Virtual Maker Exhibition: SteamHead Teacher Tour
Curriculum to a PBL Teacher
In the aftermath of a virtual education event, where students toured a 3D world of their work and the fashion tech projects of students in other schools, I asked my co-instructor what they thought about curriculum and what it meant specifically to them. We had worked together for several years and this was a good opportunity to state our current educational philosophies, which invariably and continuously evolve. I had an opportunity to record her thoughts on video and will summarize the discussion here. Additionally, I referenced her published works from year’s prior, in order to gain perspective on her changing definition of “curriculum”.
Interviewee and Discussion Context Introduction
Twila Busby, my co-instructor, has more than 20 years experience in education, where she has been an advocate and trainer for Project Based Learning. Most recently she has been the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Shenzhen American International School (SAIS), in Shenzhen, China, which is the only wall to wall PBL school in Shenzhen. While SAIS had one of the first dedicated school makerspaces, Busby promoted the idea that every classroom should be a makerspace, where academics support creativity and students bring their ideas into the physical world.
The projects we had just toured focused around students advocating for causes they had selected by creating wearable outfits with electronic features, guided by a program called MakeFashion Edu. An example project included a student-created red LED suit that had one light for each student that died as a result of gun violence in the years that their gun violence report investigated. We had brought students on a virtual tour of photographs of these projects, placed into a 3D video game world called Mozilla Hubs.
Thoughts on Curriculum
Busby, when asked about her current thoughts on curriculum and its meaning, jumped to examples from MakeFashion Edu. She invariably pulled the conversation away from what I, as an interviewer, wanted to be contextualized as “curriculum” and towards the motivations of the students participating in the project. I would have chosen to discuss the research and statistics used by the student who created the gun violence advocacy project, and how those skills tied back to subject specific learning. Instead, Busby put those traditional perceptions in the background when she said something very similar to her 2019 comments in an education documentary, “MakeFashion Edu gave me an opportunity to focus, because we knew it was going to be for a runway, it was going to be something that you wore … people get excited about it and just understand what it is.” (Busby, 2019). Busby went on to cite her District Supervisor for his claims that the projects allowed for students to learn through problem solving and think outside of the box, and that any school would appreciate the strong STEM implementation.
When pressed on the definition of curriculum, Busby responded that, “…there are many types of curriculum, what do we need to talk about as teachers? Science standards, math, reading, my kids are hitting all of those points and we don’t need to talk about if evaporation or condensation is more important, we need to talk about how the kids are learning…” (Busby, 2021).
Conclusion
I believe that this is a common feeling among progressive education-minded teachers. In The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum, the authors wrote, “…curriculum is meant to teach students all the tools they need to be innovative creators.” (Shaw, et al. 2018). This sentiment avoids specific science or math standards and instead focuses on educational outcomes. I do believe that these educators could be asked, “What is the traditional meaning of curriculum?”, and they would respond with informed, but critical, answers.
Upon reflection, I can learn that definitions in the educational world change rapidly and that many teachers would highly prefer to focus on what is new rather than the history of education. As a researcher, I’ll consider this bias when forming my questions for future studies.
References
Busby, T. (2019). MakeFashion Edu Tucson Behind the Scenes Documentary. SteamHead Productions. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/SteamHeadProductions
Busby, T. (2021, February). Personal communication. UoPeople Interview.
