This post is about the changing use of space in middle college art and design. Think for a moment how much of life has been transformed by new technologies – and how differently we design and use home and workspaces now to twenty years ago. Today’s creative spaces are changing as quickly as mobile phones and computers. It’s therefore unremarkable that art and design spaces in colleges no longer need to look or function as they did when many adults were at college. They need to perform in ways that foster a sense of wonder, imagination and creativity in designing and making.
How do kids learn to unleash their imagination and creativity?
The Open Learning Space in Stage 4 is home to our Year 7 and 8 students. Around the heritage building are wide verandahs and grassy areas. Most days students ask to work outside, either as a working group or just to have some alone time. Teaching Art and Design at IFS does not happen inside workshops and art rooms. When parents and children first tour the college, they might notice we don’t (yet) have typical fit-outs for timber or metalwork for example.
In reality, the syllabus for ‘mandatory technology’ is quite broad. Many colleges use their woodwork shops for Stage 4 as they are typically physically housed in a building dedicated to technology and applied studies.
IFS isn’t alone in not following a traditional learning space design. The Stage 4 syllabus is much broader than timber, textiles and food, yet is often assumed to consist mainly of these things. The syllabus encourages us to explore media, industrial, electronics, product, communications and mix them into exciting projects. These things can all be done in an open learning space.
So far this year, Stage 4 has been looking at the processes needed to design a product; how people in teams have to negotiate and pool ideas and then labour to turn an idea into a product. Then the product is tested, learning from mistakes and aspects that didn’t work as well as students thought they might. Learning by getting it wrong is useful, as long as you get to retry without a penalty – and that’s what we encourage in our art and design studies.
This term students are learning some basic programming, taking up the ‘hour of code’ which has been promoted by industrialists and governments as a key understanding, (and skill), for children living in a digital world. They will ultimately create a working, retro arcade game which will be published and shared online. This won’t take a year, or even a month. Our compressed, project approach will see kids making games in a few days. We tap into their curiosity and let them work for a few days at a time at their own pace.
My argument is that there is growing discussion among educators, (college and university), that the best environments for working with imagination, creativity, innovation and communication have moved well beyond the woodwork room and pencil box projects many adults will remember from college. Classrooms, libraries and labs are being reimagined for this century, not the last. Read this great article entitled 7 Things You Should Know About Maker Spaces, (which I’ll talk about in just a moment). This helps to explain how IFS approaches art and design – holistically and integrated into everyday learning.
Maker Space
Right now our visual art project is working with Japanese Studies and technology with mathematics. This lets kids make important connections between theory and content – and making things. Our visual arts and design approach can be better associated with ‘maker spaces’ and integrated into other subjects.
a makerspace is a place where young people have an opportunity to explore their own interests, learn to use tools and materials, and develop creative projects.
Maker spaces, (or hack spaces), provide opportunities for participatory learning and participatory learning is the guiding framework for my innovative college programs and services. Project New Media Literacies identifies these principles of participatory learning:
- Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation
- Learning that feels relevant to students’ identities and interests
- Opportunities for creating using a variety of media, tools and practices
- Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning
- An integrated system of learning where connections between home, college, community and world are enabled and encouraged
I encourage you to Google ‘maker spaces’ and see for yourself what is going on around the world. I am also really interested in getting parents involved with our Stage 4 ‘maker space’ – as we know we have a wide range of experts in all sorts of creating and making fields in our community. If you’re interested, please get in touch. The kids LOVE making things and when adults are helping them, they make really amazing things out of quite low-tech and simple spaces because imagination is a very powerful tool that children draw on at this age.
Kylie Wakefield says
To be able to put this in motion and observing the children develop in ways that are a nature way of learning (& living) is a great asset for all those involved. The outcome is so positive on many levels.
Great work IFS