Over the Wall

The fourth wall of the classroom being both physical and psychological is more difficult to cross than the theatrical one.  The play Sleep No More, an immersive version of Macbeth, blurs the boundary between stage and audience. In the NYT, the director said, “It’s important that the audience feels empowered to break all the rules that they’ve been trained in over their lifetime.” Our Designing Change class shared that goal.

The big community experience of my education was being a school patrol.  I wore the orange belt, held out the orange vinyl flag, and made adults I didn’t know stop their cars. If we really want students to learn agency, that sense of capacity, autonomy, and obligation to act, then they need experiences in the community.  During our semester long design thinking class, I was repeatedly struck by our students’ discomfort engaging with adults and often peers outside their grade or friend group. As much as students loved the activities, conducting empathy interviews and wrangling subjects to test prototypes challenged their comfort zones.  Admittedly, this is dangerous territory for teachers, too.  I was responsible for student actions I couldn’t see or control.  

In our library redesign project presentation, all the students were amazed that the library staff and architects addressed them seriously. They didn’t expect to have agency; they didn’t expect the cars to stop. 

Much of schooling is defining skills. We (or Common Core) decide what is important, teach skills students need, and then assess. Mostly students do a page of problems, or read a novel, or write an essay for a teacher.  More narrowly, we do this within academic disciplines, and are held responsible mostly for grades, test scores, or college admissions.  We all know the tension between the orderly curriculum and the complex, messy world beyond the four walls.  In Designing Change, we tried to teach interdisciplinary 21^st century skills of collaboration, creativity, communication, and problem solving.  My lesson from this class is that students struggle to cross the fourth wall and need new skill sets and real world assessments. But perhaps most importantly, if they are to learn to operate in the messy world, they need to be empowered to break the ingrained and all too comfortable expectations of schooling within the four walls. Our semester class didn’t take down these walls, but it certainly opened doors.  

A couple water metaphors

Charged by LSE architects and the St. Paul Public Library to offer a proposal for the new Highland Park community library teen space, our Designing Change class is diving in to makerspaces, FabLabs, and tech centers using twitter, interviews & site visits. We’ve saturated the studio space with the results of our research.   

We’re also glad to have Stanford Design School consultant Anna Love-Mickelson’s enthusiasm for this final design cycle. Yesterday she taught us how to unpack our site visits and interviews using headline note taking to pull out and preserve information.  Then, we sorted the idea looking for surprises, tensions, contradictions, and insights before creating Point of View statements.   

While there’s a temptation to focus on furniture and technology, the process keeps us focused on emotional qualities.  Here are a couple POV statement observations: 

• It would be GAME CHANGING if we could created a thought provoking teen space where young people feel comfortable taking risks.  
•  It would be GAME CHANGING if we created a versatile space that fosters community within the teen space.

Aiming for a December 11^th presentation to the architects and the library, we’ll ideate and immerse ourselves in prototypes in the next couple weeks. 

The collaborative curriculum

I couldn’t resist telling the Designing Change class students one day that they were taking a class without a curriculum.  If the class wasn’t pass/fail, of course, we wouldn’t have quite this level of comfort.  Yet the design process incorporates skills of collaboration, research, writing and presentation that fit 21^st century skills descriptors better than most. 

When we planned a class using the design thinking model for 9^th and 10^th graders, I pictured several 9^th grade boys in particular who struggled with the expectations of sitting around tables talking about literature.  In the English classroom, I always balance discussion with action such as group work, board work, or interpretive work, but the thinking about texts in discussion, later reflected in writing remains at that heart of most English classes.  Even if we move toward production, the act of reading and interpreting will remain central.  For a particular group of 9^th graders, this will always be challenging. 

So, when we imagined and then created this class that starts with collaborative activities and then moves into interviews, brainstorming and then physical prototyping, I imagined these kids would become the stars.  And at first they were.  Our first activity, the straw and paperclip bridge, got everyone working with their hands and each other to solve a problem.   And while the enthusiasm for this first problem in this novel class was electric, I noted that the students who took the lead in the discussions and in the presentations, were generally the same students who would have done so in regular class projects.  Perhaps, I thought, habits matter more than skills here and different students would surface as we moved into projects.  And when we moved into our first design problem- a physical problem in the school- some different students took the lead, particularly when computer aided design skills were required to use the Sketchup software.  Yet once that phase was done and the prototypes needed testing or iteration, these students drifted to the margins.  And I mean that quite literally.  It seemed that students who liked working with objects or technology have very different skill sets than those who work with ideas or people, and when the tasks became social, these students check out.  In my circuits around the class, I coached some students to face the group, to move closer, to stop drawing or engaging in other distracted/ing activities.  In our debrief, the division between those who preferred working with people those who preferred technology or objects stood out.  Since then, and despite coaching, the challenge remains.   

Much of the design thinking process is collaborative or social.  Students who struggle interacting with others struggle here.  And what stands out most to me, is that these are the same skill sets that make students successful in ‘normal’ school projects.  So while I imagined the design space being one that privileges non-traditional learners, I’ve been reminded that much of traditional learning and design thinking require social skills. 

Better Lucky Than Good

In schools we all negotiate the limits of calendar and class period, except for schools like Riverpoint Academy in Spokane Washington where math is the only pull out class in otherwise full day project based classrooms.  The rest of us struggle to fit the real world into 40, 60 or 80 minute pieces.  Similarly, projects outside of school often don’t match the school calendar.  Our Designing Change class has landed on an amazing design challenge for our local library that’s happening right when we’re ready for it.