Shaw, M.A., et al. (2018). The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum. SteamHead Productions. Retrieved from https://steamhead.space/design-immersion-curriculum/
The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum
A Collaborative Project Supporting Maker Education and Design Thinking in the Classroom
Written and Designed by: Michael Shaw, James Simpson, and Carrie Leung
Made Possible By: SteamHead, MakerSAIS, MakeFashion Edu and Cultivative
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 CC BY-NC-SA
Introduction
The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum builds upon the established educational values of existing design and technology curriculums to instill creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving skills to students across all subjects in a holistic program to prepare them for the challenges of the future. The curriculum is meant to teach students all the tools they need to be innovative creators: from the high-level concepts of design planning and community impact all the way through to the hands-on digital and physical tools needed to enact their ideas. Our lessons are defined and measured in the learning pathways found in this document via a series of “badges” that represent the level and degree of accomplishment in a given skill as the students progress. This method allows the most freedom and flexibility to students as possible. ‘Immersion’ best encapsulates our integrated approach towards technological and design education. It’s meant to reflect some of the value and efficacy of language immersion education because, like language, design thinking and technology are embedded in nearly every aspect of educational, personal, and business life. To that end, design immersion is meant to free these concepts from the barriers of traditionally siloed educational subjects and to cultivate creative problem solving as a dialect of learning. Our curriculum has developed and changed over several years as we implemented and experimented in the classrooms at Shenzhen American International School (SAIS) with the support of the amazing teachers there. SAIS has made Project Based Learning (PBL) central to their curriculum and philosophy and became the first entirely PBL school in Shenzhen, so it was the ideal environment to develop our curriculum. We expect to continue to innovate and develop it both at SAIS and in our own classes with the help of the larger education community. The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum is a collaboration between SteamHead, MakerSAIS, MakeFashion Edu, and Cultivative. We present the curriculum here as a living document, so that others in the education community might benefit from our efforts. If you would like to use this information to help your own communities, please do so under Creative Commons Noncommercial ShareAlike license, which can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ For a commercial licence or consulting services, please contact us at https://SteamHead.space
Learning Pathways
Design thinking requires both a thorough understanding of abstract heuristics as well as hands-on interactive skills. We are building on the Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Process of “empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test,” as well as a version of the “head, heart, hands” model, to ensure that students grasp the individual concepts of design process, how these skills can be integrated into any project or problem, and how to approach design with empathy. To that end, our four learning pathways, Community Impact, Design Planning, Digital Tools, and Physical Tools, divide skills into sensible categories for definition but should also be understood as one, gestalt design and creation process. E.g., a student’s hands-on experience with physical tools should inform their design process when considering possible materials and limitations for a prototype, and vice-versa with design process informing what skills might be needed for a project.
Community Impact
Community Impact is the most important, but also the most esoteric, pathway in our curriculum because it addresses the need for meaning and purpose in students’ work. One of the failings of older education models was their reliance on rote problem solving and artificial practice problems. Students can learn academic topics this way, but the ideas will feel disparate, not applicable to the real world, and, most of all, not interesting or important to the students and their community. Design thinking needs to begin with empathy not only as a virtue, but also as a pathway to listening and thinking about the needs of those around us then defining a problem to solve. Students share their work as the final aspect of this pathway to encourage self reflection and to reinforce that their project has impact outside the classroom. Starting from the perspective of community impact is the pathway that leads students to define meaningful projects, be motivated to innovate, and instill meaning into the work they do at school and beyond.
Design Process
The Design Process pathway represents the methods students need to ideate, manage, and revise their projects. This is the second of our abstract pathways, but it should be accessible and familiar to anyone who has tried to complete a task with more than one step: the need for planning and process becomes more and more apparent with each layer of complexity. The Design Process pathway allows students to pick up the problem they defined in Community Impact and attempt to solve it. They first ideate possible solutions or avenues of exploration and make drafts, then they organize the steps, tools, and other factors needed to create a prototype. Through practicing and organizing their own projects, students gain independence in setting up and cleaning up their work as well as become empowered to solve problems they choose rather than waiting to be told what to work on. This pathway will also teach students the meta-structure of design thinking and the purpose of the abstract scaffolding they are being taught both as constructs and as applied skills. For example, students would write a business plan for their prototype product that requires an up front understanding of the project’s resources, scope, and scale. Last, this pathway teaches iteration and testing: the important process of building on and learning from one’s work; the essential lesson that, contrary to the traditional mindset of producing “right or wrong answers,” we often learn most from the trials and prototypes that don’t work, rather than ones that do.
Fabrication Tools
Fabrication tools are often one of the first things that come to mind when the topic of project based learning and maker education come up, and understandably so, because few things inspire and excite us more than seeing an idea come to life in physical form whether it’s on the tray of a 3D printer or the woodshop table. While that base-level excitement fuels the creative and learning process, the Fabrication Tools pathway also serves as a grounding point and a means to solve problems identified in the Community Impact pathway and require forethought, attention to detail, safety, and management of resources. The classroom provides an environment where students can learn these tools under guidance and supervision, so they have the skills and respect for fabrication tools to use them in future projects and for the rest of their lives. Regardless of whether students learn tools and skills held by humans for hundreds of years like papercraft, woodcraft, and stitching, or they learn the kind of technological tools hyped in the headlines like 3D printers, laser cutters, and block circuits: few lessons are more powerful than when students become empowered to literally change the world around them.
