Edith Ackerman prepares to answer a question after her Fablearn 2016 keynote, October 16th, 2016. That’s my grey, balding head in the lower-left center foreground.

She sat, alone, at the table in front of the auditorium, fielding questions after her mesmerizing keynote at Fablearn 2016.

An audience member pondered:

“I’m interested in the nexus of purpose and play, as someone who works with numerous students, I think the idea of getting people to make and be creative is critically important to getting them involved … but at some point … what’s the purpose, not so much as the need to follow a curricular standard, but, are they being altruistic … is there a broader purpose other than making a keychain and feeling good about that? What is the balance between just being creative and and also ensuring that our students and whoever we’re working with have a greater purpose in mind?”

To which I added:

“I think the greater purpose is to make design the focus – human centered design – so they are not just making a ‘widget,’ they’re making something that matters to someone.”

Image: Fablearn

That’s when it happened. Edith looked right at me, and without a moment’s hesitation, began to deliver what some said amounted to an entire graduate program’s worth of education theory in a nine minute response.

To process it all, I have attempted to transcribe the bulk of her remarks (and, as a result, now have tremendous respect for people who do transcription for a living.) The complete video can be found here; her response starts the 54 minute mark and ends at about 1:03.

So, here’s Edith’s response:

This is an important point, I think that there has been a big shift in view … if I look at the history of active learning or constructivist approaches to learning … the important shift I think came with scholars and practitioners that suddenly realized the very notion of constructing new knowledge is about a process of abstraction, from concrete to abstract, and the process of decontextualizing … it’s like how to move from ‘here and now’ to more generalizable ideas.

So, the essence of making, effectively … the process of abstraction … making ideas into knowledge. She continues:

And, to a certain extent, certain constructivists like the sort of Jean Piaget, the older generation, or Vygotsky, they still had this idea that cognitive development – superior ways of thinking – are ways of thinking that actually enable you to sort of ‘disentangle’ from context and to allow you to interject or internalize your experience and draw lessons from it. The big reversal I see coming, I saw it myself in the 1980s, when most people who were interested in design, I think of Seymour Papert, I think of Donald, who wrote The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön, all of a sudden people started realizing, wait a minute, there has not been enough focus paid on the opposite of reflective abstraction, which is intelligent form-making. It’s the process of externalization or projecting out project-added (?) design, in order to precisely turn ideas into some tangible artifacts that can then be taken and as shared ground for conversation around.

I love the word ‘disentangle’ – it sounds like the learning in my lab – a discrete, personalized experience where kids interact with tools and technologies as they ponder, experiment and create.

I think it’s from the moment on when people start paying more attention to that process, that’s a huge change, and Seymour Papert played an important role in that. Because, what he said is that ‘we have to put this Piaget on his head,’ and what he said is even more interesting, because Piaget was so obsessed with the genesis of becoming a formal thinker, that his contribution to the world, was to actually help us understand that sensori-motor grounding, and concrete operational grounding, is required to teach these formal ways of thinking.

All new concepts to me…

Now there has been a lot of water going down the river since then, we have had the whole tradition of more situated approaches to learning, of more embodied approaches of enactment series of learning, and what they have in common is exactly what you say, is that, the idea is projecting out is as important as introjecting. To my pleasure, because Jean Piaget was my master, he already had this insight. Because, the way he said it, if you want anybody to construct cognitive invariance, what was this more abstract that you pull out of these situations, offer variation in the context.

“Projecting out” – meaning, making things that matter to others. Yes!

This is very close to the idea of Marvin Minsky, is that to understand something, you have to understand it in at least three different ways. And the whole work that he did for example on the way to help children understand concepts such as numbers, it’s not just to make it concrete, like, you know, now the fraction becomes a pie, but it’s precisely to look at different aspects of numbers, of numerosity, that actually experts – mathematicians – have come up with like ordinal aspects of numbers, cardinal aspects of numbers, inclusive aspects of numbers … and then you give concrete situations, in which those different aspects  of numerosity are manifested, and you let the children play around with them, and when they are ready to make the connections between these different aspects, the conservation of numbers, then you have actually allowed them to be more abstract or be cognitively invariant by offering variation, and this seems a little bit of a paradoxical idea, but it’s absolutely key I think.

Learning things in one way through play, which then results in learning it in different ways. Whoa. Did I get that right?

And actually there was another shift, I noticed it at the school of architecture, because I work a lot with architects, and designers, is the second shift came like five years ago, everybody was talking about learning as design, designs for learning, and it was Don Schön, and design was still considered project direct, we had to have prototypes, rapid prototyping became important, this whole notion of co-creation of artifacts, then all of a sudden everyone talks about fabrication, and that’s another important shift. I think this shift has to do, and I said it yesterday, with the fact that this very cycle of projectari (sp?) and building prototypes, and then sort of manufacturing, is getting accelerated and broken down because in a way what happens is that no more prototyping is needed, almost, with the technologies that allow you for a single project or idea, to create a single product. That completely changes, again, the ways in which people think about the role of these intermedial objects (I like to call them intermedial objects and not models) in actually trying to sort of evolve your design or sharpen your ideas.

The power of prototypes as a pathway to fabrication, of course, until the prototyping tools become so sophisticated that prototyping itself becomes ‘instant manufacturing’. A vision of our possible future, playing out before us as we speak. Talk about a visionary.

I didn’t know when I met Edith at Fablearn that it would be the last and only time I’d ever get to see her. She passed away just a few days ago – December 24th, 2016 – at age 70. I’m glad that I got to personally thank her after her talk (and our exchange) at Fablearn. I look forward to learning more from her as my own career, and program, evolves.

