Category Archives: Innovative Learning Environments

Facing History Together

Teachers, here’s a powerful opportunity to engage your students in a shared mission of creating a better future with human flourishing for all. Face the Future: A game for social change.

Set in the year 2026, the game imagines the future of empathy and social change. It explores how new technologies may make it possible for us to *literally* feel each others’ feelings as if they were our own. If you are a middle-years or high school teacher, please sign up for more information and please SHARE THIS WITH YOUR NETWORK! The online game will take place November 13–14, 2016.

Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 11.01.05 AM

MAKE

MAKE_2016title

As Solnit (2013) shares in in The Faraway Nearby, “to become a maker is to make the world for others, not only the material world but the world of ideas that rules over the material world, the dreams we dream and inhabit together.”

What are you making? What are you sharing? What’s your story?

MAKE is a collection of creative and intellectual works (artifacts, stories, poetry, photography, ethnodrama, and research) by a team of teachers engaged in the art of making meaning together. We welcome you to join us in our journey, “let us take what we have learned from our courses and from each other and fly on eagles’ wings to (s)p(l)aces beyond our imagination” (Stuart, 2016).

Download MAKE from iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1093003369

Authors: EDCP 508 Collective
Editor: Paula MacDowell
Publication Date: March 13, 2016
Format: Interactive, multi-touch eBook

A place for wonder, creativity & discovery

Ipad

“The child starting school this year will graduate in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a world that will have challenges and opportunities beyond what we can imagine today, with possibilities and problems that will demand creativity, ingenuity, responsibility, and compassion. Whether this year’s student will merely survive or positively thrive in the decades to come depends in large measure on the experiences he has in school”

OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture, & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher: 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning. New York, NY: Abrams Books.

Kids speak out on student engagement in Edutopia (2015): “I think having freedom in assignments, project directions, and more choices would engage students. More variety = more space for creativity.”

To what extent do students need/deserve:
1. Freedom
2. Choice
3. Variety
4. Creativity
5. Engagement

Lessons in creativity from Star Wars

“It’s easy to look at Star Wars: The Force Awakens and assume that the creative team had some kind of crazy competitive advantage in coming up with ideas. After all, it’s the latest edition of the world’s most popular movie series that sets the standards for special effects. Maybe they got a head start down the road of Good Ideas? Perhaps, they used The Force?” Matt McCue

Star Wars: The Force Awakens has completed principal photography. ..#TheForceAwakens #StarWarsVII

Lessons in creativity from The Little Prince

sea

The big lesson of The Little Prince: (Re)capture the creativity of childhood

LP-1 LP-2 LP-3

LP-sheepLP-box

Why do makerspaces matter?

CYCInrOUwAAG-7-

Fleming, L. (2015). Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace for Your School. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

The maker education movement

All children deserve opportunities to be the creators of the technologies that create our world, as well as to take part in changing who controls, leads, and owns our future.

Screen Shot 2016-01-15 at 9.50.56 PM

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” Paulo Freire

Drawing-DG-and-Mitch-talk-1000x668

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 7.28.29 PM

How do you challenge your comfort zone?

COMFORTzone

“A person’s license to create is irrevocable, and it opens to every corner of daily life. But it is always hard to see that doubt, fear, and indirectness are eternal aspects of the creative path” writes Shaun McNiff (1998) in Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go. He also teaches that “the education of imagination involves giving up what I call ego control. It (creativity) requires an inclination to step into the unknown as well as the ability to persist when there is no end in sight.”

What is the goal of education?

Piaget

Image Credit: Adam Fletcher

Creative community engagement

Community

Image Credit: Denise Boehm