How might academic library makerspaces impact undergraduate student learning?
This is the question that UTA Libraries, in collaboration with other university partners, want to answer by exploring best practices that incorporate cross-disciplinary, transferrable (“transdisciplinary”), maker-based competencies into the undergraduate curriculum. To this end, we have received two National Leadership Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). With the first, we completed a pilot program that allowed us to test and improve our early-stage set of maker-based competencies and to develop best-practices for integrating academic library makerspaces into the undergraduate curriculum. Upon the completion of our pilot study, we sought and received the second grant to broaden our impact and advance national practice by way of professional development and assessing student learning outcomes.
We will continue to expand on the work done here to develop nationally recognized and accepted maker literacy standards, much like the Association for College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards became best practices for academic libraries around the nation. The findings from our work will also be applicable beyond the undergraduate curriculum and academe in general.