Читать книгу Cultivating Curiosity - Doreen Gehry Nelson - Страница 12

As a rebellious teenager, I would have laughed if anyone had told me that I would one day become a teacher and a teacher of teachers—and that I would love it.

I wrote this book imagining new teachers and seasoned teachers, who, like me, still aspire to make a difference in society through education. Most of us want to do more than just deliver dry subject matter to students. We want to prepare them for problem seeking and problem-solving around questions that are essential to society. We want the subject matter that our students need to learn to be put into a contextual setting that ensures their long-term memory retention so that they are able to apply what they learn to a wide array of situations. We know that teaching critical and creative thinking is the best preparation for an unknown future.

As a classroom teacher, it seemed to take me forever to understand where to look for answers to how to make learning stick, and how to teach in a way that would bring who I am, and my deepest family values, into my classroom.

In the late 1950s, my tough-minded, well-read mother, born in 1904, had just completed her high school degree, attending night classes at my high school. She had graduated with honors and was planning to go to college. At age 16, I had just graduated with a C+ average, and I agreed with my high school counselor that college wasn't for me. My mother disagreed in no uncertain terms. My entrepreneurial, endlessly creative, curiosity-driven dad (my role model) wasn't buying it, either. He had only finished the 4th grade and wanted both of his children to be well educated. My brother Frank (who would become the noted architect Frank Gehry), almost nine years my senior, my only sibling and lifelong hero, was excelling in his studies of architecture at USC. He told me that I was capable of doing something like that. I felt I had no choice but to go when my mother enrolled us both at Los Angeles City College (me during the day, her at night).

We had moved to Los Angeles from Canada after my dad's heart attack at age 47. In Los Angeles, with my dad too ill to work, the burden of supporting the four of us was on my mother's shoulders. She would come home at the end of the day from her job as a clerk at the Broadway Department Store in Hollywood, we would make dinner together, and after she tended to my dad, she would sit down with me and together we wrote essays for our classes and articles for the school newspaper, and studied for the sociology class we were both taking. My grades soared. I liked the teachers, the students, and the social activities so much that I decided to apply to UCLA.

As a student at UCLA, I went back to playing the harp, something I had studied seriously in middle school (with a harp my dad bought by working the night shift at a liquor store). I played in the UCLA Symphony for four years, and off and on in the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony. I changed my major a half dozen times, starting with Education, switching to Music, Anthropology, back to Education, then Sociology, then Art.

My brother Frank, meanwhile, had graduated from the School of Architecture at USC and with my family just scraping by, I had to be able to support myself. A UCLA counselor told me that if I took a few more Education courses and did supervised teaching, I could get a teaching credential in just one year, so I signed up—after balking at first because my mother had so often urged me to get a teaching credential to “have something to fall back on when you get married.” (Perhaps she was recalling that when I was in grade school, while my brother built model airplanes and made sketches of everything, I had corralled neighborhood kids who were having trouble in school, had them draw pictures that told a story, and taught them to read.)

My family's belief in the inherent value of creativity, perseverance, doing things for others, and community activism is the bedrock for my life's work. In Canada, where I grew up, my dad, who was an American citizen, was politically vocal. While I was at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, my favorite teacher was accused of being a Communist because she was against the supposed temporary relocation of residents in Chavez Ravine near downtown Los Angeles, where a new public housing project was to be built. (The city of Los Angeles had bought up that property through the power of eminent domain. The residents lost their community when the housing project never happened and the land eventually went to Dodger Stadium.) I joined protests against the city with my brother, and after that, during election times, he would take me to underserved neighborhoods to register voters and promote candidates.

When I became a teacher, I wanted to realize my strongly held belief that to equalize society, acknowledge cultural differences, and to prepare students to participate in a world of serious societal, political, economic, and environmental challenges, all kids needed to be taught to become courageous, original thinkers, capable of working together to make and evaluate proposals for change.

After 10 years of classroom teaching, I went back to school for a master's degree. I began developing my John Dewey-, Benjamin Bloom-, Jerome Bruner-inspired Design-Based Learning methodology. I zeroed in on two of the things that Bruner described as central to becoming an educated person: (1) creative thinking, the ability to imagine solutions to what would later be termed Essential Questions—the underlying powerful ideas, universal concepts, principles, values, and morals associated with high-level thinking—and (2) the ability to gather information from multiple areas of the curriculum to revise and refine what is imagined.

(I met Jerry Bruner in New York in the early 1980s when I looked up his name in the phone book and had the chutzpah to call him. To my surprise, he answered. After I explained that I had developed my methodology based in part on what he had written, he invited me to lunch. Jerry became a friend and supporter of my work, and I was honored and deeply touched by his offer [at age 100] to write the introduction to this book, in progress at the time.)

I eventually understood that during all my years of teaching, I had not been cultivating original thinking. I had long believed that building physical artifacts and role-playing within a contextual, cross-curricular “story” were vital for learning to become reusable. (Maybe it was my dad's passion for seeing how one thing could become something else that influenced me. As the owner of a furniture factory in Canada, he would explore how unique materials could transform the everyday products he designed and produced.) What I was missing was a way to unleash creative thinking in my students. That wasn't happening when the artifacts they made replicated what already existed and their “dramatic play” using those artifacts simply imitated others.

I wrestled with the meaning of Bloom's Taxonomy that pointed to creative thinking as the highest goal of education. Convinced that creative thinking is innate in all students, disenfranchised and privileged alike, and could be taught without sacrificing academic rigor, I began conceiving what would become the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning (formerly called City Building Education) to put creative thinking skills first.

