The Maker Moment
by Vince Durnan
A few of us spent this past Friday in Cambridge, MA with a cutting edge bunch of mostly West Coast teachers—early proponents of a movement to rethink schooling. The invitation and the experience gave me reason for gratitude. Here’s why:
A few of us spent this past Friday in Cambridge, MA with a cutting edge bunch of mostly West Coast teachers—early proponents of a movement to rethink schooling. The invitation and the experience gave me reason for gratitude. Here’s why:
Our rallying point was Agency by Design (AbD), not “all but dissertation”—letters familiar to me until late last spring, but instead a research dimension of the Harvard Ed School’s Project Zero. Since 1967 that office, most memorably under the guidance of multiple intelligence theory pioneer Howard Gardner, has conducted research on a host of topics in arts education, cognitive dispositions, teaching and learning, and new frontiers in school reform. Choosy in the extreme, Project Zero took on AbD a couple of years ago, once sufficient grant funding permitted work to start. Our full day summit provided a window on progress measured so far in the very hip realm of the maker movement.
Don’t feel self-conscious if the term doesn’t ring a bell. At the risk of oversimplifying, the maker idea sprang from a growing understanding that we as a nation have lost our sense of how things work, how pieces fit together, and how important it is to think like an inventor. As we’ve become more estranged from our food sources, less connected in our communities, and more disengaged in the world around us, our classrooms have followed that same trend. The “makers” take inspiration from startup entrepreneurs in the social, tech, and business realms. And they, mostly millennials, are finding their way into schools, perhaps most notably in this instance in Oakland.
Fifth grade USN science teacher Tobey Beaver Balzer, an alumna and former Adventure Science Center staffer, joined me and MS head Jeff Greenfield, thanks to the Abundance Foundation (the primary AbD funder) on this brief but memorable pilgrimage. We got to do maker stuff, more properly design thinking (like the chance to take familiar machines apart, “slow noticing” as we went, and to think about the complexities of their structure and function) and hear about initiatives in practice at early adopter schools. There was time to discuss the meaning and the proliferation of maker talk in our field and to consider the lamentable possibility that it could go the way of other education buzzwords and misappropriated flavors of the month.
We also talked about the transformational potential of slowing down and digging in, of providing a counterpoint to an objectified, Common Core-type curricular fixation on that which can be counted by current high stakes testing. Certainly the maker concepts resonate with mindfulness program advocates and “less is more” educational theorists, in addition to many of those who drive STEM initiatives and focus on thinking routines. Our tendency as schools, and USN is no exception, has been toward being additive and not subtractive, toward more being more, with the result being very full days, with growing course requisites and the best of intentions. The question--or certainly one question--at hand is whether maker ideas could be compatible with what’s best in what we do now.
For that matter, we should ask ourselves how much of what we’re doing now is in fact maker-space stuff that we just haven’t called by that name. It’s not that we are likely to trade school as we know it for the potential of a compelling new concept, but the chance to be in the room when the exploration of that concept is happening in real time is a big and important thing. Ours is the historic responsibility to be educational leaders—pragmatic and purposeful and thankful for our turn at the wheel.
Thinking hard,
Vince
Vince
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Nashville, TN 37212
Phone: 615-321-8000
Fax: 615-321-0889
Email: info@usn.org
River Campus
1200 County Hospital Road
Nashville, TN 37218
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University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.
University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.