-kj-

“Play is children’s most serious work.” Edith Ackermann

In Loving Memory and Respect

The design team of EPIC Middle School dreamt big.  We evoked as many education buzzwords as we could think of and are still working hard to try to make them work together: game-based learning, the hero’s journey, making/”fablabing”, engineering, design, and personalized learning.  The design team all thought these went well together, and still do, but there are a lot of moving parts.  To show you what we had in our heads please allow me to take you on a short trip back to Oakland in the 60’s.

At Epic we do week long QUESTS, a.k.a. LARPS (live action role plays), at the end of 1st and 3rd trimesters.  We decided to call them QUESTS instead of LARPS to reflect our foundation in the hero’s journey. The first quest is called Oakland in the 60’s where students, a couple of weeks ago, made posters and chants that reflected the tools of the time. I wanted so bad to have a conversation with Edith about how we could make this experience for students and teachers (especially in the planning – its so intensive for teachers).

Oakland in the 60’s is a measuring stick for resistance movements against social injustice in the real world.  This year, we took students back to the 1968 elections between the Republican, Democrat, American Independent, and Peace and Freedom parties.  Each grade had a role:  6th grade were the non-committed class of voters who had to learn the issues to vote; 7th graders represented a political issue through the lens of one of the four political parties; the 8th graders represented the political parties and politicians in town hall debates in 6th and 7th grade classrooms.

In the Makerspace students came in to explore and re-enact different ways to make a protest.

Day 1 was all about the protest march.  Students broke into 2 committees: safe and responsible. The safety committee made sure to stay in formation throughout the whole march so that the protesters inside were safe from traffic while lead to the Tide Canal.  At the Tide Canal they lead investigations on the health of the water and did trash counts.  The responsible committee did some research on and re-write some chants regarding the issue they chose to focus on as a class.  One class focused on police brutality, another on Saving the Bay efforts, another on stopping the draft, but most wanted to protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Students marched from my classroom all the way to the Tide Canal with the protest posters they made and chants they re-wrote.  The class protesting against police brutality chanted all the way through a group of 5 police officers by Guadalajara restaurant: “No justice, no peace until the cops are off our streets.”  Some students debated whether they should continue the chant on the side and then joined in concluding that it the killings of unarmed men of color have to stop.

Day 2 was all about the sit-in.  Students had to decide tactically where in the Oakland in the 60’s EPIC world would be more impactful to have a sit-in.  Some decided the country club was a symbol of segregation since it segregated have’s from have-not’s. Others decided the police station headquarters was the best place to stage a sit in because they were against police brutality and the unfair profiling happening in the hallways.

These activities don’t normally have to do with making in the sense that they didn’t use paper cutters or laser cutters to make their posters.  However, as a Maker Educator I feel that there is constantly a step missing in my instruction to set the stage so to speak.  The Exploratorium’s online course Tinkering 101 goes over many ideas around facilitation, environment and activity design in order to ensure students are as engaged as possible.  They reminded me that some of those activities are going to require a lot more behind the scenes prep for me to be able to sit back and facilitate later and some activities will be more ready-to-tinker (if I may use a fashion term).  

My journey in this fellowship has to do with how to more effectively do that behind the scenes work as well as how to keep doing that around activities that lead students to develop skills they’ll need not to design things but to be co-creators and designers of every aspect of their world.  What do you think?  Is this too much of a stretch?  Is this not Maker Education anymore?

8^th graders who have been taking engineering classes at Kepler Tech Lab surprised me when I came prepared to give them all I had, but kids completely changed learning outcomes I was hoping for them. I still wonder why I am using the doughs in any context; they are good and helped me define how much kids can be creative. When I wanted kids in my lab to explore more about electronics projects, I told them we are going to bake doughs and use them in our projects. They were all surprised and shouting that they are going to consume doughs but it was not the case because they konw they do not have to eat and drink from the lab for safety purpose. To be succinct, the projects were about Squishy Circuits using doughs.

What is Squishy Circuit?

“Squishy Circuits uses conductive and insulating play dough to teach the basics of electrical circuits in a fun, hands-on way.” (squishycircuits.com).

Without losing my control describing how our engineering classes are structured, kids work in pairs and they switch teams after two weeks to experience working with diverse groups of fellow students. Since we are preparing them a physical computing curriculum, kids are being trained on how to use computers, performing some typing exercises, and compete for one another playing around with typing games to e familiar with computer keyboard and its Graphics User Interface.

Back to the Squishy Circuits! With Squishy Circuits, I was expecting kids to make resistors and capacitors, which they did, but they ended up making funny things I never thought about. Firstly, they made two different doughs, one conductive and another one insulating with the help of guides adapted from https://squishycircuits.com. The conductive dough was the one which is resistive. After making the conductive dough, it is easy to make resistor out of it. You can simply take a portion of it and use it in a circuit as an actual resistor. Afterwards, kids used an insulating dough as a spacer between two pieces of conductive dough in order to make a capacitor. It worked, but the insulating dough seemed to be conductive, and that was not expected in our experiment, need to explore more.

What happened next!

All nine teams (two kids each team) have completed the first challenge of making resistor and capacitor out of doughs while experimenting with Squishy Circuits. Kids have used Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs and buzzers as loads in their experiments.  I was so happy to see their faces smiling and they were pledging that they can do things with doughs they made. My reactions were “sure, the floor is yours, let’s do it!! We shall have an exhibition session to see what each team is going to make.” They started testing out some sort of different things and I was murmuring “what crazy are these kids?” Yes, they were mad explorers, innovators, and tinkerers; see what some of what they’ve just made.

As they were promised to have exhibition in order to show the whole class what they have made, all teams have been asked to bring their creations on one table. Each team got excited about their creation and they inspired me as well.

Lesson learned from this activity: give students the freedom to do anything and keep the time as you assist them throughout designed activities.