The resources here are designed for both educator and learner use of the Agency by Design Framework for Maker-Centered Learning. In this collection you will find three sets of resources. Thinking Routines offer several mini-strategies to encourage active processing and build on learners’ background knowledge. Activities & Practices offer suggestions and guidelines for teaching a variety of maker-centered learning activities. The Documentation and Assessment Tools offer a range of techniques and activities that help learners and educators reflect on thinking and learning and be intentional in their efforts to improve the learning process. All of the tools are designed to help develop the maker capacities of Looking Closely, Exploring Complexity, and Finding Opportunity.
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!
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 Learn Workbook supports engagement with the Voice and Choice protocol. Created by Julie Rains.
This Learn Workbook supports engagement with the Voice and Choice protocol. Created by Julie Rains.
This practice promotes noticing, play, and exploration. When learners have time to tinker with materials they can gain an understanding of the affordances, possibilities, and constraints inherent in a variety of making materials.
This practice promotes noticing, play, and exploration. When learners have time to tinker with materials they can gain an understanding of the affordances, possibilities, and constraints inherent in a variety of making materials.
This practice is designed to deepen learners’ sensitivity to design through drawing, observing, questioning, and collaborating.
This practice is designed to deepen learners’ sensitivity to design through drawing, observing, questioning, and collaborating.
This practice supports co-inspiration and the cross-pollination of ideas during maker-centered group work.
This practice supports co-inspiration and the cross-pollination of ideas during maker-centered group work.
The practice of mapping allows learners to build and demonstrate their understanding of the parts, people, and interactions that comprise a given system.
The practice of mapping allows learners to build and demonstrate their understanding of the parts, people, and interactions that comprise a given system.
A conversation starter and reflective activity for introducing young people and adults to making.
A conversation starter and reflective activity for introducing young people and adults to making.
This practice allows learners to notice features of an object that they may not have the vocabulary to fully describe yet. By doing several sketches, learners have the chance to engage in perspective taking and to see details they might miss at first glance.
This practice allows learners to notice features of an object that they may not have the vocabulary to fully describe yet. By doing several sketches, learners have the chance to engage in perspective taking and to see details they might miss at first glance.
Mechanical dissections are a practice that allows learners to discover the often hidden design of objects.
Mechanical dissections are a practice that allows learners to discover the often hidden design of objects.
This practice first encourages learners to observe the world around them and look for design, “in the wild,” taking a broad inventory of the designs they notice. Then it asks them to focus in on one object or system to consider the designer’s perspective or to propose redesign ideas.
This practice first encourages learners to observe the world around them and look for design, “in the wild,” taking a broad inventory of the designs they notice. Then it asks them to focus in on one object or system to consider the designer’s perspective or to propose redesign ideas.
PROTOCOLO PARA ANALIZAR DE FORMA CRÍTICA UN CONTENIDO, CONSIDERANDO DIFERENTES PERSPECTIVAS Y REPRESENTACIÓN, PARA DESPUÉS REDISEÑAR O REIMAGINAR ESE CONTENIDO DESDE UNA PERSPECTIVA PROPIA.
PROTOCOLO PARA ANALIZAR DE FORMA CRÍTICA UN CONTENIDO, CONSIDERANDO DIFERENTES PERSPECTIVAS Y REPRESENTACIÓN, PARA DESPUÉS REDISEÑAR O REIMAGINAR ESE CONTENIDO DESDE UNA PERSPECTIVA PROPIA.
Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan provided some inspiration for educators from Park Day School to explore the complexities of everyday objects with their second grade learners. In this picture of practice essay educator Jeanine Harmon shares the project.
Featured photo by Jaime Chao Mignano
Oakland Learning Community Tatum Omari’s builds on her experience with system redesign to hack her daughter’s soccer gear.
Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom presents a systems-based approach to examining creativity in education that aims to make participating in invention and innovation accessible to all students. Moving beyond the gifted-versus-ungifted debate present in many of today’s classrooms, the book’s inclusive framework situates creativity as a participatory and socially distributed process. The core principle of the book is that individuals are not creative, ideas are creative, and that there are multiple ways for a variety of individuals to participate in the development of creative ideas. This dynamic reframing of invention and innovation provides strategies for teachers, curriculum designers, policymakers, researchers, and others who seek to develop a more equitable approach towards establishing creative learning experiences in various educational settings.
