Читать книгу Cultivating Curiosity - Doreen Gehry Nelson - Страница 16

In 1968, in my classroom of underserved 5th and 6th graders at Westminster Elementary School in Venice, California, I taught my students that there is a reason that a variety of housing has existed throughout the world by telling them and showing them what tents, teepees, igloos, and skyscrapers have in common. To have my students reach Benjamin Bloom's highest level—imagination and originality—I asked them to consider the environment, the geography, the resources, the attitudes, and technology that make housing what it is now, what it had been since the beginning of time, and what it might be in the future. I wanted them to know that housing is simply a container for human activity and since they were humans, they had the right to think about what that container might be like. I also wanted them to know that every container is human-made or made in nature for a purpose: a house to shelter and protect, a bottle to hold water, a clock to hold time, a pencil to hold lead, an egg to hold life.

This was still a frontward path, but I kept going on it. I obtained donated cameras to have my students photograph their homes. I thought that by looking at and being asked to imagine how to reconfigure where they live, the students would invent their dream houses. Instead, they came back with all kinds of excuses for not doing the assignment. I realized that their homes were not pretty to them and they felt powerless to change their environments.

I showed them how one thing can become another in a dramatic way. I told them how Pop artist Claes Oldenburg had once given an everyday ice bag new meaning in his installation at the American Pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. His enlarged and rotating ice bag was not representative of a giant headache, Oldenburg had explained, but was a symbol of change and dignity as the cap of the bag caught the sun and the bag bowed to the audience as it turned, representing the healing that had taken place between the United States and Japan since World War II.

Close to Halloween, and inspired by Oldenburg, I asked the students to change themselves into an object of their choice by making a “New Skin” costume to create a Never-Before-Seen them. I had them select a small physical object, describe how it symbolized them, and turn it into a body cover. My students chose to be musical instruments, cans of food, bacon and eggs, cameras, wallets, mops, brooms, razor blades, and even a tube of toothpaste. Unexpectedly, I was teaching them to think metaphorically. I had them pretend that they were the objects and use their imaginations to make up stories about what the object did and how it represented who they were.

Non-Specific Transfer of Learning was automatic, and what had started out as an art project had become a backwards path to teaching subject matter. I observed the students' involvement with subject matter lessons and saw that they didn't mind if my list of criteria for their costumes expanded whenever I thought of adding to it. As they built their New Skins, they willingly measured their small, real objects to figure out how many times bigger the objects would need to be to fit as costumes, and what kind of details would make their costumes recognizable. To decide what to use to make their body covers, they debated the difference between using soft fabrics or large rolls of paper versus hard cardboard boxes, and I had them research the costs for each. More Math, Science, and Language Arts lessons emerged. (One student, who had previously refused to read in class at all, managed to copy all of the detailed writing on his soda can and discuss why certain words were on the can in the first place.)

Even those students who had difficulty crafting their New Skins learned to justify their creations. Some students made New Skin body covers that looked better than others, but that wasn't the point. I was teaching them to feel comfortable expressing themselves and leading them to reuse the symbolism and metaphoric thinking inherent in this experience.

It is hard to forget the boy who chose to be a soup can to show that he loved to eat. Or the student who was a razor blade to show his desire to cut things into pieces. Or the girl who was a telephone to represent her fear of having no one to call when she needed a friend.

Dressing up as an object of their choice gave my students the feeling that they had redesigned Halloween. They begged to wear their funny and original New Skin costumes during the school's Halloween parade. They took great pleasure in knowing that everyone else would be the same old skeleton or fairy princess. (Of course, when they did their research about the origins of Halloween, they discovered why certain costumes dominated the holiday.)

Above all, my students were no longer inhibited in imagining themselves as designers. By changing the size and function of an object with intention, and embracing their New Skin selves, they had learned that they had the power to transform one thing into something else. This resulted in a high rate of student success. I had been concerned about justifying having students spend a few hours a day over a three-week period building, wearing, and storing their New Skin body covers, but it proved to be an invaluable use of classroom time, filling a solid month of academic study.

