Humanities: Designing, Boxing, Imagining, Artifacting, Digging Deep

We continue to shape up our learning space today as we do a different sort of work to determine next steps in the space.

Thinking

We'll begin with this video, "Adventures of a Cardboard Box" from Studio Canoe and activity to get us thinking outside the box.

Questions to Answer After Our Watching

• Why did we have you watch this video?
• How can what we say affect how other people think about us?
• What can we learn from our responses to another’s painful experiences?
• What effect can our jokes have on the people around us?

Artifacts & Humanities

From there we will turn our attention to artifact thinking & critical thinking, digging deep, going beyond the surface as we try to determine what Humanities is all about through evidence.  

Yesterday's artifact work was pretty good.  We can do even better.  

Design

After the artifact work, we return to designing the classroom where we will be using a 2x2 plotting system to help us whittle down all the room design ideas we have going to those we should probably actually put to work in our space.

And then . . . we can start moving stuff around.

Homework

Due Thursday 9/5

Gather artifacts that represent you based on these criteria.

a. One artifact should be about you as a student. 

b. One artifact should be about you socially (family/friends)

c. One artifact should be about your personal interests/hobbies.

d. The last artifact is completely up to you.  

On the sheet provided, write a few sentences about what each artifact says about 

you.  Put all of the artifacts in the brown paper bag given you along with the rationales.  

Put your name ONLY ON THE SHEET.  


Identity Cultural Anthropology Experience:  We will place the artifacts that each of you have brought in 

paper bags. Your job/and my job will be to get one bag, put the items on your desk, take a 

look at them, and then circulate around the room.  Make your best guess as to who belongs 

to each set of artifacts and why you think that.

PACE: Designing, Interviewing, Mapping, Prototyping

Wednesday's class is going to make some tremendous headway for our classroom design.

Design

We will start with Thirty Circles again to warm up the brains.

Then we will interview one another using the Four Compass Points protocol, a way of asking key questions about a problem you are trying to solve and finding out what your partner thinks about that problem.

From there, you can choose the design work that most appeals to you:

Organizing & coding the input from the various sources

Drawing/constructing models of the classroom based on the data available

Prototyping and physically experimenting with configurations in the classroom

The above will take about 45 to 50 minutes.

What Is PACE?

The rest of class will be a discussion of what PACE is, what it means, what is going to happen this year, and what each of us needs for this to be successful.  This will mean "norms" work a.k.a. "how we roll" work.

Homework

We will be working a great deal with symbolism, metaphor and analogy this year.
Bring three objects with you to class:
One represents yourself as a learner
One represents what you are thinking about PACE right now
One represents what you hope to gain from PACE
Be prepared to discuss, defend, praise your choices.