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This paper examines the integration of justice-centered making into STEM teacher preparation programs, focusing on how these programs can foster equity and inclusivity while acknowledging the need for more research on the overlapping areas of STEM teacher preparation, social justice, and makerspace. Therefore, I synthesize recent literature in the overlapping areas and identify how each component brings insight to purposeful activity, identity formation, and connection. The discussion leads to how utilizing justice-centered-making activities can prepare educators to address systemic inequities in STEM fields. The implications of these pedagogical approaches for both teachers and students are discussed. 

In order to promote justice-centered making in STEAM classrooms, the NASA Landsat-based Science and Technology Education for Land/Life Assessment (STELLA) instrument is proposed as an affordable educational tool for students to collect and analyze data pertaining to vegetation health, surface temperature, and air quality. This instrument can be used to investigate justice-centered, community-based problems and promote civic engagement toward policy change for a healthier world. Our study applies the MakerTPICK theoretical framework to a qualitative study to explore changes in teacher beliefs about the STELLA instrument following three justice-centered STEAM-making activities pertaining to urban heat islands, air quality, and vegetation health. The implications of this research can be used to inform professional development and promote justice-centered learning in the STEAM classroom. 

Teaching STEM for social justice is essential to ensure that K-12 students experience opportunities to learn that attend to time in instruction, the quality of instruction, and the use of technology (Tate, 2001) to engages students in STEM learning. This themed paper-set endeavors to introduce three intentionally designed courses aimed at helping STEM educators better understand liberatory design, justice-centered STEM pedagogy, and most of all teaching STEM for social justice. 

An example of how middle-school engineering projects can be used as contexts for students’ exploration of previous and new mathematics topics is shared here. In this example, students algebraically determined where to place frets on the fretboard of a stringed instrument they were designing and along the way made use of a fractional exponent that was beyond what they experienced in prior courses. Students engaged in reasoning and problem solving, had extended meaningful discourse with each other, stayed motivated through productive struggle, and actively built new mathematical understandings from new experiences and prior mathematical knowledge. 

Makerspaces are increasingly present in K-12 schools and these spaces have the potential to be transformative for mathematics education. However, this rich promise of makerspaces to be transformative for education assumes that teachers will be able to successfully integrate these spaces into their instruction. Teachers who lack the specialized knowledge for such integration, which we refer to as MakerPACK, are unlikely to use makerspaces to their full potential. This mixed-methods research project investigates teacher learning of makerspace technologies through the lens of mathematics curriculum and tasks within the context of a graduate course. Emerging results suggest that while exposing practicing teachers to these makerspace technologies through guided explorations had an overall positive impact on teachers’ perceptions of the role of technology in mathematics teaching, their attitudes and beliefs about technology integration were often mediated by their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning. 

Incorporating modeling activities into classroom instruction requires flexibility with pedagogical content knowledge and the ability to understand and interpret students’ thinking, skills that teachers often develop through experience. One way to support preservice mathematics teachers’ (PSMTs) proficiency with mathematical modeling is by incorporating modeling tasks into mathematics pedagogy courses, allowing PSMTs to engage with mathematical modeling as students and as future teachers. Eight PSMTs participated in a model-eliciting activity (MEA) in which they were asked to develop a model that describes the strength of the magnetic field generated by a solenoid. By engaging in mathematical modeling as students, these PSMTs became aware of their own proficiency with and understanding of mathematical modeling. By engaging inmathematical modeling as future teachers, these PSMTs were able to articulate the importance of incorporating MEAs into their own instruction. 

This paper describes a modeling task designed to improve students’ understanding of music and related unit structures (e.g., whole note, half note). Fourteen upper elementary students were asked to build models of melodies using Cuisenaire rods and make arguments about how their models represented what they heard. Our analysis of students’ models suggested four categories of models. Students exhibited one- or two-dimensional reasoning with either (or both) height and length correspondence that varied in terms of duration and/or pitch features. 

This paper describes a modeling task designed to improve students’ understanding of music and related unit structures (e.g., whole note, half note). Fourteen upper elementary students were asked to build models of melodies using Cuisenaire rods and make arguments about how their models represented what they heard. Our analysis of students’ models suggested four categories of models. Students exhibited one- or two-dimensional reasoning with either (or both) height and length correspondence that varied in terms of duration and/or pitch features. 

In this project, we investigate how teachers develop the skills and knowledge to integrate makerspace technologies into mathematics lessons. Makerspaces are physical spaces that encourage creative design that often include emerging technologies such as 3D fabrication, coding, and robotics, and are being increasingly used to enhance mathematics instruction. Research suggests that for teachers to integrate any new technology into instruction, they must develop a specialized technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK), but little is known about how teachers develop TPACK for makerspace technology. We present emerging findings investigating how practicing mathematics teachers developed TPACK for makerspaces during a graduate technology course. Results suggest that despite similar experiences in the course, teachers varied significantly in their development of TPACK and integration of technology.