The Making of the Midwives of the Makers Mel Chua EDPL 8200 (Spring 2013) Like all human

n activities, the profession of engineering is a social construct that perpetuates and modifies social constructs. Engineering philosopher Billy Koen suggests that creating change is a key engineering activity (Koen, 2003) in other words, engineers modify existing social constructs, and they do so primarily through the creation of material artifacts. Even the NSF's most prestigious grant for research in engineering education calls for the investigation of Makers, (NSF, 2013) the people who will invent the things that make it possible for us to derail the story-tracks our existing lives are on. Making, therefore, is a disruptive activity and the maker movement itself, as a distributed, decentralized, and diverse mythos across the formal and informal engineering world, is an active disruption of the metanarrative of mass production of things. Making, hacking, tinkering, the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement whatever you may call it, it's the material form of the poststructuralist movement. Let's unpack that for a moment; physical massproduction is a metanarrative, with one-size-fits-all goods packed into standard shipping crates from China. And metanarratives are social constructs that are mass-produced; pick out your matching set of ideology at your local mega-warehouse store, carefully matched by a few designers. The technological world is dismantling its material metanarratives, spinning out into mass customization, garage workshops, shared hackerspaces, crowdsourced products, and millions of other little blooms of newlylegitimized making activities (which may have been going on unrecognized for hundreds of years). We've redefined the words of making and manufacture so that they're no longer centralized in the hands of a few. It is because I know how much potential technology has to shape our world, said open culture activist Sumana Harihareswara, that I know it is essential that the people who shape that technology represent that world, represent the best that world has to offer. (Harihareswara, 2011) And, as the NSF CFP exemplifies, the engineering education world has responded by saying Great! How can we make as many makers as possible? Wait. There's an incongruity here. How can you mass-manufacture people whose role it is to disrupt mass-manufacture? Let's look at the world through the eyes of the makers of makers, through the lens of an engineering educator trained in engineering's narratives of mass production. Makers seem to impact the world in a good way. Engineers have a lasting impact on the world by producing durable and generalizable artifacts. Therefore, we will model Makers as durable and generalizable artifacts. The effects of these artifacts must be rigorously evaluated in order to be valid, preferably via quantitative (objective) means that remain the same across all instances of the artifact. Therefore, we will produce Makers that can be evaluated by a standard metric. If we have durable, generalizable (and therefore repeatable) artifacts with a repeatedly measurable impact on the world, we can produce as many of them as we want (given sufficient resources to do so) and thereby have as much impact on the world as we want (within our resource limitations).

...and out the other end pops a Maker-Making Machine. There's a certain irony to the image of a lecture hall of thousands of undergraduates passively watching a slide deck outlining design and innovation as a step-by-step process. How can we train disruptors on a diet of uninterrupted metanarratives full of Anglocentric masculine positivism, the stories we tell ourselves about meritocracy and rigorous and objective standards? The art of Making meets none of the standards for quality honored within the art;

we seek it exactly because it is neither generalizable nor repeatable nor durable and can therefore respond to and change the world as it is, right now, in the place it happens to be. One of many possible answers is to recognize that Making Makers is an oxymoron, and to think about ways to reframe the roles of engineering faculty. Instead of making makers, distinct bodies that will go out and perform the act of making on other, neatly-bounded, external-to-them bodies, we can try looking at making as an activity that (among other things) blurs and transmutes and reimagines. If Makers (as engineers) view their activities in terms of projects, we could say that one of a Maker's early projects is the blurring, transmuting, and reimainging of themselves making their Maker-self. If students are the ones making their Maker-selves, engineering professors can't be makers of Makers they need to be something else. There are many words you could use for what they are, but I'll call them midwives of Makers here, both to emphasize the facilitating-of-inner-uniqueness nature of the role (in contrast to a prescriptive, order-giving dominance) and to plant a powerful and generative feminist image in the center of a male-dominated culture of technocracy. Now is a good time to pause again and note that midwives in the Yucatec Mayan tradition were all women who had given birth themselves. (Lave & Wenger, 1991) Midwives aren't made, they're midwifed both as infants being birthed from their mothers, and as mothers giving birth. So the title of this essay, The Making of the Midwives of the Makers, reflects a current state in engineering education: those who are becoming midwives were not midwifed themselves but a future aspiration might be to midwife the Midwives of Makers. How can someone who was trained as a non-disruptor teach bricolage, and reinvention when being productively lost isn't the sort of algorithm they know how to pass down through a hierarchy? They'll need to engage in a process of sensemaking, of envisioning their future selves as able to belong in a future world. They'll need to pass through awkward spaces in-between things that used to feel like coherent narratives, intersect with seemingly incoherent narratives, dismantle their assumptions. This will be difficult. Engineering culture values clear and unambiguous specifications; if something isn't stated in a product's functional requirements, it is marginalized, considered not to exist. (Cavallaro, 2001, p 48-49) Wittgenstein's paradox of conveying the importance of important things by not saying them (Wittgenstein, 2010) becomes impossible within the constraints that engineering culture has built up around itself in the name of objectivity. In order to admit and value the sensemaking experiences they are (often intensely and self-evidently) passing through but cannot clearly specify, engineering educators will need to recognize and question their constructs of objectivity. When objectivity begins to shake, the notion of truth and validity is probably not far behind. The pragmatic theory of truth states that something is true if its practical application yields testably successful outcomes. (Cavallaro, 2001, p. 8-9) This notion of truth is tied heavily to the scientific method and the culture of validity in engineering. Early anthropologists of science showed how the nature of success was actually a construct created by the consensus of research communities of practice (Latour, 1979) rather than some Platonic ideal present independent of them. In keeping with the multivocality-excluding nature of objectivity, engineers are consciously trained to be unconscious of the socially-constructed nature of what they consider truth the cultural conventions they are taught continuously whisper to them that things can't be decoded as true if they questions the nature of truth. If you needed to explain why your different-looking work was valid, that was a good indication that it wasn't. This leads to positivistic, declarative and imperative language patterns all over engineering literature both inside and outside the academy, and these language patterns

in turn say a lot about engineering culture. Unless you hold these same unstated assumptions, you are not one of us, they say. Notice how that last statement also fits with the multivocality-excluding nature of objectivity and how it can be used to justify and replicate power imbalances under the cloak of meritocracy. After all, anyone can hold those unstated assumptions and thereby gain admission. But also notice that this is a direct contradiction to engineering culture's validity criteria of clear and unambiguous specifications; by its own value systems, unstated assumptions about validity are themselves invalid and nonexistent. Engineering culture already carries the seeds of its own dismantlement. Some of these seeds are more obvious than others. One disconnect in engineering education that midwives of Makers will need to bridge is how the way we teach is contradictory to what we claim to teach; Makers see the world as a writerly text to be read, one in which they can participate in the construction of many shifting realities. They know the world is hackable even if the texts they are given are closed. The fabric of the world can be endlessly made and unmade; they aren't closed, finished, or exclusive to one maker. (Cavallaro, 2001, p. 59) It's just a matter of applying the constant remaking of the world to the ways in which we teach our remaking.

References Cavallaro, D. (2001). Critical and cultural theory thematic variations. London; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Harihareswara, S. (2011). Bitch Radio. Bitchmagazine.org. Transcript retrieved from http://bitchmagazine.org/post/bitch-radio-women-in-open-source-part-2. Koen, B. V. (2003). Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer's Approach to Problem Solving. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1986). Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press. National Science Foundation. (2013). Research in Engineering Education (REE). Retrieved from http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503584 Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Lexington, KY: Seven Treasures Publications.