I had been successful at teaching the drill and practice of basic facts for Specific Transfer of Learning (2 plus 2 equals 4; 2 apples plus 2 oranges equals 4 pieces of fruit). I needed to find a systematic way to teach for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning that would open the door to creative thinking and enable students at any grade level to use and reuse information, think independently, and advocate for themselves and others. Accomplishing this, I thought, would build community and cultivate equality.

To discourage students from engaging in replicative thinking, I wondered what would happen if I had them “back in” to learning what I was required to teach them. After trying out numerous ideas in my classroom, I thought about how a city's character is reflected in its location, its architecture, and the values of the people who live and work there. I thought about how the parts of the city could be a metaphor for creative thinking and for all subject matter. What if I gave students a curriculum-based story about a city situated in a real place familiar to them, a story that asked them to imagine that city 100 years in the future? What if I had them build a rough model of their imagined City of the Future, shaped by their own Never-Before-Seen, roughly built solutions to subject-related, big topic dilemmas that they identified—before I taught them what others had done?

In the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning, following its 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™, through a progression of big topic Design Challenges, students roughly build a tabletop City or other Never-Before-Seen built environments that represent real places or systems (a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, etc.), based on required curriculum.

Determined by a teacher's pre-set subject matter requirements and Guided Lessons, an ongoing City “story” evolves with students' original thinking displayed by the artifacts they build on individual land parcels to develop an ever-changing, dynamic model. Each big topic Design Challenge, taking place over a week to a month, integrates interdisciplinary studies and meets learning objectives in teacher-taught Guided Lessons related to big and small topics. Students bring their individual land parcels together—as parts to the contextual whole—in a continuing revision process as they review the problems they identify in their City and set out to solve as a classroom community the validity of their solutions. Social responsibility, social justice, civics, and government (division of labor and classroom management) come into play as students adopt government roles in the City through Never-Before-Seen Creatures they build as their Avatars.

The words “design” and “Never-Before-Seen” in the methodology are synonyms for creativity. A designer communicates original ideas, taking into consideration a client's “don't wants and needs” to make them real. In the same way, a teacher pretends to be the client, “hiring” students to be the designers of Never-Before-Seen solutions to Design Challenges, and requiring that they adhere to a “don't wants and needs” Criteria List.

This is not a competition to see who makes the best or prettiest artifact. Materials used for building can be anything, even folded cardboard or crumpled pieces of paper. There are no “wrong” answers as long as students can justify how their Never-Before-Seen built artifacts meet the teacher's criteria. What the artifacts look like doesn't matter. The tangible artifacts that students build, before revising them after Guided Lessons and textbook study, represent their original thinking about subject matter and promote the creative and higher level thinking skills that lead to the transferable application of information across the curriculum and in real life.

As students describe how their built objects meet subject-matter-related criteria, they learn to advocate for their ideas and to discuss and evaluate their solutions and those of their peers. Writing follows oral discussion. Students write about their creations and do required textbook study and related research. They use the information they acquire to revise their own built artifacts through oral and written presentations and/or by physically rebuilding them in the context of their City's simulated government. This process, ongoing over a semester or school year, engages students in learning and gives them confidence and the vocabulary to think deeply about how the factual information they are required to learn applies to real life.

Design-Based Learning re-imagines classroom practice. It is not about stand-alone projects, arts-and-crafts activities, or training future professional designers. Creative thinking is woven into the entire K-12 required curriculum through this methodology, connecting multiple subjects to the student-built student-run City of the Future or other contextual environment.

Teaching at Cal Poly Pomona, California, gave me a university platform for training K–12 teachers through comprehensive course work in my methodology. To establish a Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Design-Based Learning, I had to write a course of study and have it approved by the Academic Senate. This happened in 1995 with the crucial support and persistence of School of Education and Integrated Studies Interim Dean, Sheila McCoy.

To date, hundreds of teachers trained in the methodology have documented their practice and the significant standardized test results that their students have achieved.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, I spearheaded an online pilot program in 2020 working with a large group of K–12 Design-Based Learning teachers who were uncertain about how to apply the methodology online, but found that traditional teaching methods left their students disengaged. When technology first surfaced in the classroom, I had tried working with a few computer scientists to find a way to bring my Design-Based Learning methodology to a 2D medium without losing its fundamental reliance on the spatial domain: 3D, hands-on experiences. Those efforts were unsuccessful, but developing a pilot program with so many teachers anxious to apply Design-Based Learning online made the difference. The results were that my methodology translated easily to the building and running of a City in a virtual setting, as long as students at home built physical artifacts for the City. What was learned from this online research will continue beyond the pandemic as a companion to in-person classroom teaching and teacher training. In a hybrid environment, my methodology will connect virtual and in-person teaching and learning by providing a continuum across both venues.

* * *

In the summer of 2019, I walked up the steps to Moore Hall at UCLA and entered the School of Education. My Design-Based Learning methodology had recently become part of the university's Center X teacher-training institution, one of the most prestigious in the country. I was there to oversee the first Center X Design-Based Learning teacher training.

I had gone up those same stairs on my very first day as a student at UCLA in 1955, intending to be a music major, not an education student, on my way to audition as a harpist for the UCLA Symphony. I couldn't help but choke up, thinking, “Oh, my God, I came here so many years ago to play the music of others. And now I'm coming to teach others to play the ‘music' that I developed.” It was a profound experience.

What I thought I would hate all those years ago had turned out to be a lifelong obsession, giving me the sense that I could make a difference in the world, something I've learned many teachers feel. When I was a classroom teacher, I often wondered why I was being paid to have so much fun.

Today, when I teach teachers, I feel the same way.