We were fortunate to build on the well-established knowledge base of action research and practitioner-led inquiry that the National Writing Project has built over the past 40 years. This included the simplest of methods: us all making a commitment to regularly collect data through observations and journaling, then mining that data for patterns locally with our libraries and staff, and then having regular conversations (conference and video calls) with other labs to help narrow down and identify our problems of practice.<\/p>\n
As part of these monthly meetings and conversations, we used a version of a consultancy protocol, which enabled us to both listen and be listeners to each other in a structured way, then give feedback. A recurring question we would ask each other to identify the themes that became our framework was, \u201cwhat is post-emergent-y about what you\u2019re describing?\u201d<\/p>\n
During our monthly meetings we discussed articles we had read together on making and makerspaces. Some of the things we read included:<\/span><\/p>\n As we moved towards sharing and disseminating our findings outside of our five libraries (and felt comfortable sharing our problems outside of our monthly meetings) we recorded podcasts where we talked with each other about our challenges as a way of seeing them from a different perspective. We also posted about them in the <\/span>YOUmedia Community of Practice<\/span><\/a>, the platform that the wider YOUmedia Network (and beyond) uses to connect, ask questions, and share resources. The Community of Practice, or CoP, is managed by the Association of Science-Technology Centers, and free and open for anyone to join and access resources. Many podcasts are archived there, including these podcast where we discuss our work around post-emergent makerspaces in our local contexts:<\/span><\/p>\n We presented on this work (with a work-in-progress framework) at the 2016 Digital Media and Learning Conference<\/a> at the University of California at Irvine.Our session was called Blazing the Trail: Action Research and \u201cPost-Emergent\u201d Library Makerspaces.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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