Specialized Education Services Professor Claudia Pagliaro supervises a team building activity as part of her Making MY Space project.
In education, we’re used to structure. Give us the criteria, the learning outcomes,
the rubric, the lesson plan, the syllabus.
But sometimes the best ideas come to us when we’re free of structure,
when the guidelines are open and the options are endless. When the School of Education (SOE) asked its faculty
to submit proposals for fellowship projects to use the new Student Educator
Learning Factory (SELF) Design Studio, a makerspace in the Michel Family Teaching Resource
Center, the requirements were pretty basic.
“When the opportunity for the makerspace projects came up,
the sky was sort of the limit,” says Specialized Education Services (SES) professor
Stephanie Kurtts. “I think that was the best thing they could have done,” she
says.
Project ENRICH, a teacher reform grant, funded the creation
of the SELF Design Studio in the SOE, as well as funding these faculty
fellowships to develop projects that encourage teacher candidates to integrate
technology, creativity, entrepreneurial learning, and innovation into their
teaching and assignments. Despite a
quick turn-around, SOE faculty submitted more than a dozen proposals for the
fellowships, of which five were funded for the 2014-2015 school year.
“We wanted to seed some projects that would help the space
become a functional living space that supports the development of high-quality
teachers,” explains Project ENRICH Director Christina O’Connor.
These fellowship projects included cross-departmental and
cross-program collaboration among School of Education faculty, students, and
staff, and the variety of selected projects demonstrates the potential of a
makerspace like the SELF Design Studio to encourage creative thinking and new
ideas. A makerspace is an open space or
lab often created in schools and libraries to encourage creativity,
problem-solving, and tinkering through projects that use both high-tech and low-tech
tools and materials, from 3D printers and robotics to traditional arts and
crafts.
The Family WORKS!
Project
Kurtts describes sitting around the dinner table with her
family talking about the proposals and brainstorming ideas. “I have not a creative bone in my body, but my
younger son is a graphic designer, and his wife is an interior architect,” she
says. Kurtts’ son and daughter-in-law
have a variety of creative and entrepreneurial endeavors, including work with
textiles and prints, in an online Etsy shop as well as in a booth in Design
Archives on Elm Street in downtown Greensboro.
From the inspiration of her family sitting around the dinner
table, Kurtts and her SES colleagues Nicole Dobbins and Teresa Little came up
with the Family WORKS! Project, in which 15 students from Northeast Middle
School in Guilford County and their parents or guardians design and develop a
product in the SELF Design Studio that they can sell in an online store or
local shop.
“We really want to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in
these young people,” Kurtts says.
Each pair of kids and parents/guardians will get $250 to
spend on supplies to create their products, and they will work on them
throughout the year in the SELF Design Studio.
The project includes a community coordinator and a community advisory
board that includes teachers, parents, and local leaders who are experts in
marketing, design, and entrepreneurship. Each pair of students and parents will
present their ideas to the board and get suggestions and feedback on their
product. Kurtts hopes that the project will benefit the students in various
ways, including getting them on a college campus on a regular basis.
“It’s beyond just the projects,” Kurtts says. “It’s: ‘I can make a contribution—I can make
a contribution to my family, [and] I can be a productive citizen,” she says.
Additionally, Dobbins and Little will conduct two
professional development workshops at Northeast Middle School to instruct 15
teachers in universal design for learning and how innovative learning and
creativity can fit within the curriculum, further expanding creativity in the
community.
Making MY Space: Building
3D Model “Deaf-Friendly” Homes
In
the School of Education’s Professions in Deafness (PID) program in the
SES department, a group of middle school and high school students from
Kiser Middle
School and Grimsley High School will visit the SELF Design Studio for a
series
of sessions to work on a creative project.
Fifteen deaf and hard-of-hearing students will come to the SOE this
school year to build 3D models of deaf-friendly homes. Typically, students who are deaf/hard-of-hearing
in grades 6-11 in Guilford County Schools must create a blueprint of their
future home within a prescribed budget.
However, the PID program has expanded this project to
create a unique hands-on learning experience for the students in the SELF
Design Studio by having them create their models in 3D using a variety of
supplies and methods. A big part of
designing these 3D homes is understanding what could make a home more
deaf-friendly, such as open floor plans, well-lit spaces, sensors that activate
light flashers for typically sound-based alarms and signals, and video phones.
“Most of (the students) come from homes where there are
hearing parents, so they might not know that these technologies exist, or where
to go to get them,” says PID professor Claudia Pagliaro. “So we wanted them to think outside the box,
but also learn what’s happening now,” she says.
PID professor Joseph Hill, whose linguistics class is
creating a bilingual English/ASL visual dictionary for the middle & high
school students that focuses on the specialized language they will be using for
design and construction, emphasizes that thinking about how to build deaf-friendly
homes can help the students have more independence.
“For me, I grew up with deaf people in my family—my mother’s
hard of hearing, my brother and sister are deaf, so they already knew what they
had [and] what they needed for the house,” Hill says, “So I could live
independently.” But with many of his deaf
friends with hearing parents, the parents “kind of took care of the kids
instead of letting them figure it out for themselves,” he says.
