This is the second of a series of posts documenting the progression of a collaborative project at the South End Technology Center @ Tent City supported by the Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean’s Equity Project. The goal is to create a safe and creative space for high school and college youth to explore their… Read more »
Author: Susan Klimczak
South End Technology Center @ Tent City,
United States -
I am the education organizer of Boston's Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program, passionate about engaging our youth in the creative possibilities of engineering and technology. Every day I witness the genius of our teenage youth as teachers, makers, and catalyzers of cultural change in our communities. I also love my bicycle and baking pies.
An interesting article on “Culturally responsive computing: a theory revisited”
Among the FabLearn Fellows and at the Fab Learn Conference this past October, there has been a focus on thinking about how to put youth of color, young women and youth living in families with low incomes at the center of the maker education movement. As part of my own research for a current project… Read more »
Toward Making Change: Beyond #BlackLivesMatter (One: Introduction)
This is the first of a series of posts documenting the progression of a collaborative project at the South End Technology Center @ Tent City supported by the Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean’s Equity Project. The goal is to create a safe and creative space for high school and college youth to explore their… Read more »
The church says “Amen”! : Leah Buechley rocks as she works to decenter “Making”
Leah Buechley rocks and I have been impressed and moved by her since we met. When she was working and researching at the MIT Media Lab High Low Technology Group, Leah also had a tremendous impact on Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn. She and her graduate students had a deep understanding for the… Read more »
Dr. Nettrice Gaskins: Recontextualizing the Makerspace & Culturally Responsive Education
At the Fab Learn Conference last weekend, I was struck that Paulo Blickstein set the tone by making a strong argument for maker education to focus on inclusion and equity even suggesting the importance of giving “an unfair advantage to low income youth.” Here in Boston I am part of the work of the Race,… Read more »
Creating opportunities for youth to transform their relationship with failure
A “What I am reading and thinking about” post! Having a positive and playful relationship to failure is an important ingredient in making! I have some very amusing video footage of our youth discussing the process of creating a perfect pressfit cube, advising each other that it takes at least 20 failures to really understand… Read more »
Everything “fab” we do & teach should have “uniqueness, impact and magic”!
This evening I was reading this article by MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito & feeling a “kindred spirit” tingle. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140930004656-1391-antidisciplinary I feel as though the goal he sets forth for education activities to have “uniqueness, impact and magic” is a great one for all the special making spaces we are creating. Our makerspaces should be such… Read more »
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”
I always struggle with devising effective groundrules for our making learning communities. There are obvious safety rules, but the “how to make and be with others in the makerspace” guidelines are tougher Each year, we have the youth devise their own “We the People” set of expectations which we put on a big poster and… Read more »
Teach the Whole Family to Code: MIT Media Lab Family Creative Learning Guide
In my diverse and mostly low income urban community, parents of our youth teachers are sometimes fearful about having their children engage with technology. This is because often the only technologies that they are familiar with are ones that they associate with risks and danger for their children: facebook, video games, texting and the like…. Read more »
Mitch Resnick: Different Approaches to Education
I really enjoyed this youtube video by Mitch Resnick and especially how it applies to our reading of Mindstorms by Seymour Papert.