How Design Can Get Kids On the Path to Tech Careers
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it… And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world… nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.” –Hannah Arendt
Her name comes up in almost any discussion about transforming education: Dr. Stephanie Pace Marshall. Dr. Marshall is the founding president (1986-2007) and president emeritus of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), an internationally renowned, publicly funded residential high school (10th to 12th grade) that emphasizes a curriculum in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
Dr. Marshall’s first mandate in developing the concept for this decidedly new learning experience was: “Let’s not call it a school but rather a ‘center for inquiry and imagination.'” When IMSA’s funding was in jeopardy, Dr. Marshall legendarily brought her students to the Illinois state capitol and set up classes in the rotunda. There they conducted physics and chemistry experiments, spoke Japanese and Russian, staged a scene from a Shakespearean play, and met with legislators. IMSA’s funding agreement was rectified. With STEM education a U.S. priority and increasingly seen as the means to competing with developing giants like China and India, I asked Dr. Marshall about the opportunities and challenges we face in advancing STEM learning.
How can the entanglement of design and education move the unmovable object — i.e. the established, staid institution of education?
I love this question, because it seeks to get at the core of design and its role in helping to co-create an educational system worthy of our children. I would amend it slightly however, to ask: ‘How can design both enter into and perturb a new conversation about education so the system becomes disturbed enough to begin living into their desired future now?’
“Design enables us to redefine who and how we now want to be.”
I am not a credentialed designer, but as a leader I have always been mindful of the power of design to evoke changes in perception, attitudes, experiences, and behaviors by helping to change the relationships, patterns, and shape of the system. For me, designers are storytellers. They speak a patterned and relational language, and they use it to create environments and experiences that change the system’s neural network and the traditional dynamics of who and how we move, think, and behave, within a particular place. Design invites us to navigate a new narrative, to alter the map and landscape we have traditionally traveled, and to be different and belong differently to a place. Design enables us to reclaim spaces and behaviors that may not have been accessible before and redefine who and how we now want to be.
Design enables us to encode our stories and create our maps. It makes our covenants visible, and it illuminates our beliefs and values. And when this happens, when design enables our children’s, teachers’, and system’s inventive genius to flourish, education will change.
Sometimes there are moments in human history that seem to beckon awakenings. They perturb us to reevaluate our beliefs, assumptions, and reigning cultural stories. They challenge us to synthesize and integrate seemingly disparate forms of knowledge into new relationships, new patterns, and new theories. They invite us to invent new language, new rules, and new structures. They call us to create and live into new stories of possibility. The ancient Greeks called this time kairos, the “right moment.” It is a time when reality embraces possibility.
What were the key ideas and goals behind creating a learning community like IMSA?
The idea of a residential secondary institution for students talented in mathematics and science was proposed by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman. This was in the fall of 1983 and his vision was a response to the perceived national crisis in developing STEM talent. But as we know, the crisis persists. The achievement level of U.S. students on internationally benchmarked standardized tests in science and mathematics remain dismal and the needs of our nation’s most talented youth remain unfulfilled. Traditional models for educating academically talented students in STEM (Advance Placement courses) have not been able to nurture our next generation of STEM researchers, innovators, leaders, and inventors.
[Dr. Marshall talks to a student in a science class.]
From inception, IMSA sought not only to develop decidedly different scientific minds, but also to develop a decidedly different residential learning community — one that was nurturing and innovative, and one that instilled a sense of stewardship, and an obligation to give back. As a dynamic teaching and learning laboratory, IMSA continues to evolve, yet the roots of our founding ideas and goals remain. Here’s what they were and still are. The ‘IMSA idea’ means:
1. A collaborative partnership between diverse stakeholders — education, science, research, technology, innovation, business, and government.
2. Serving as a catalyst and laboratory to stimulate excellence in STEM teaching and learning.
3. Multi-dimensional admission criteria for identifying STEM talent and potential beyond a standardized test score.
4. An innovative, advanced and “uniquely challenging” curriculum designed by IMSA faculty that integrates the habits of mind of science and mathematics with those of the arts and humanities. Advanced placement (AP) would not be the content or driver of the curriculum.
5. Personalized learning opportunities both on and off campus for independent study, research and mentorships.
6. Formal interaction with some of the great minds of our time.
7. Developing deep disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise and integrative ways of knowing and experiencing the interdisciplinary nature of science by solving complex multidisciplinary problems.
