Steamhead Productions
Early on in our development as maker educators, we saw how meaningful and impactful it was for our students to have a voice in their work. There are many approaches to this, but we’ve found that a public presentation not only gives students that voice, but also real validation from their community that their voice is meaningful.
It wasn’t long before the community reached back. Local businesses and community groups saw the student work and were able to offer not just resources, but real world problems and issues for our students to address that could replace fictional problems used for educational purposes. This also created community stakeholders who could replace grade-givers.
Our programs grew into district-wide maker faires and fashion tech runways that gave our students larger and larger audiences and communities to speak to. They grew until we saw the need for, and modern realities of, a global audience, and we started SteamHead Productions to document and share our student’s stories, as well as to share what we have learned with educators everywhere.
We partnered with non-profit Cultivative and our media director Mike Shaw to develop this program into a robust platform where our students would be represented professionally and inspire the largest audience possible.
Publishing fashion activism
We published a print and digital book of our High Tech Middle MakeFashion Edu Activism projects.
The students created outfits and wrote narratives for causes they cared about, and together we promoted their viewpoints by publishing their works.
We publish books as inspiration and references for maker classrooms, and because the work our students do to impact the world is genuine and not just a classroom assignment.
Maker Faire Documentaries
These videos chronicle our successes in bringing together schools across an entire city to a single event for students to share projects and insights. We produce and publish these kinds of videos in order to open-source our process and encourage other communities to grow. Our videos also serve as outreach to new partners and to increase the number of people impacted by this work.