This piece is the first in a series of Field Notes which can be read as a Take Apart Toolkit of sorts, including how to use Take Aparts to engage in deep analysis, to increase accessibility, to explore the complexity of less tangible objects and systems, and more.
Cracking the case of a computer always inspires a small gasp—an intake of breath that is part fear and part wonder. And it really is beautiful in there.
For that matter, so are the guts of a blender or a blow dryer or an FM radio. When I first started using Take Apart practices in the classroom, it was for the simple unwrapping of the incredible miniature landscape inside of the familiar objects that we think we understand most intimately. The view from the inside is a powerful and nearly instantaneous entrypoint into what Agency by Design names a sensitivity to design—that the world around us is designed and made by humans like us, and can be remade, too.
Over time, I came to think of a Take Apart a perfect first dip into maker-centered learning for learners of any age or context because it requires very little prior knowledge. When I’m guiding a group of learners, I like to ask: Look at the object in front of you—do you know its name? Have you ever used it? Most of us can stare down a clock with some level of confidence and firsthand experience. We have a connection to an object we recognize and ready access to what we already know about how it is used, some alternative forms it may have, and even some ideas about how it works. We have memories that may connect it to our home, the Kindergarten teacher who taught us how to tell time, the last clock we touched. A Take Apart has an emotional locomotion that is hard to resist.
A first, essential step is looking closely—slowly observing and reflecting on the whole. One of the key requirements of a Take Apart, and one that I share with learners, is this important permission: You will not be asked to put it back together. You do not need to preserve it. Once the clock is really Taken Apart, it does not go back together, literally or conceptually. It is a plastic rain poncho that can never be stuffed back into its perfect tiny pouch. When we unpack the parts and complications of the clock—when we explore complexity—our understanding of it balloons out dimensionally.
Permission to break things is a visceral release, and the small shock of cracking the case of a clock marks that crystal moment of transgression. “No going back now,” some learners might say, or “Is this what I’m supposed to do?” They have entered forbidden territory.
The real processing begins when learners' hands are deep in the guts of the clock and a flurry of questions and inferences rise out of their inherent curiosity. It can get wild in there, and conversations and observations help make order and meaning of what they find. I like to prompt, What do you see? What words or numbers can you find? How are things connected? How does it work to move the hands? As pieces start to come out onto the table, I ask: Sort them in a way that makes sense to you. Is it the way they fit together on the inside? Is it by size or color? What way explains the clock best?
When everything is out, when it is arranged as a representation of our understanding of the clock, it has changed irreversibly. It is broken, for sure, but it is also now physically and conceptually larger than it has ever been. Reflection can make visible how learners’ understandings of the clock and their thinking about it have grown. They can teach what they have learned, or explain a moment of surprise where what they thought they knew about the clock was upended. I often invite my students to consider the following: What was hard about taking it apart, physically or emotionally—and what does that mean? What was hard about explaining its workings? What puzzles remain?
Then finding opportunity becomes a natural next step. Often, learners will ask me if they can keep a piece of this clock. I might ask: Why this piece? What do you want to do with it? What should be thrown away, and what is just too interesting?
In the past year, the Making Across the Curriculum project at Washington International School has supported our faculty to dig into an exploration of what Take Apart practices might look like in a classroom. The curiosity and enthusiasm of students during a Take Apart is often the most obvious impact, but we are also trying to identify more subtle evidence of student understanding.
AbD researchers describe how their use of agency “vignettes” help them gain new understandings around the concept of agency.
这个思维习惯通过帮助学生近距离观察某个物品/系统的细节，考虑不同的观点角度、不同的使用者和利益相关者，以及反思自己和这个物品/系统的关系来探究其中的关联性。
Guest Author Jeff Evancho, the Project Zero Programming Specialist at the Quaker Valley School District, describes the process of establishing the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community, including the community’s interest in developing documentation and assessment strategies for the maker-centered classroom.
Participants at the Arts Education Partnership National Forum consider the role of the arts in maker-centered learning experiences.