8. Learning experiences designed using current research on the learning sciences and how we learn.
9. Commitment to treat each student as if he or she is capable of significantly influencing life on the planet.
10. Embodies the following programmatic commitments: distributed expertise with students and teachers serving as co-learners and collaborators; fostering integrative habits of mind; designing competency-driven, inquiry-based, problem-centered, and integrative curriculum; experiential and technology embedded instruction; student-driven inquiry and research; flexible time structures to align with and support curricular and instructional goals and the commitment to share our learning, practices, processes, materials and models with educators and schools in Illinois and beyond.
Why did you feel so strongly about not calling IMSA a “school”?
It was very clear to me that whenever you say the word ‘school,’ it conjures up mental images and models of our experiences and behavior in a place — and accompanying that ‘place model’ is a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions about how that place looked and worked — how we felt in it, what was rewarded, celebrated and expected, and who we were supposed to be as learners in that place. Unfortunately, many of these mental models of how we should learn in school are completely at odds with how real learning happens and how it’s demonstrated in the real world. False proxies for learning often erode our children’s vibrant intellectual and creative potentials because they diminish the excitement of real learning and discovery. Everyone knows that finishing a course and a textbook does not mean achievement. Listening to a lecture does not mean understanding. Getting a high score on a high-stakes standardized test does not mean proficiency. Credentialing does not mean competency. Our children know it, too, yet it persists.
From IMSA’s inception, I knew that if we called IMSA a school, I would spend most of my time explaining what we were not instead of what we were. I would be telling people what we didn’t do rather than what we did do.
Years ago, a wise colleague told me to be careful because what you call it becomes what it is. This was a powerful caveat — calling ourselves an academy and a ‘teaching and learning laboratory for imagination and inquiry’ stimulates questions that enable us to have the conversations we want to have. All transformation begins in language. I did not want IMSA to be confined within a school story because that narrative would have been far too small for our imagination. You simply cannot create new maps from old stories.
Reference Link
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662937/how-design-can-get-kids-on-the-path-to-tech-careers
Courtesy
Mansueto Ventures
[Images courtesy Illinois Math and Science Academy]
Where Few Women Go: A Building Site
Sharon Darling, 24, is a graduate of a program at Nontraditional Employment for Women, a group that prepares women for union jobs in the building trades, and has been an apprentice with Electricians Local 3 for nearly a year. In five years, she will attain the status of mechanic, earning $40 to $50 an hour and the authority to delegate grunt work like hauling 90-pound bales of wire to apprentices like her. She lives in Midwood, Brooklyn.
A start in carpentry: I attended a lot of schools with performing arts programs, and I came across carpentry when I was at P.S. 152. I found out I really loved building sets for the school musicals; I helped build the set for “The Lion King,” and I was in it, too. I went to Sullivan County Community College upstate and got an associate’s degree in construction technology. Then I came back to the city and couldn’t find a job.
The switch to electric: A friend of mine told me her grandmother had gone to the NEW program and become a carpenter, so one day I went to an information session. I took a math and English exam, went through an interview, and got accepted to their program. I thought I would be going for carpentry, but I switched to electric because I loved the math theory that you have to use: math, physics, science, everything. This is the best trade as far as using your brain goes.
Fashion interval: I had to wait a year to take the test to get into the union. You have to wait until a spot opens. The test takes about five hours; it’s really tedious, and those who do pass it, I would call them warriors. I worked at the J. Crew at Rockefeller Center until the union notified me; all that year I was thinking, “I have to get this career; I have to get a job that gives you benefits and all the things you need to survive in this world.”
On the job by 7: I was never a morning person, but when you’re in the union, you have to be at the site by 7 and tardiness is not tolerated. We’re like vampires, up at 4 or 5 in the morning so we can get wherever we need to be. I live in Brooklyn but my job site for the last eight months is at a school that’s being built in Queens; it takes an hour to get there.
The only girl: The first job I was assigned was in Brooklyn. It was at a new school that was pretty much finished, so I was only there three days. The first day was scary. Everybody is looking at you because you’re the only girl. My second job, the one I’m still at, was much better. The foreman got me straight to work at 7, and I felt like, “I can do this.” The fear was gone.
The name thing: Oh, God, they call me “darling” all day long, and they say they can get away with it because it’s my name. As long as they don’t take it no further, I’m O.K. with it. But you keep it moving; you can’t mingle. When you’re on a big job, you’ve got carpenters and roofers and plumbers. There can be a thousand men. And you know the stereotypes men have: They think I should be home having babies, or doing hair or nails, girly stuff. But I’m hanging in here; I’m carrying the same tools. I feel like I’m worth something.
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/nyregion/15entry.html?_r=2&nl=nyregion&emc=ura3
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
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