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Collab Lab 67: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

Last week’s Collab Lab served as a follow on from our November’s session on Place Based Engagement. At that session and in follow up conversations, Joe Kaltenberg, MKE Parks Manager with the The City of Milwaukee noted that input from students, residents, property owners, and other stakeholders can offer the department not only a clearer picture of the roles the playgrounds and parks oversee play in those neighborhoods, but also a richer vision of the roles they could play. 

That prompted us to use Collab Lab 67 to explore how and where K-12 students might engage at different points in the City’s playground redevelopment process as a means to foster community input and engagement in those efforts. During the discussion participants identified three areas where engaging K-12 students could offer a rich experience for students and support key areas of the City’s process — stakeholder mapping, storytelling, and design.

Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping allows the City to understand who uses, cares for, or is concerned with a particular playground or park, and who ought to have input or otherwise be involved as part of the redevelopment process. The work to identify stakeholders, their relation to a playground or park, the issues they see and the goals they have, is an opportunity for K-12 students to gain a much broader perspective on civic engagement. It’s a chance to understand who in a community cares about what happens on a specific site, the reasons behind that and where they may conflict and align with goals others may have.

Storytelling

For a park or playground to be of the neighborhood in which it sits, the City needs to hear the stories of those who use, care, or are impacted by a park or playground, and what takes place there. Storytelling offers methods to understand where stakeholders are coming from and communicate those hopes, fears, and dreams to a broader audience.

Collab Lab participants noted that a storytelling event focused at or on a particular site would allow K-12 students to collect stories from a variety of stakeholders. It would also serve as a way to draw attention to that site as a candidate for redevelopment.

Ideation

Involving students in the design of a playground or park, where they can see their ideas take shape and have an impact on the community is a wonderful idea. Yet, as Collab Lab participants noted, unless the process were constrained to proposals for the arrangement of pre-selected components, it is unlikely that they would ever see their designs implemented as envisioned, and even in this scenario, be able to recognize their contributions to what was put in place.

More importantly, this approach fails to leverage the fact that these are students. We shouldn’t be asking them to act as engineers, we should be asking them to dream, to think outside the box, and challenge the assumptions of engineers. Here the request of students ought to focus on how they or others experience a playground or the features or equipment under consideration. We ought to be asking them what adults involved in the process fail to see or understand about how a park or playground is experienced by those who use it. We need to probe behind suggestions for features that would never be implemented to understand the problem a student sees that an impossible feature solves.

Constraints

A common set of constraints cuts across all three of these areas for engagement. Central among them is the ability of teachers to effectively engage their students in this work:

  • Finding the time to do so
  • Establishing connections to curriculum standards
  • Synchronizing school calendars with the City’s, particularly when the seasons and weather can further constrain the time students can spend on-site
  • The availability of community partners to support student efforts
  • The ability of teachers to collaborate across classroom or school boundaries for shared success
  • The proximity of parks in the City’s pipeline to teachers and students ready to take on this work

The Collab Lab did not provide an opportunity to dive into all of these issues, but we were able to identify a strategy in one area. Most schools, particularly at the middle and high school level draw students from well beyond the neighborhood in which the school sits. Thus, while a park or playground may be near a school, many students will have limited exposure to it or be able to access it outside of school hours. For any of the opportunities noted above, this limits the ability to rely on students themselves as stakeholders, storytellers, or users of their own designs.

What we can do is ask students to work at a higher level, to be the mappers of stakeholders, the collectors of stories. We can ask them to be the designers who can communicate what the users of a park or playground that is near their school want from it or hope that it could become.

Where do we go from here

The work to organize teachers, students, and community stakeholders to participate in the planning process would be a lot for MKE Parks to take on. While useful to have that input, it’s not really something for them to take on. We’re exploring with Joe a different approach– developing a framework that, recognizing the timelines and constraints faced by each of these participants, allows them to work outside of a City managed process while offering their input and results of their work at the most useful points in the process.  We plan to spend time between now and the end of the school year to understand what this framework would need to look like to make this work for educators. If you are interested in participating in that process, let us know.