Based on this New Skin activity—the precursor to what would become my methodology's sequential, curriculum-based Design Challenges—my daily Guided Lessons in Math, Science, History, and Language Arts were more comprehensive than any I had been able to teach over my then-10-year career in the classroom.

Seeing how diligently they adhered to the required criteria, I graded them for meeting (or not meeting) what they themselves agreed they needed to achieve. If I had assigned grades for the “best” New Skin, I would have been recognizing them for their motor skills, not for their ability to produce and justify a creative object.

To my surprise, in the longitudinal study I did 10 years after my first New Skin activity in Venice, many of those from that class of students with mixed abilities were in college and still remembered the New Skin objects they had been. Keeping the actual costumes, or photographs of their New Skins was common. I visited two of my former students, siblings, who had moved to Missoula, Montana. In their small house, over the fireplace, hung their 10-year-old New Skin costumes (one was a can of soup).

For some time, I thought that the New Skin activity was the only way to drive home the point that large, student-built artifacts in the classroom made a difference in higher-level learning. I did this activity with students with severe learning disabilities, English Language learners, teachers, lawyers, architects, and computer scientists. After the initial shock of being asked to be silly, none had difficulty in introducing themselves to others as their New Skin selves.

I developed an Object Interview with actors from the Mark Taper Forum, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, to apply my methodology to teaching theater to young children. The Object Interview, modeled after what actors do when they take on a role, involves asking a series of questions that interviewers might ask the New Skin Object if they met it on the street. The questions start with the Object's name, where it lives, where it was born, and who its immediate family and distant relatives are. They then move on to the Object's function, what it is good at, scared of, what it dreams about, its social class and economic status—and even what rules and laws govern its existence.

In one 3rd-grade class, eight-year-old Doug Bernstein was a yellow M&M candy, which he remembers to this day. During his Object Interview, he described how happy he was when he was born at the factory and how he had come from a long line of sweets that had made people happy since the beginning of time. Doug said that his relatives ranged from fruit to sugar and that while he loved his M&M family, his favorite thing was to have his owner reach into the bag and choose him. When asked when the M&M would die, Doug put his hands on his head and said, “Oh my god, I was born to die.” He later wrote a skit about the life cycle of an M&M. (Today, Doug is associate medical director for the Emergency Department at Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia.)

Although I stopped using the New Skin activity as the gateway to my methodology, many Design-Based Learning teachers I've trained still keep at it. Some body covers are made instantly; others are detailed and precise. Some teachers have students arrange themselves into families of New Skin Objects to make a Venn diagram of similarities and differences. Some teachers create holiday plays, others have students decide which Objects would be the best leaders, based on their Objects' imagined character traits.

In a class I taught at Cal Poly, Pomona, one teacher chose to be a rubber condom. “I'm not a giant prick,” he told the class. “I think of myself as a protector, caring for the world.” In a Liberal Studies class taught by a History professor I coached, one student presented herself as a chamois cloth. Her husband had chosen that object for her. She said that she was disappointed that he hadn't chosen something more feminine, until he had explained that he thought she was like a chamois cloth because she could be very firm under certain circumstances and soft in others. An engineering major, taking a course in design, made it clear that he felt the New Skin activity was pointless. The day the students were to bring their New Skin selves to class, he was late. He had made himself into a slice of bread covered with peanut butter and jelly, and hadn't been able to get through his front door. He hadn't calculated the dimensions and was forced to dismantle and re-engineer his New Skin in order to bring it to class.

Dan Wishard, an architect in Southern California, was a New Skin student in a 6th-grade class taught by Ruth Hiebert, whom I had trained in my methodology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1972. Dan wrote recently to tell me that he has fond memories of being a hammer one year and a tape dispenser the next: “What an awesome time. I'll never forget it as long as I live,” he wrote. “I have told countless people about it and they are always amazed that something like that existed. Looking back, I am, too. What a great experience for all those involved.”

Dan Wishard in his New Skin hammer as a 6th grader in Saugus, California.