Tinkering in the Humanities

A plasma-cutter-wielding English teacher should be a common sight at all schools in the future. I have spent the last few weeks engaged in a thinking (and visiting) odyssey that has demanded that I consider how tinkering and maker science can be applied to the Humanities. And while I certainly don’t have the answer, the process of discovery sure has been fun.

Yesterday’s episode starred a visit to The Crucible and class in MIG welding and plasma cutting. After what seemed like an extraordinarily brief instruction period on both spark and flame producing tools, our instructor set us lose to build a box. I was terrified. My mind raced to the number of injuries I could sustain through my own ignorance and I was nearly paralyzed. Finally I realized I had a reputation to protect with my colleagues and the spirit of my father (my tinkering mentor) to honor and off I went to the plasma cutter. All photos of my first crack at this include a ridiculous grin plastered across my face. I was in love. But there was still the MIG welding to tackle and those welder’s mask sure made things dark and hard to see. By the end of the two hours, I was pumped up. Proud of my pathetic looking box, proud of myself for accomplishing such a task and tackling my fear and convinced that my going through that experience was vital to me as a teacher realizing that my students may feel like this everyday and wondering how I can help them take that step off the ledge.

Our visits took us to Benicia where a terrific teacher named Nicci Nunes had created a 21^st Technology class for her students who were in a continuation program. Looking for ways to connect to her at-risk students, she quickly realized the importance of creating opportunities for small successes early for her students. Whether it was a spooky ghost or spider with simple LEDs, she saw that this built persistence in her students who had no reason to trust themselves or the world around them. She also modeled that persistence for her students when she created a maker space from Donors Choose and grant writing, acquiring everything from a 3-D printer to circuit kits. Beyond my admiration for Nicci’s own persistence, there was an important lesson to learn. While her students fear risk, much like I did, our students do as well. Where her students had poverty and a myriad of other problems to overcome, we have pummeled our students with expectations from the minute they start schooling. There is no comparison between the challenges that these students and our students face, but I think the results may be similar. How many of our students have convinced themselves that they simply cannot do something? How many of our students no longer want to try? How many of our students feel that they cannot live up to the demands of the adults around them? I need to find what those early successes look like in my English classroom. What barriers can I reduce to enable those tiny successes and build persistence for my students?

Our next stop, the Nueva School, builds this tinkering mindset throughout their school using the Design Thinking model. By implementing this beginning in first grade, their students arrive in high school fearless, realizing that iteration, prototyping and feedback are implicit in learning with a heightened sense of empathy and the spirit of a designer.

So how do you begin this plan when you don’t have the luxury of first graders at your school working through the Design Thinking process to help ease the pains and increase the gains of their classmate with a broken leg? Our visit to the Stanford D.School continued my belief that part of it is truly about space. We need to create a space that fosters collaboration and urges students to write, draw, think. At the D School, all of the furniture and white boards are on rollers and there are diagrams in each space on how to “reset” when students are finished. The acknowledgement that each group will work differently and the empowerment of manipulating their own space are positive steps towards an independent, innovative thinking mindset. The next step and most challenging is the scaffolding of the behavior and expectations. Building failure and prototyping into the thinking of students who just desperately want to finish a task so they can cross it off their list and move on to the next one on their ever-burgeoning to-do list must be a cross-disciplinary effort. As Nicci Nunes said, “We need to change the rules of school.” 

Visiting the OEDK at Rice showed me what was possible as their students were prototyping products that were helping infants with sleep apnea and were adopted by USAID. But we need to start that thinking now so that when our students add an increasingly complex skill set and knowledge base they can hit the ground designing.

I want my students to have that euphoria and sense of accomplishment I felt yesterday when I handled fire and cut through metal. And while I think I am close to that experience with my students in our Global Action Project, I know I have not quite cracked the code on how to implement this in my more traditional 10^th grade English. Time for more tinkering.