The emergence of leadership in pre-service teacher education students’ collaborative learning in the context of maker education project

Abstract

While talking about ways to effectively improve teaching and reform schools, teacher leadership is an essential issue. Teacher leadership is considered as a crucial skill to make an influence on pupils both within and outside of the classroom. Therefore, future teachers need to acquire leadership skills to be effective during their teaching practice. There has been growing interest in maker education in different educational contexts which can be fostered through collaborative learning. Maker education emphasizes collaborative learning approach to benefit the group optimal success. During the maker-based group collaboration there are possibilities for the future teachers becoming as emerged leaders. While previous studies explored the emergence of leadership in children makerspace-based group collaboration, it needs to be focused on the pre-service teacher education context. To address the issue, this qualitative thematic deductive and inductive analysis study identified emerging leadership qualities within eight pre-service teacher students who have the common educational background or teaching experiences. A number of emerged leadership moves identified focusing on which moves occur mostly and two leader-ship types emerged during maker project collaboration. Data analysis depicts that students have taken all four leadership moves at various situations while students mostly taken the role of seeking out resources as well as coordinating joint work. Most of the interviewees agreed that during the collaboration in their maker project they have shared different leadership moves rotationally with others which indicate that there were shared leadership emerged although there was evidence of individual leadership in two groups. key findings of this study highlight that leadership moves and shared leadership approach can be effective at successful maker project group collaboration. In the discussion and conclusion part of this study have shown that extended empirical evidence for the emergent leadership in maker based collaborative learning and provided insights and suggestions for future teachers and researchers.