Avenues The World School

 

DEVELOPING Future-making skills through project-based learning

Role: Interdisciplinary project Teacher | Project: 11th Grade Futures Literacy

www.avenues.org/sp/

At Avenues, Art & Design is part of an interdisciplinary project-based initiative of teaching Futures Literacy to 11th grade students. Through Art & Design, students explored making as a creative act to give shape to the future. Through experimentation and iterations, we emphasized action learning—that is, students learned from their process of trying things out. Making was introduced in two ways: for one side, students were motivated to experiment with using various technologies & crafts (3D printing, laser cutting, sewing, drawing, amongst others). In those ways, students worked to produce tangible artifacts as outcomes of their projects.

Fig.1: Students put together an immersive experience for the project showcase. The exhibition was called “The Thing From the Future” and explored speculative solutions to problems Brazil would face in both near and very distant futures.

From another side, we introduced students to the idea of "making the intangible," that is, attending to the experiential, meaning-based and aesthetic qualities that often derived from what they made. Ultimately, we reminded students that Art & Design can be about making things together, as a collaborative process: that is, students discovered tools to make together with their peers and the grade level as a whole.

Fig.2: Student finalizes their project showcase. The group explored the future of food and how hunger in Brazil could be addressed through technology.

Fig.3: students imagine a future 1000-year ahead, when current generation memes become historical records of a Brazil from the past.

Project: Maker's Toolkit

In this project, students explored how to give form to their ideas through the use of a wide range of technologies. In groups, students were asked to create tutorial videos of a chosen technology—in that way, they became the teachers of a particular tool. Which meant—for some, that they would need to learn and practice it in order to teach; and for others, that they would go in depth into something they already had an inclination for.

 


REFERENCES