survey to collect peer feedback from the community itself, on the usefulness and ease of use that community members (Higher Education tutors, students, researchers as well as practitioners) may themselves find specific methods to have within, and for, their own contexts and audiences.

What do we mean by thin participation techniques?

Making-based participation techniques involve learning through hands-on creation, tinkering, prototyping, repairing, hacking, modelling, material experimentation and do-it-with-others production. They include DIWO making, maker education, tinkering, e-waste prototyping, repair cafés, low-tech design, speculative artefacts, zines, emergency kits and physical prototypes. In higher education, making-based participation helps students move from abstract discussion to tangible experimentation. For teaching the polycrisis, these methods are especially useful because crises are material as well as conceptual: they involve infrastructures, tools, waste, energy, food, housing, communication, repair, scarcity and everyday survival practices

Indicative starter sources for information about these methods

DIWO making — Do-It-With-Others: Emphasises collaborative creation, peer empowerment, decentralised production and co-authored artistic or civic processes.
Marc Garrett on DIWO: Presents DIWO as artistic co-creation and peer empowerment beyond top-down authorship.
TinkerLab. “What is tinkering?”: Accessible introduction to tinkering as open-ended exploration, experimentation and learning through making.
Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia. “Tinkering.”: Museum-based education source showing tinkering as creative, experimental and inquiry-oriented learning.
Learnlife. “Learning by tinkering and making.”: Educational resource connecting tinkering, making, experimentation and learner agency.
Exploratorium Tinkering Studio: Rich practical source on tinkering, making, learning dimensions and facilitation.
Learning dimensions of making and tinkering: Useful for designing activities that support initiative, collaboration, problem-solving and conceptual understanding.
Maker movement resources: Introduce collaborative building, repair, fabrication, open tools and creative technological experimentation.
E-waste participatory making: Useful for making with sustainability, reuse, repair, environmental justice and technological inequality.
Repair and circular economy education: Connects making-based learning to maintenance, reuse, ecological responsibility and anti-disposability cultures.

Additional sources of information about these methods

Garrett, M. (2013). DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Artistic co-creation as a decentralized method of peer empowerment in today's multitude. SEAD White Papers.
https://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/diwo-do-it-with-others-artistic-co-creation-as-a-decentralized-method-of-peer-empowerment-in-todays-multitude-diwo-do-it-with-others-artistic-co-creation-as-a-decentralized-method-
Catlow, R., & Garrett, M. (2012). Do it with others - No ecology without social ecology. In S. Biggs (Ed.), Remediating the social (pp. 69–74). Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice, University of Bergen.
http://www.remediating.net/
Catlow, R., & Garrett, M. (2008). Do it with others (DIWO) — E-mail art in context. Curediting/Vague Terrain.
Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. In M. Honey & D. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 163–181). Routledge.
Bevan, B., Gutwill, J. P., Petrich, M., & Wilkinson, K. (2015). Learning through STEM-rich tinkering: Findings from a jointly negotiated research project taken up in practice. Science Education, 99(1), 98–120.
https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21151
Vossoughi, S., & Bevan, B. (2014). Making and tinkering: A review of the literature. National Research Council.
https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/documents/webpage/dbasse_089888.pdf
Bevan, B., Ryoo, J. J., Vanderwerff, A., Petrich, M., & Wilkinson, K. (2020). "I see students differently": Following the lead of maker educators in defining what counts as learning. Frontiers in Education, 5, Article 121.
https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00121
Bevan, B., Petrich, M., & Wilkinson, K. (2014/2015). Tinkering is serious play. Educational Leadership, 72(4), 28–33.
Gutwill, J. P., Petrich, M., & Wilkinson, K. (2015). Learning through tinkering. Curator: The Museum Journal, 58(2), 151–168.
https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12105
Blikstein, P. (2013). Digital fabrication and 'making' in education: The democratization of invention. In J. Walter-Herrmann & C. Büching (Eds.), FabLabs: Of machines, makers and inventors (pp. 1–21). Transcript Publishers.
Blikstein, P. (2018). Maker movement in education: History and prospects. In M. J. de Vries (Ed.), Handbook of technology education (pp. 419–437). Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44687-5_33
Martinez, S. L., & Stager, G. (2013). Invent to learn: Making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom. Constructing Modern Knowledge Press.
Peppler, K., Halverson, E. R., & Kafai, Y. B. (Eds.). (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Vols. 1–2). Routledge.

Indicative participatory teaching scenarios for these methods

Scenario 1. Crisis communication prototype

Students design low-cost communication artefacts for a community facing overlapping crises. Artefacts may include emergency cards, visual warning tools, zines, multilingual posters, low-tech notice systems or simple digital mock-ups. The class tests whether the prototypes are understandable, accessible, ethical and useful for different stakeholders.

Scenario 2. Repair and resilience lab

Students bring broken, obsolete or symbolic objects and discuss what repair reveals about the polycrisis. They connect repair to energy scarcity, circular economy, e-waste, planned obsolescence, inequality and care. Groups then design a campus repair initiative or public learning event.

Scenario 3. Speculative object from 2050

Groups create an artefact from a possible polycrisis future: a ration card, heatwave shelter token, seed library kit, misinformation detector, migration memory object or low-energy learning tool. They present the object with a short story explaining the future society that produced it.

Scenario 4. E-waste redesign challenge

Students safely use discarded electronic parts, cardboard, wires, images or non-functional components to create speculative prototypes addressing energy poverty, information access, waste or repair cultures. The activity emphasises critique and imagination rather than technical perfection.

Scenario 5. DIWO mutual-aid making sprint

Students co-create practical artefacts for a fictional mutual-aid network: resource maps, emergency checklists, reusable signage, food-sharing labels, care cards or neighbourhood support kits. The emphasis is on co-production, usefulness, accessibility and collective ownership.