Facilitation In Library Makerspaces: A Prototype For A Professional Development Model

Introduction. This paper presents Remake Making, a research project that explores an interactive, constructivist professional development methodology for people who work with youth in library maker spaces, asking the research question, How can a constructivist system of professional development support facilitated making in libraries? The goal of the project is to provide library staff with a set of heuristics to support self-awareness, intentionality, and relevance around their facilitation practices with young people at the library.Method. The project applied methods of improvement science to iteratively design and test a range of professional development innovations around facilitation. Through a participatory process, 18 library staff, grouped into four cohorts, met for multiple sessions over the course of two months (five sessions in the first two cohorts; six sessions in each of the last two). Participants identified their own problems of practice and used improvement science methods to establish practitioner know-how.Results. The central contribution of this study is a model for a constructivist approach to professional development, accompanied by strategies that arise out of the real-world experiences of practitioners. For the participants, the act of reflecting on practice through an improvement project surfaced an awareness about themselves as facilitators, suggesting that the end game for professional development should not be a packaged, one-size-fits-all training program but rather, a methodology that allows library staff to design a set of reflective activities contextualized for their own use, in their own communities.Conclusions. By treating the facilitation of activities in library maker spaces as a practice that requires expertise, the project gives serious attention to an (often unacknowledged) aspect of library service. This research study also advances broader knowledge in the area of professional development, specifically as relates to improvement science, an applied science useful for investigating change-in-context for the purposes of improvement.