After starting with designing for physical problems in the school building like doorstops and lockers, and then redesigning the tutorial period in our new schedule, we were looking for a community based issue for our final project.  We figured local politicians hear about plenty of problems and invited a city and district council members to speak to our class about what they’re hearing from the neighborhood.  They raised some problems, but also reminded us how progressive St. Paul is by focusing on bikeways and the sharable cities project.  While I hope we can come back to the shareable cities idea, Councilmember Tolbert also told us about a local library remodel.  

 A couple calls later, the architects were here presenting their plan for the library and asking us to help them design the new Teen Space for the building.  Our charge- design a 28x34 foot space that brings young people to the library.  We launched a design cycle today asking, ‘What do we need to know?’ Students will start research this weekend. 

Last thoughts

 Flowers are always appropriate, but on my last night finding a set of four flower stands like this felt particularly so.  The wreathes of marigolds and white flowers are for honoring the gods, and people put them on statues or small sculptures.  They also put incense sticks and pictures in these shrines.  They're scattered everywhere and remind me of fairy houses somehow.  

I wandered some in new neighborhoods tonight- from Hindustan Park to Khalighat 

It felt like goodbye, and I was struck by the low key density.  In the past couple days, I've been less tolerant of the honking, of the aggressive motorcyclists, of the guys sidling up next to me to try and chat me up before making the pitch for their shop (this never happens in real neighborhoods- only in this one by the hotel).  I've stared down some cars that expected me to jump out of the way despite the basic assumption that anyone who has a vehicle has priority over anyone walking. It's a sign of my transition back home, clearly.  But I also admired the tiny stalls of people selling rice, tea, chai, or offering tailoring, grain milling, or cell phone repair. 

I also came across this street where all the typists offer their services under a ubiquitous blue tarp.  I recall an office like this in Marrakesh where the illiterate could get letters typed or forms filled out.  In a legalistic, bureaucratic place like India, this must be an essential service for many.  Yet juxtaposed to a large population w/ smart phones, the contrast feels jarring. Still, most of them had customers tonight. 

Goodbyes

Warning- cute kids here.  These are my two 6th grade sections on our final day.  While the goodbyes were heartfelt ones all around, twelve year olds really feel things like that close to the surface.  In one class I finished reading The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell, a story I'd started a while ago.  In the other we wrote haikus- a form that makes students at home roll their eyes, but the exercise of counting syllables and making meaning in 17 of them was a novel challenge here.  Of course, there are some universals.  One boy wanted to write one about an AK47.  I said, "A poem about a machine gun?" and he didn't understand my dismay.  I reminded him that the name alone was 6 syllables thinking that might end it.  He solved the problem by writing about an AK46.  I received many sweet hand made cards, pictures, and little gifts.  All of noted that such appreciation never happens at home, although I think I recall Pape Diop, another Fulbright teacher, got the high school version of such appreciation when he left SPA and returned to Senegal.  

As usual and apt, I'm ready to come home after these five weeks.  First, it will be very nice to see family and friends again.  I'm also pretty excited to escape the humidity here.  If there was any hint of exoticism associated with monsoon season, it's certainly lost on me.  Constant sweating is straight up unpleasant. Bring on the 50 degree mornings.  I'll gladly exchange the cappucino delivered to my room for a regular coffee on the porch. 

New Light

 New Light-

The Kalighat neighborhood’s infamous red light district looked pretty benign in the afternoon as two groups of boys staged a kite battle in the main roadway.  Then we turned down a narrow concrete path with small open two room dwellings.  One had a person sitting cross legged watching a tv. Another seems to serve as a diner.  A goat stood outside another.

At the end of the corridor, the second floor of a former temple serves as office, cafeteria, school, and dwelling for nearly 100 children.  New Light was started by Urmi Basu who left the foundation world because the work felt empty (and as I later found out chose to leaver her husband, too, when given an ultimatum to choose him or her work). The organization serves sex workers, trafficked women, and their children providing shelter, food, education, and health services.  

Given write ups in the NYT, in Kristof’s Half the Sky, and recognition through various humanitarian awards, I expected more by way of  facilities. But that’s a common feeling here.  First we watched a dozen older girls do yoga on mats. Afterwards all of the 80-100 children lined up in rows for attendance and then meditation.  Seated on the floor in tight formation, they all closed their eyes and assumed a basic lotus position. The smallest ones were terribly cute trying to stay awake nodding perilously before quickly recovering.  

Afterwards we tutored them, after a fashion.  The first night I started writing letters and words and pictures that they would copy, then we moved to tic-tac-toe.  One girl beat me regularly, and not just because she cheated by ‘casually’ covering up her marks with a finger. These sweetpeas just loved the attention, as seems fitting for kids sleeping communally on the floor of a shelter without parents.  Their mothers may visit them sometimes, but largely this feels like something between foster care and orphanage. Tonight I worked with older students on their English homework from school today.  The levels vary widely, so I circled around working with small groups. One girl showed me her workbook with all the answers completed correctly, but as I was halfway through it, her friend ratted her out pointing out a cheat book with the answers in Bengali.  I teased her about being a cheater, a word she understood immediately, and made a joke about it.

While this place is far from the fancy school I visited this morning, the appreciation I felt there tonight seemed much more real. While working with them, it feels like any other teaching moment.  Sweet kids struggling with both material and motivation, working in part to please me as teacher.  It makes Mitra’s School in the Cloud seem a distant second choice.  I certainly sensed they preferred having me there over a computer screen, but maybe I flatter myself. I will be going back a few more nights before I leave.