Guest & TEDx Speaker Charles Sutton Asks, "What Can You Do, With What You Know?"

Maker education has the potential to empower all individuals to think critically about complex systems and encourage them to be active participants in building and shaping the future they want. 

In this episode, we are joined by Charles Sutton, a librarian and aspiring public intellectual. Through his professional and personal work, he is committed to developing human agency and structural change where needed. His interests include early and emergent literacy, critical making, and maker education/empowerment. Charles is a thinker and a tinkerer. The following quote from Ralph Ellison’s  Invisible Man sums it up best:  “Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinker.” 

In 2015, Charles spoke at TEDx Evansville on the topic "Maker Education: Empowering individuals to make a better world."  He discusses how he transformed his home into an urban ecological experiment – implementing workable alternatives to current practices that threaten our water, energy and food security. 

Can makers of all stripes facilitate healing and restoration of urban communities?  Can they - we, because we all can make something - help to ameliorate the deep-seated wounds to communities caused by racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, economic disinvestment, etc.? 

We will talk about this and much more in this episode.  Please join us!