The below pictures are our artifacts. The first image captures two students who are working on the computers in our “combined elective” (woodwork, metalwork, art, computer tech) that we are calling “Design 8” – the computer picture shows these two students working on developing posters to help promote the upcoming school play, posters that eventually will be printed off for the school as a form of advertising our upcoming play production.
Meaningful, powerful projects, was something that we had first envisioned with this course, and it is awesome seeing our goals come to light.
The second photo is of the same two students, in the same “Design 8” class, but this time in the Carpentry shop, working on another critically thought out project, a “Rube Goldberg” machine that powers on a lightbulb by using dominoes, a tape measure, a marble, and other household items.
We wanted to capture that our class is pushing kids out of their regular “streamed” course selections, and having them learn new and important skills in the different areas of our school. In these pictures, one of the students is your typical “shop/industrial art student” while the other is your typical “fine arts student” – our course is allowing these students to break down those titles and become overall stronger students.
We have already found a lot of success in the course. Even with the students who did not appreciate being put in areas that they were not comfortable with, are starting to turn around their opinions of the course. We allow for open discussion and feedback in the form of “exit notes” from time to time, that allows our students to check in with us, telling us what’s working and what’s not working in their projects, their learning, and their overall enjoyment of the course.
One of our setbacks has continued to be the structural binds of our current timetable. We are working firsthand with our administration to try and better this issue for the upcoming school year.
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