Forging the Future of Education: Critical Directions for K-16 Maker Education

Over the past decade and a half, maker education has emerged as a powerful approach for engaging learners in creative, design-centered, and materially rich learning experiences. Across K–16 contexts, schools, libraries, museums, community centers, and universities, makerspaces and maker-centered pedagogies have supported learners in developing technical skills, collaborating with peers, engaging in interdisciplinary inquiry, and forming identities as creators, designers, and problem-solvers. Drawing on traditions such as constructionism, project-based learning, and design-based learning, maker education has contributed to a broader reimagining of learning as iterative, embodied, social, and deeply connected to learners’ lived experiences. At the same time, as maker education has matured and scaled, significant questions and tensions have become increasingly visible. Access to maker opportunities remains uneven, often shaped by disparities in resources, infrastructure, and institutional support. Dominant narratives of making have frequently privileged technocentric practices, such as robotics, coding, and digital fabrication, while marginalizing craft traditions, community-based knowledge, repair practices, and culturally grounded forms of making. Research has also struggled to clearly articulate the mechanisms through which making supports disciplinary learning, identity development, and long-term educational trajectories across the K–16 pipeline. Educators face complex pedagogical demands in maker environments, including balancing openness with structure, aligning making with curricular standards, developing equitable facilitation practices, and assessing learning processes that extend beyond final artifacts. Questions of sustainability, scalability, and policy alignment further complicate implementation, particularly as maker education moves from isolated initiatives to system-level adoption.

This Research Topic is motivated by the need to advance a more critical, theoretically grounded, and empirically robust phase of maker education scholarship. Rather than focusing solely on the promise or novelty of making, this Topic seeks to examine the conditions under which maker education can achieve its transformative potential, and the limitations that must be addressed to do so.

We invite contributions that engage deeply with equity, identity, pedagogy, assessment, systems, and policy, and that attend to the diverse contexts in which maker learning unfolds from early childhood through higher education. The purpose of this Research Topic is to bring together high-quality empirical, theoretical, and methodological work that clarifies critical directions for K–16 maker education. We particularly welcome research that:

(a) Examines equity, access, recognition, and social justice in maker learning;
(b) Investigates coherent K–16 curricular and pedagogical pathways that support interdisciplinary learning;
(c) Develops and critiques approaches to assessing maker learning processes, dispositions, and outcomes;
(d) Explores teacher preparation, professional development, and educator identity in maker-centered environments;
(e) Analyzes systemic, institutional, and policy factors that shape the sustainability and scaling of maker education, including connections between formal and informal learning spaces.

By foregrounding critical perspectives and diverse forms of making, this Research Topic aims to strengthen the field’s theoretical foundations, expand its methodological repertoire, and inform educational practice and policy. Collectively, the contributions will help chart a future for maker education that is equitable, sustainable, and responsive to the cultural, disciplinary, and societal demands of contemporary education across the K–16 spectrum.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Maker Education, Education Identity, Education Equity, Mechanisms of Learning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.