Читать книгу Cultivating Curiosity - Doreen Gehry Nelson - Страница 18

I was convinced that teaching students to become creative thinkers had to be integral to all required subjects. I was looking for a way that my method of Design-Based Learning would enable all students—not just those designated as gifted or artistic—to practice creative thinking. If students were asked to design or invent their own solutions to topics and concepts underlying subject matter, before formally learning that information, self-expression would bloom and they would become adept in transferring what they learned from one setting to another. They would learn that information was theirs to use and reuse. My research and experience with the New Skin activity had underscored the power of the spatial domain for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. Now I needed to find a practical way to realize what I had always imagined as the perfect context for learning: a student-built, student-run City of the Future in the classroom, prominent and versatile enough to accommodate the teaching of any subject.

This was on my mind in April 1969, during a trip to Bourton-on-the-Water, an old-world English village tucked away in the Cotswolds, where I walked through a replica of the village built there in 1937 to a one-ninth scale. All of the elements of a real place could be seen at a glance in a tactile example of the power of miniaturization and contextualization. I wondered if my students could build a small City representing their own community, not as it was, but as it might be. The rough artifacts students would make for their City of the Future would not be an end-all. They would be a way for students to think of themselves as inventors, sparking their interest in related subject matter, and motivating them to learn to reason their way to an understanding of how and why a solution to a question or need came about.

I pioneered this process with my “New Skin” students who continued on with me in the 1969–1970 school year. My Westminster Elementary School principal, Sylvia Coop, gave me the green light to teach the yearlong course of study that I was devising for my master's degree using a city as context to promote Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. I team-taught with 3rd- and 4th-grade teacher Ruth Glatt, an artist, sounding board, partner, and friend, who engaged with me and my combined 5th- and 6th-grade class throughout the process. In essence, the existing wall between our classrooms periodically disappeared as collaboration occurred, and over the school year, with contributions from Ruth and her students, my students designed, built, revised, and ran a roughly to-scale City of the Future that represented their Venice, California, community of Oakwood.

To prepare my students to build what they imagined Oakwood would look like 100 years in the future, I first had them locate their homes and local landmarks on a map. We took a field trip to walk around their community with the map so that they would learn what maps were for and how to notice and read details. Back in the classroom, I projected an enlarged map of Oakwood onto a 5- × 7-foot piece of butcher paper and had students trace it.

Because the map was so large, they became actively interested, wanting to know more about how to read a map, why things were where they were, what a legend was, and how maps were made. This led to in-depth Geography lessons that included looking at USGS maps to identify topography and land formations elsewhere. They noticed that their Venice community on the map was flat because it was near the beach. As they looked at different types of maps, they learned that human beings make maps to represent places not easily viewable at a glance. They wrote stories about their existing community. I had them make up word problems related to time and distances between locations. I was able to teach Math, English, Geography, and Science to every type of learner in the class.

I moved the desks to surround a 5 × 7-foot piece of Styrofoam on the floor, topped with our wall map of the Oakwood community, and had the students determine the boundaries for their City of the Future. They outlined Oakwood's main arteries and landmarks on the Styrofoam to make clear that some of what already existed would probably remain in the future for their reinvented community. I put them into Council District groups to simulate a government and had each District make a plan for how to divide the map up so that each student had his or her own piece of “real estate.” I taught them how to give oral presentations to justify and advocate for their plans and how to use descriptive language in writing about them. In a City meeting, the whole class voted for the best plan. I cut the Styrofoam into pieces to match the students' agreed-upon plan. Over the next few weeks, as I coupled having students experience democratic decision-making with creative thinking, their inventiveness began to flourish and my Backwards Thinking™ process took form.

After selecting individual land parcels and taking them back to their desks, the student designers had to follow the requirements on my Criteria List. The “Don't Wants” and “Needs” on the Criteria List proved invaluable as a guide, telling students the population of futuristic Oakwood and itemizing the basic needs for any City to be considered a City: shelters, places to exchange goods and services, ways to move around, medical and government services, etc. (This list of needs comes from The Image of the City [1960], a seminal work by urban planner, author, and MIT professor Kevin Lynch.)

With the Criteria List as their reference, and my emphasis that their designs not copy what already existed, my students built three-dimensional, very rough models of futuristic houses, power plants, community centers, recreation sites, commercial complexes, and underground and overground ways to move about on their City land parcels. How the finished products looked didn't matter. This was to be a Starter City made of recycled materials that students brought to class, to be revised as they studied and applied related subject matter. Ruth Glatt provided tools and techniques that my students used to craft and revise what they envisioned. (It was because of Ruth's ideas that I learned to open up to creative possibilities in my own teaching.)