Digital Tools
Digital Tools have transformed our world and made this the Digital Age, and yet individual apps, websites, and coding languages are quickly swallowed up in the shifting sands of popularity and technological advancement, so this pathway has to focus on the kind of digital literacy, frameworks, and heuristics needed to use any kind of digital tool in addition to those in front of us today. Our students often arrive to the classroom having been steeped in the digital world from birth, and the trope of adults needing to “ask a young person” how their own digital tools work shouldn’t surprise us. However, it’s naive and dangerous to assume that students don’t need a thorough education on this topic. The hazards of data security and privacy jump first to mind, but even common skills like file management can seem outmoded and unnecessary until they become a crisis of lost projects. Like the native language skills students bring to the classroom, students can already ‘speak’ with digital tools, but they need to be surrounded by educators modeling positive habits in order to develop that skill. The notion that classrooms should remove digital tools for being ‘distractions’ or to better serve traditional pedagogy amounts to hiding our heads in the sand in the face of an already digital world. Pedagogy, teachers, and students all need to adapt to these changes because digital tools open up entirely new modes of thinking and working, allow access to near limitless information, and are 21st century implements of innovation; we must empower our students with these tools if they are to be ready for the future.
System of Badges
Our Design Immersion Curriculum relies on a system of digital badges to measure student progress, allow for open learning pathways, and encourage self documentation. The badges can be implemented on a number of open platforms such as Badg.us, Badgr, and Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI). These are systems for sharing a unique digital artifact, creating something similar to a scout badge, that consists of an image and metadata about the criteria, issuer, and evidence of the work done to earn it. The badge is then added to a student’s portfolio and can be brought to future classes or shown as a history of accomplishments. Research by Mozilla and ISTE among others has shown these badges to be an effective, evidence-based system to measure student performance based on actions taken, not facts memorized, which is important for the subjective topic of design. Digital badges encourage student agency as they strive toward accomplishable goals that excite them. Once achieved, the student engages in self documentation and reflection, which is meaningful for the learning process and necessary to reduce the resource cost for the teacher tracking multiple students on multiple projects. An introductory level implementation might involve attaching a badge to a lesson that all students participate in, but we plan for Design Immersion to have open-ended objectives that allow students to engage in true design thinking and explore new pathways. As they progress, students self document and ‘apply’ for badges, so teachers can measure and reward progress in skills even while efforts toward a finished product fail or are abandoned. It’s far too easy to see design projects (and other open projects such as in art or engineering) only through the lens of the end result, but there is true, measurable, educational value in the exploration and drafting phases of design that can be captured by our badging system.
Appendix 1: Badges Excel File
APA Citation Format
Shaw, M.A., Leung, C.K., Simpson, B.J. (2018). The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum. SteamHead Productions. Retrieved from https://steamhead.space/design-immersion-curriculum/
In text citation: (Shaw et al., 2018)
Empathy in Curriculum: Disenfranchised Perspectives
In his chapter, “What Does It Mean to Say a School is Doing Well?” from The Curriculum Studies Reader, Elliot Eisner proposes a move away from traditional education, by means of evaluating and rejecting the rationalism thought processes that led to the system’s development. I have brought together three questions he proposes and given an answer to them. These answers are essentially objections to his thought processes, and though they do not represent how I personally feel about education, I am not making absurd claims. I believe these are common perspectives need to be carefully considered by progressive educators.
Lazy Selfish Artists?
In the third full paragraph on page 301, Eisner states that “The most significant intellectual achievement is not so much in problem solving, but in question posing.” This is a significant thing to state as face. He then asks, “What if we took that idea seriously and concluded units of study by looking for the sorts of questions that youngsters are able to raise as a result of being immersed in a domain of study?” Eisner states his assumptions is a positive manner, implying that his unanswered question holds much hope. However, in my experience working with low-income communities, and having come from a low-income background, I have observed that motivating individuals to solve problems is an immense achievement, particularly when the answers are known but disliked. Posing questions versus solving problems – these do not need to be measured against each other.
