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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. 

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. 

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.