Teamwork and Target Audience

Several weeks back Charles Riddle, Mark Liu and Simon Nicholls from the Media Arts Department at Wintec (our local Media Arts School, and a strong supporter of this project) spent a Friday afternoon with us sharing some insights from their experiences working on similar projects (including Village on the Hill and The Waikato Independent).

Here's a short video with a couple of excerpts from their talk.



(Please excuse the less than ideal audio! A good interview mic that works with DSLR video is on my list of things to buy for the project. If you have any suggestion of a good brand and model for this, please leave a comment)

Authentic Authenticity

It's been another challenging week! Let's assume that means we're learning lots and being stretched!

Community Engagement
One of Fraser's goals for this year is to better engage (to use a popular educational term) with our community. While the project was not by any stretch of the imagination set up as a PR exercise, I expected that the Curriculum Integration Project would provide some opportunities for this engagement. However, I've been taken aback by just how this has played out as we have begun to engage with our wider community in an authentic way (read "went begging for help to complete our project"!).

I've already blogged about the contribution Adlite Signs made to the project following a student's suggestion. Added to this though have been visits to our studio from people like Emma from the Ministry of Done, and Margi, Simon, Mark and Charles from Wintec's Media Arts Department (the people behind the Waikato Independent and The Village on the Hill). These people have taken the time to connect with our group of budding magazine publishers and share 'real world' experiences of various parts of the publishing industry.

Further to this has been the incredible generosity of the artists and designers who have not only been willing to be interviewed by our students for the magazine, but in some cases have offered their time to come and run workshops, or be filmed for stop-motion videos of them making work, or have pointed the students in the direction of additional information and other resources that will help enhance the project.

Epitomizing all of this has been a media specialist (I'd better check with her before I say too much to identify her!) who has met twice with members of our team to share invaluable insights from her experience in the industry, and finished our last meeting with a "just call me any time you've got a question." What incredible people we're having the chance to work with! And if you're reading this, thanks to all of you!

Authenticity
It is becoming clear that one of the key challenges for the project teaching team is working out how we can provide sufficient structure for the students to give them confidence that they will have a successful product at the end of the project, while maintaining the flexibility to respond to the new learning that takes place at each step. A number of students have let us know that they were feeling pretty overwhelmed by the size of what we've bitten off, to the point where it was starting to get demoralizing. I guess that's the 'down side' of engaging with 'authentically authentic' learning in this kind of project. When the teacher moves to being at best a facilitator, and at times a fellow learner it can leave the students with a sense of 'who's steering this thing?' which has clearly been unsettling for some.

However, I'm becoming familiar with some of the cycles of our project learning process: We engage with some form of focused 'learning event' (frequently a visit to or from a guest) which opens our eyes to a series of previously unseen challenges and opportunities. This frequently leads to a bit of a down-swing as the students grapple with how to incorporate this learning into their current understandings of the project. After a day or two of unsettled-ness a plan and structure begins to emerge as they take ownership of the new element of the project. And then we invite in a new guest in and the cycle continues!

Out of this cycle is growing a greater sense of student ownership and driving of the project, which has to be a good thing!

The unexpected curriculum

I think it's interesting how as a teacher you can plan a series of lessons or learning experiences for students, and then when they're put into action a whole lot of other learning also takes place?

Last week's key focus was going to be how we could apply design thinking and some creativity to turning a traditional classroom space into something that would better enable teams to carry out project based work, and that would be interesting and inspiring to spend time in. We achieved this, to a reasonable extent, although there are still many parts of this project to complete (chief among them being getting rid of the world's ugliest curtains and replacing them with a window treatment that allows us to vary light levels, and reduces heat from the sun).

However, there was other, less fully anticipated, but ultimately more important learning that took (and will continue to take) place:

• How do you work with people who have a different work ethic and work output to you?
• Working with the same people all day is quite different to the usual secondary school scenario. How do you get the best out of this?
• What additional skills and contacts do we each bring to a project such as this, and how can we utilise them to achieve the greatest value for the project?
• When helping students to develop their problem solving skills, what is the balance between making it too easy for them by giving them my answers, and making it too hard for them by leaving them completely to their own devices?
• How do you use a belt sander? How much paint will hessian board absorb before it stops looking patchy?
• People who may not have been entirely excited about a project when you describe it to them can have a much more positive response when they see it in the flesh, and see the learning that is taking place.
• Support staff are incredible - in our case two of the ground staff put their other work on hold for most of two days to help us out

Some of this learning was relatively easy and pleasant. Other learning was, and will continue to be, challenging. Some of the learning was experienced by the students. Much of the learning was experienced by their teacher.

Classroom makeover

The planning had been done, and it was time to get our hands dirty and make some physical changes to the classroom.

Hack your learning space

Friday 3 February - the first day with students participating in the 'project'. A busy and exciting day! We spent most of the day working on our 'Hack your learning space' activity, designing the learning space that we wanted to learn and work in for the year.

Key elements of the designs presented included kitchen space, hooks for bag storage ("like a cloak bay from primary school"), couches/beanbags, table space, and a 'tree-house'. Working within our $500 budget we'll see how much of this we can bring to fruition.