Teaching as Designing

Today I took part along with FAIR Downtown teacher Paul Hannan in a small Cultural Collaborative class with Dr. Jabari Mahiri. Essentially he tested a prototype of his new seminar, Designing Learning: Integrating Digital & Traditional Texts & Tools in Schools, in advance of his new book. Fellow Arts Integrators - this guy is right up our alley, if you don't know him, you should!

His premise is that the design process is a viable model for technology integration and curriculum development in general. What he's getting to is the same idea Eric Booth espouses - that when we integrate through the nouns (concepts) we'll have limited success, but when we utilize the verbs (processes) we get to deeper learning and more authentic connections. He also pointed out that the prototyping process - in which participants are forced to move away from the page and into a physical model - is a great place to make learning more active and more collaborative. It is true that the prototyping phase caused us more head-scratching about how to get started, surely an indicator of our brains having to stretch. This phase was also the most animated, with participants standing, moving, gesturing and experimenting - all indicators of physical engagement. And, for me, some pieces of our design literally firmed up as we created our physical model.

The other foundational assumption that Mahiri makes is that learning can be "multimodal" - a text is a text is a text, regardless of the mode of communication. So when a student makes connections between a phrase of music and a series of images, that's what reading guru Ellin Keene would call a text-to-text connection - an important part of developing comprehension. (In fact, the subtitle of her book was my first clue that reading teachers think of themselves as teaching not just reading but comprehension. What if we all did this?) Mahiri illustrated this by presenting a handful of images from the lengthy picture book, The Arrival by Shaun Tan and allowing us each to create and share our own meaning from them. (Check out the NPR story for a sense of this beautiful book In Wordless Imagery, An Immigrant's Timeless Tale). Then, modeling a text-to-text connection for us, he compared a series of images from the Let it Be and Come Together portions of the Julie Taymor film, Across The Universe - a different interpretation of the same archetypal story.

For the phases of the design process, Mahiri uses the vocabulary from Stanford University's design school, or D-School. Here are my notes on them:

• Empathy: uncovering meaningful needs, identifying with user needs. Clients (students) are the experts in their own needs. Interviewing, observation & immersion are techniques to gain empathy.

• Define: distilling the specific need and behind that need, insight into what the design will address, leading to an actionable problem statement. In Education this means defining who are the users, what grade, etc.

• Ideate: generation of ideas – use post-its so you can regroup as needed. Go broad to provide fuel for prototype. Later, you'll focus and select ideas.

• Prototype: creation of artifacts – physical, digital or experiential – that provide visible models of solutions being designed to address user needs and that can be tested for viability. Prototype gives us a physical springboard to which people can respond.

• Test: trying out the design solution with actual or potential users. Prototype like you know you’re right; Test like you know you might be wrong in order to refine the solution and make it better.

The best thing about this class was that we got to do the process. I know that I learned in an entirely different way from this active process, and I connected with my partners as well as the members of the other groups better. What we designed, in groups of 3 or 4, was a unit that incorporated digital tools. Though it was not a requirement, all of the groups ended up with designs that had students participating in a design process as well - even the 5th grade Vocabulary unit!

I got assigned to work on a Social Issues unit, with the requirement to include the iveBeenThere site. Specifically, we were assigned to use the Race portion of the site. The site started out as the project of a graduate student - along the lines of the Coming Out project, but featuring young adult "mentors" speaking about a range of social issues that younger kids might face: race, sexuality, bullying, drugs, making friends - you name it. The idea is that teens can access advice from a mentor on their own - one that looks like them, just a little bit older. They can search by topic, or if there is a particular mentor they like, they can follow that person.

From this site we found several others that would be great for a social issues/race unit. The Race Awareness Project  has a "Guess My Race" app similar to the section of the Science Museum's Race exhibit. There's also a "Who Am I Race Awareness Game," designed to open dialog about human physical diversity, colorblindness and race. It's  recommended for children ages 3 and up, care-givers, teachers, etc. Teachers with iPod access, this could be something to check out! Also, there's a way for people to upload their own head shots to be a part of the games. 

The site that ended up organizing our unit design was the Understanding Race site originally developed by the Science Museum of MN for their Race exhibit. The introduction to the site is one of the few in the world that is really worth watching completely, as it cycles through a mosaic of facial features making up a multi-racial face, all the while listing  off multiple ways that humans can differ from one another. This of course is also a list of things that we might use to construct our identities. From this and the other sites, we decided that a race unit should be embedded in a large, interdisciplinary unit based in identity. Hmm, this is sounding familiar. FAIR teachers, I did give you some credit when one person asked if we would actually teach something like this in the classroom and if so, how would we structure courageous conversations with students? I was proud to say that we would, could and do at the FAIR schools, and that Paul or I would be glad to discuss this with them.

We heard about two more juicy, equity related sites at the end. First, check out the Question Bridge, a project that asks black males a set of question and then edits down to the meatiest parts of their answers. There are over 2,000 men represented so far and the designers are trying to reach 200,000 participants. They have put out an app with which black males can upload their answers to the questions. There is also an identity map which is a tag cloud of words the men use to describe their identities, and a high school curriculum framework. The site was not fully functional today, but the parts I have been able to see are promising, so it would be worthwhile to check in periodically to see how it is developing.

Second, Virtual Oakland Blues and Jazz: Remembering 7th St.
This is a second-life tour of historic Oakland, California during the post-World War II period when there was a prosperous black business community based on the port of Oakland. Students can make an avatar, take it to the actual clothing store to pick out a vintage outfit, then check out the shops and of course, the blues and jazz clubs. They can interact with some residents to find things out. This seems like such a great way to use the 3-d virtual environment - not as a substitute for reality, but a way to see something that's just not currently available.

I expected to learn about a lot of cool sites today. What I didn't expect was to begin to see ways that students could use these sites not just for traditional research, but to really participate in their own design processes. I'm excited to see so many interactive sites and sites to which students can upload their own work, share with each other and their teachers, and even invent entire worlds of their own. I'm encouraged that time students spend in design-based games is adding to their persistence, taking them to new places and allowing them to experience things that no longer exist - or don't exist yet!