Compassion for others, an awareness of community building, and the ability of self-control are focuses often seen in rural communities. In these communities, traditional education is tolerated as a means to an end, with the end being an escape from poverty for not only the individual but the community. China, who has been experiencing great economic growth, found great success while schools focused students towards managerial and vocational trades (Rothman, 2018).
To answer Eisner’s question, if everyone took his ideas seriously, we may end up in a world of creative individuals who lack discipline and don’t act compassionately, even though they are very intellectually aware of compassion. To propose the situation even more moderately, Eisner’s students may be looked upon as prodigal sons and daughters, even though they themselves and their teachers disagree with the assessment.
Though I do not know how to rectify this issue, I suggest that Eisner’s suggestion could be improved by codifying a system of listening to communities and responding to their specific needs.
Short-Term Losses
In the sixth full paragraph on page 310, Eisner asks, “What if we used that kind of structure to promote various forms of thinking?”, in reference to a proposition by a psychologist that detailed 130 different forms of thought. Eisner goes on to promote a concept that this will create better people. He goes beyond promoting that education can be improved, into saying that people can be improved by education, and that his system will lead to these improvements. However, I feel that he does not acknowledge, in this essay, the larger field of debate that he is entering: What makes people good? Eisner lays out his ideas from the perspective of a parent or teacher who wants to see their child or student become a confident and successful person.
To answer Eisner’s question, if we moved the goal of schooling away from rationalism towards the systems he proposes in this essay, we would be making an implicit statement that we know what’s best for people, and that traditional education is not what’s best. This act may inspire resentment and disagreement because it shifts the goalposts of meritocracy. If the act was successful, and it is indeed proposing a shift in thinking for millions of people, then shifts in power would accompany periods of time where people lose desirable benefits that they have earned and have not yet gained the desirable benefits of this new system. The same thing happens when technology deflates the value of specific types of labor.
I do not propose a solution for this issue, but I do suggest that teachers and students be made ready for the negative outcomes as well as the positive, in following this line of thinking.
Looking Outwards
In the last paragraph of page 301, Eisner asks, “What connections are students helped to make between what they study in class and the world outside of school?” I believe that the connections that are made by traditional education refer to timeless works of art and science and are indeed outside of school. However, I feel that because these timeless elements have been present in academics for many decades if not longer, many people feel that the works are only academic. If a particular topic or community is addressed by school content for a long enough amount of time, it becomes a part of the school, so this question, in my opinion, could be improved to be less circular.
I believe it is instead worth asking, “What should the rate of change in a school’s curriculum be tied to?”, because I believe that many feel a lack of control and awareness in regard to the change of curriculum and that this feeds into a disdain of traditional education. The awareness of what curriculum means also needs to be updated, as it can be less of a book and more of a process of learning, as Oh and Rozycki (2017) discuss in “What exactly is Curriculum?”.
Conclusion
This chapter, “What Does It Mean to Say a School is Doing Well?” from The Curriculum Studies Reader, is thought provoking an excellent basis for discourse. Elliot Eisner’s proposals seem to be meant for an audience ready and eager to gain vocabulary and experience in discussing ideas that they already agree with. This is a useful tool for those people. In my essay, I have objected to his queries. It may be that he answers my queries in earlier chapters of this same book (and I intend to find out), but they are worthy of consideration throughout the reading of his works. To use a term new to me, we must always avoid being in an “echo chamber” where our ideas are promoted and discussed in exclusion of outside perspectives, even when the very concept presented in gaining perspectives.
References
Eisner, E. What does it mean to say a school is doing well?. In Flinders, D. J., & Thornton, S. J. (Eds.), The Curriculum Studies Reader, Fourth Edition (pp.297-305). New York, NY: Routledge. Retrieved January 30 from: https://chrisdavidcampbell.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/eisener-2001.pdf
Rothman, R. (Ed.). (2018, March 14). Shanghai-China: Instructional Systems. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from https://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/shanghai-china/shanghai-china-instructional-systems/
Lindsey Oh & Ray Rozycki (2017). What is Exactly Curriculum. Education Elements. Retrieved January 30, 2020 from https://www.edelements.com/blog/exactly/what-is-curriculum
APA Citation
Simpson, Benjamin James. (2018). Empathy in Curriculum: Disenfranchised Perspectives. SteamHead Productions. Retrieved from https://steamhead.space/curriculum_empathy/ (Simpson, 2018)
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