The Starter City of the Future posed dilemmas that were deliberate in order for students to learn from their mistakes and understand the reasons they would be asked to make revisions. I wanted them to learn to seek and solve problems and persevere by becoming accustomed to constructing original, three-dimensional artifacts that represented their thinking and revising their designs as they collected new information. I wanted them to stop using already existing paradigms. I was determined to have students' original thinking become second nature and visible to them so that they would know what they knew—again, metacognition—and could reuse what they knew.

After my students built what they felt would be needed in their Starter City on their individual land parcels, I had them put the parcels back together on the floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle to teach them how parts make up a whole. This took practice because they had to look at the wall map and rotate the image in their minds to know where to place their land parcels on the physical three-dimensional land site. We had daily races to see who could get his or her piece where it belonged the fastest. I devised all kinds of activities to ensure that everyone knew where their piece of property and everyone else's belonged.

(Looking at a shape in a specific position on a two-dimensional surface and recognizing it in a rotated position is a skill that IQ tests measure, and sure enough, even though IQs were thought to be immutable at the time, this group of underserved students made significant increases. Some went from 90 to 115 on the Individual Stanford-Binet IQ Test.)

When the Styrofoam land parcels were put together, the new dilemma I had planned appeared: the pieces fit, but because the students had been thinking only of what they wanted to build on their own land parcels, there were obvious problems with their designs. They were surprised when they identified how one road ran into the front door of a neighboring property. A freeway abutted a nursery school. There were too many parks and amusement areas and no facilities for the elderly. Some land parcels were dominated by shopping centers with no street access. Overall, there were too few places for living and learning. I guided them to solve this dilemma by having them, over time, do research, revise their designs, and learn to use a government structure to present and justify their solutions.

As my master's degree study of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning took hold, I began to think of ways for students to apply what they learned from building and running their City of the Future to a variety of topics. To connect to the required curriculum, I taught my students to name the problems they identified in their Starter City and associate them with larger topics.

My students gobbled it up. Even my difficult students and slowest learners came to life, creating solutions to the dilemmas they identified that propelled a sequential “story” set within the students' roughly built City in our classroom, based on what they imagined their Venice community would look like in the future.

Connecting the dots between “backwards thinking” and metacognition, instead of starting with the state-mandated K–12 curriculum requirements and textbooks, I developed a sequence of topics and themes around social, political, economic, and environmental issues and constructed a comprehensive course of study encompassing all subjects. For every topic or theme, I had my students build rough artifacts to express their thinking, enabling me to effortlessly engage them in learning what I was required to teach them. The “story” grew each month as I had students imagine and solve different curriculum-related dilemmas in their City of the Future. Built of found materials and governed by students, the City was a visible, daily reminder of their learning. Throughout the school year of building and role-playing, the City became an evolving container for displaying reusable learning across the curriculum.

The artifacts students built for their City became a springboard for lessons in Math, Science, and Language Arts. Without being conscious that they were being taught, my students excelled in presenting their ideas with conviction as they debated with their peers over which design was best for refining their Starter City of the Future and why. What I had hoped came true: my students stopped asking, “Am I doing it right?” and instead learned to assess the plans they made and carried out.

To have my students begin refining their Starter City, I had them study the topic of Shelter. They compared what they had built to types of housing all over the world, learned to describe their buildings in terms of geometric shapes and to calculate size and volume, and revised their designs according to their research. My next topic was Movement. The students compared their designs for moving around their evolving City of the Future and beyond its borders to what they learned about how people throughout history have moved themselves and their necessities. For the topic of Economics and Trade, they redesigned and rebuilt places to buy and sell goods and exchange services. To study Power Sources, my students designed power-saving utilities. To study Health, they built medical services for the citizens of their City, and to learn more about Government Process, they built places to house government services. They built places to store resources, industrial areas, religious facilities, and even places for burials.

When I gave them Pollution as the topic, the students designed ways to get rid of it and did research projects on different forms of pollution (air, land, water, noise, and visual blight). When they wanted a mountain in their City, I had them justify where the soil would come from in their flat community and do science experiments to learn about soil displacement. When they wanted to “demolish” places in present-day Oakwood, I insisted that they figure out where the debris would go. Pretending that a flashlight was the sun shining on their buildings, they learned about the Earth's rotation. When the topic was Efficiency, I taught them about division of labor.