The contributors also hope that the project will promote
deaf advocacy and a better understanding of working with deaf and
hard-of-hearing students.
“Deafness is such a low-incidence kind of disability that
people only really see the signing, the language, and not really [that] they’re
students, they’re kids,” says Joane Mapas, a teacher for the deaf at Kiser and
a PID graduate. “I always say to my deaf
students ‘Don’t give me the deaf card,” Mapas says, “because you can.” “You can
read, too, just like the hearing kids,” she says. “I don’t want the excuses, and they all know
that.”
“These are the kids that we work really hard for,” Pagliaro
says. And now, through this project, SOE
students will get to work together in the SELF Design Studio to support the middle
and high school students. In fact, the
cross-curriculum project will include all three programs within PID: the deaf
education teacher preparation program, the interpreter training program, and
the deaf advocacy program. More than 25 pre-service students will support the
project, as well as SOE faculty and staff members Lynne Allen, Mary V. Compton,
Sam Parker, Karen DeNaples, and Glenda Torres, and Grimsley High School Teacher
Kristen Hoover, in addition to those already mentioned, making it a truly
collaborative experience.
Teacher-librarian
partnerships in a Makerspace
In a cross-departmental faculty fellowship project, Library
and Information Studies (LIS) professors Linda Gann, Nora Bird, and Fatih Oguz
are working with Teacher Education and Higher Education (TEHE) professor Edna
Tan to focus on teacher-librarian collaborations in a makerspace. In the first phase of their project over the
summer, they brought in 6 pairs of classroom teachers and school librarians
from a variety of grade levels and subjects to collaborate on projects and
develop lesson plans utilizing the SELF Design Studio.
When Gann, Oguz, and Tan introduced makerspaces to the
teachers and librarians they worked with this summer, they made sure to
emphasize that it was not a new concept.
“Makerspaces are nothing new, they are as old as dirt,” says LIS
professor Linda Gann. “We have had
‘makerspaces’ in libraries, both public and school libraries, since the late
1800s,” she says. The first “makerspace”
was a knitting club at a public library in Boston, and in the 1920s, John
Dewey, the founder of the progressive education movement, referred to a school
library as a “learning laboratory.”
“’Learning laboratory’ suggests you go there to create,”
Gann says. “You research, you create, and you share,” she says. “Over time,
it’s just that the tools have changed.”
The fact that makerspaces often feature technology can cause
anxiety to new users. So, they chose to
inform the group on the history of makerspaces as well as its flexibility as
far as materials, technology, and subject matter.
“They were initially quite intimidated with the notion of
all this technology,” Gann says, “but we ended up having a wonderful project
that showed force in motion using cardboard, pencils, and rubber bands to
create and build a car.”
“The goal of our project is to get these teacher and school
librarian partners to create lessons based on the standards, like the common
core,” Gann says. “You initially think
with makerspaces that it’s all science, but it’s not, you can do the makerspace
in any kind of subject area,” she says.
The faculty fellows also plan to build a digital repository
for makerspace lesson plans based on several sets of standards: the common
core, the American Association of School Libraries, and the next generation
science standards. The repository will
be categorized and searchable by grade level and subject.
“Replication is important,” Oguz says. “There’s a cool
factor attached to [makerspaces], but not necessarily as much of a structure,”
Oguz says. “So we tried to add those
[structures], and we tried to align them with the standards,” he says.
And ultimately, they made sure that the teachers and
librarians understood that the SELF Design Studio is a space for exploration
and learning new things.
“They (the teachers and librarians) don’t have to know how
to do all this stuff, they just have to provide the materials,” Gann says. “It’s
a matter of providing the resources and the environment, and then stepping back
and being there as a resource,” she says.
Inventing to Learn
and Serious Game Development
Two more groups of faculty are working on fellowship
projects this school year to complement the new SELF Design Studio. TEHE professors Heidi Carlone, Bev Faircloth,
and Edna Tan developed a project called “Inventing to Learn” that focuses on
tinkering and engineering through several ongoing collaborations, including
Carlone’s “Engineering is Elementary” project; a Makerspace partnership between
teacher-education faculty, pre-service teachers, and practicing teachers and
their students in the elementary and middle grades science methods curriculum;
and Faircloth’s and Tan’s Glenhaven Science Club for refugee youth.
Additionally, Counseling and Educational Development (CED)
Professors Scott Young and Carrie Wachter Morris are developing a project to
examine and develop serious games as learning tools. By integrating the SELF Design Studio into a
CED course and by providing games not just for entertainment but also to
support therapeutic goals, they hope to illuminate how games can help us grow
and develop as human beings.
Through all of the faculty fellowships, a talent for collaboration
and creativity has emerged, cementing the role of the new SELF Design Studio as
a community space for exploration and innovation. So far it’s been a fast year of planning and
developing the fellowship projects, and yet that quick pace has only served to
energize our faculty, staff, and students as we build and create this new
resource and space.
“We’re building the plane as we fly it, but you never get to
do that in education,” Kurtts says. “I
think overall, it’s just created an excitement that I haven’t felt in several
years.”
