Sylvie Barma

Implementing Maker Spaces to Promote Cross-Generational Sharing and Learning

In this chapter, we seek to contribute to a reflection on cross-generational sharing and learning by presenting a position paper on the potential that the implementation of maker spaces presents in formal and informal educational settings. We first discuss the main characteristics of the maker movement and illustrate some concrete activities that are taking place in Montreal and Quebec City. We then explore to which extent students build knowledge within maker spaces, acquiring knowledge, and competencies through a participatory approach with the extended members of the school community. Our conclusions highlight the great potential that maker spaces hold for the improvement of cross-generational relationships and for the foundation of learning across the lifespan.

Designing Enhanced Learning Environments in Physics: An Interdisciplinary Collaborative Approach Producing an Instrument for School Success

Parallel, an innovative teaching and learning tool, was designed by a multidisciplinary team gathering together university and college professors, post-graduate students, teachers, as well as young adults and college students. The creation of Parallel, made possible fruitful collaboration between students, teachers and researchers. The collaborative experience was part of an effort to understand how a serious game on a mobile platform using augmented reality could be exploited in a formal educational context to overcome the difficulties encountered by physic’s college students. Up to now, 60 % of these students have been failing the course as they are being taught the laws of electromagnetism. As Lave, points out, “too often, school lessons are fraught with difficulty and failure more many students” (Lave, Anthropol Educ Q 16:171–176, 1985, p. 174). We will discuss how we arrive at the conclusion that Parallel can act as a potential instrument for student’s mastery of their own relationships with society and allow them to reinvest their learning with youth and the elderly. Although the empirical study we are presenting pinpoints a specific aspect of physic’s learning, it opens new horizons for cross-generational and age-oriented digital game-based learning from childhood to older adulthood.

Early stages in building hybrid activity between school and work: the case of PénArt

Abstract This formative intervention documents the emergence of a hybrid activity aiming at student engagement and academic achievement. In this context-bound study, early stages of this activity consisted in establishing PénArt meant to enable high school students with difficulties to start up their own business at school. It involved reaching agreements between a high school and a youth centre so that high school students engage in the production and selling of their branded t-shirt. At the frontiers of their respective activity system, students, youth workers, special education teachers and members of the school board took actions to cross boundaries and redefine their interrelations. Cultural historical activity theory was fruitful to document the development of a new object-oriented activity. Tensions and contradictions revelaled to be the key moments in the emergence of the hybrid activity. Expansive learning led us to understand that, in a conflicting situation, a collective’s agentive actions create an expansive form of learning and leads to a successful entrepreneurship experience. Change laboratory capacity to foster change for cooperative education in Quebec was successful. The students enrolled in a regional entrepreneurship contest and won it. That was a significant event for students with low self-esteem linked with their performance at school.