Longer Bio
James has always used community building and teaching to drive his work strategies. As an engineer responsible for restructuring and running manufacturing lines, his base methods focused on creating collaborative environments by breaking down socioeconomic and traditional workplace communication barriers. He set up workshops and projects that included members of management as well as line workers. These environments had rules and goals that shifted traditional roles, and allowed the two groups to share information and ultimately improve processes.
When James entered education, he sought to apply these some philosophies to classrooms. In order to create the collaborative environments that credit sources of knowledge to all participants, he found a need to bring university-level design thinking and workshop techniques to K-12 education, and built up SteamHead in pursuit of this goal.
In the Press (media links)
A Personal Story
SteamHead’s Neighborhood Earth program brings tech and design thinking to under-served schools and communities. James has a personal connection to this program, and has brought it to his small home community in the Mojave desert for several years.
“At my high school, I didn’t have access to college counseling. More than that, I hadn’t really been taught that college counseling was a “thing” people had. This lack of access grew into an unawareness of what was possible. It meant that I had missed out on options to define life, not because I couldn’t pick a university or major, but because I didn’t see my peers doing it or hear from adults that it had been done by people like me before.
You can be anything you want to be
But how do you know what you want to be?
I grew up following instructions. I excelled in my traditional education classes, and if some device broke at home we would follow the manufacturer’s instructions for next steps of repair or hiring licensed experts. I took to the philosophy easily, and loved board games and the like that built systems upon these ideas.
I didn’t have a clear picture of what types of educational experiences happened after high school because I had no basis for comparison, and I was a person who needed exposure in order to form comparisons. I never thought to ask broader questions, perhaps I felt uncomfortable asking for options outside of what was presented to me.
At the high school graduation ceremony, someone put me in line with five students who were all going to college. It was a mistake – they had assumed that since I was at the top of my class with great grades, a passion for learning, and a love of teaching that I would be headed to a university. When I saw that those students were going straight off to college, I saw an option for myself. I searched my environment with new eyes and stole an old copy of the U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges” from the school’s front office.
There were a lot of choices, and I had no way of knowing where to pick. I hitchhiked to the University of Southern California a week later, about 150 miles away.
I felt strange as I wandered around the campus not knowing what I was looking for. I found some offices down an alley. They called an admissions officer over and we had a conversation about why I was there, how I got there, and what my grades were like in high school. He said I could start in January.
For me, it worked out. I found my way into the world of design, engineering, and exploration. I interned at NASA, Toyota, and Siemens.
Kids have options. The options exist, and they are plentiful and amazing. That is not nearly enough. Teachers need to be empowered to send their students questing into research and problems outside of a school’s four walls. Sometimes there are institutional problems, sometimes teachers are overworked, sometimes students are rowdy and unmotivated.
Why are we distributing content, visiting schools, creating spaces, and sharing stories? Because it is not nearly enough to simply create, we must share.
Testing microchips with SteamHead’s August Resident Educator
Creating a tape body form at Maker Ed Summer Camp
Learning micro:bit programming at SAIS
