

Agency by Design project manager Jen Ryan describes her experience discussing the “maker mind” at TEDxDirigo.
Welcome to the new Agency by Design website! Because the new website is so rich with content and features, we think it might be helpful to take you on a tour to get a sense of all it has to offer. The new site boasts 29 educator tools and practices that accompany the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning, featured documentation and assessment resources highlighting the most recent phases of work, Agency by Design media and publications, and project and funder pages to highlight the Origin Project, Early Childhood in the Making, and Making Across the Curriculum. The video below walks you through the elements of the site and gives an overview of each page.
A protocol for looking closely at content, considering perspectives and representation, and then redesigning or reimagining that content from one's own perspective. Try out the accompanying Learner Workbook!
This routine encourages learners to slow down and make careful, detailed observations as they look beyond the obvious features of an object or system and think about how it works. This thinking routine can help foster curiosity as children notice details, ask questions, make connections, and identify topics for future inquiry.
Inicialmente, essa rotina estimula o pensamento divergente, à medida que os estudantes pensam em novas possibilidades para um objeto ou um sistema; depois, o pensamento convergente é encorajado, à medida que os estudantes decidem a maneira mais eficaz de construir, explorar, re/desenhar ou hackear esse objeto ou esse sistema.
Agency by Designer project Director Shari Tishman introduces the concept of “maker empowerment” as a potential outcome of maker learning experiences.
This entry offers a critical perspective of the role of the arts within the popular STEAM agenda. Most loosely defined, STEAM can be understood as incorporating the arts into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) acronym for the purpose of introducing a focus on art and design into these four subject areas. This entry first questions what the A in the STEAM acronym actually represents. The entry then argues that a focus on any discrete set of disciplines prioritizes some domains of practice, while overlooking others. The entry goes on to encourage a more distributed approach to pedagogical practice that is less about establishing catchy acronyms that privilege some disciplines over others – and more about supporting young people and adults in becoming multimodal learners capable of making connections between and beyond the disciplines.
A resource for learners to explore the ways you can use the Agency by Design Framework and Making Moves/Indicators.