Collab Lab 66: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

Our discussion at February’s Collab Lab focused on engaging families. As we explored goals we have for family engagement we considered:

  • Who we include as “family” in “family engagement”
  • Who family engages with
  • Where/When it happens
  • Who benefits/how

While parents, siblings, and caregivers of students are obvious starting points for who to include as family, the discussion quickly broadened to include a much broader group. The extended families of students, individuals and families in the community which surrounds a school, those who may work or own businesses in the community around the school. In no small part, this expansive view family reflects a deeper goal — that the school is not simply a place where students and teachers spend the day, but that it is deeply embedded in the life of the community.

This broader approach to engagement changes the way one thinks about who the school and it’s families engage with. It’s not just about caregivers connecting with their student’s teachers. It’s about giving those families a chance to connect with each other, individuals and organizations who support their school, and in particular. It looks to move past one way communication, simple reporting out of what a school thinks families ought to know. It looks to build the relationships and trust that allow disengaged families to engage and for the community to come together not just to support the work of students and their families, but to  support each other. It changes as well, where engagement might take place.  It moves beyond family coming to school. It’s the school coming out into the community. 

This expansive view of engagement only works if all participants see benefits, and they see that their contributions to the school community, as students, teachers, family members or neighbors are valued. 

What do members of the school community need to engage?

As we moved the discussion to what’s needed to engage, the word “dignity” came up early. Again, not just dignity for caregivers, but dignity for students, teachers, and members of the broader community who schools do or seek to engage with.  For caregivers, this means recognizing both the time, financial, and other constraints and obligations they work face, but that they have something to of value to offer, that they are partners in the education of their child.  Often it comes down to the simple things– if we are asking for something more of any of the participants, what burdens can we remove?

  • A time that works for those we want to engage with
  • Providing food at events that may overlap with meal times
  • Helping with transportation
  • Activities for children that may need to come when a caregiver is there for an adult conversation

Most importantly, don’t waste someone’s time.  This means not asking teachers, caregivers, or members of the broader community to participate in engagement activities they don’t value or benefit from. 

The process starts with how we invite the engagement. Are we asking for engagement because we see a caregiver or a student as a problem or the one that needs to solve it, or are we asking for engagement to work together for a better outcome.

In the end, it comes down to recognizing that members of the broadly defined school community each come with a different set of goals. Effective engagement doesn’t mean that everyone needs to share the same set of goals. It requires that we acknowledge the goals they do have, understand where they align, and find something useful to work on together that allows everyone to come out ahead. It’s how trust is built.

A special thanks to our featured guests,

Amber DuChateau — Art Teacher at the Milwaukee Academy of Science

Aubrey (Ellickson) Fulsaas — Environmental Educator, Schlitz Audubon Nature Center

Bernie Traversari — Director of Operations and Programs, Society for Conservation Biology North America & STEM Education Consultant

Additional thanks to Bernie for his help facilitating the session. Bernie joined us to record a debrief of the session that you can find on inspirEd.

As always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 67: Connecting to Community Thursday March 13th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Lab 65: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs , , ,

Capacity Building as an Outreach Strategy

The Freshwater Collaborative  of Wisconsin’s mission to advance freshwater education and research relies on attracting and developing talented individuals who are passionate about water science. The conventional approach to community outreach is traditionally focused on the delivery of programming — offering experiences or content to K-12 teachers and students through curriculum, site visits, summer camps, or other activities.

We worked with the Freshwater Collaborative to use our December Collab to explore a different approach. We view teachers, students, and schools not simply as recipients of programming, but as potential partners that can support and extend the work of Freshwater Collaborative members. This model empowers K-12 schools to become active partners in research and education, creating experiential learning opportunities that benefit both students and researchers.

To provide a concrete basis from which to explore this approach to engagement, we framed the discussion around a budding collaboration between Dr. Ashley Lemke, an underwater archeologist working out of UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, and Peter Graven, a middle school science and high school robotics teacher from St. Francis. Over the past several years, his students have developed underwater ROV’s of increasing sophistication. The immediate opportunity is to deploy an ROV in service of Dr. Lemke’s research. The bigger vision is to develop additional capabilities at St. Francis and other schools to serve the specific needs of FCW researchers and its partners.

Discussion

The set-up for our discussion centered on a single faculty member working with an individual teacher on a specific project. What came out of that was a number of insights about how and where those efforts could catalyze opportunities for other K-12 teachers and schools, as well as faculty pursuing other research interests.

We split the attendees into four discussion groups, each focused on a different capacity needed to allow a K-12 school, to support research efforts of Dr. Lemke. These included:

  • An ability to engineer, prototype, and test components
  • An ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples
  • An ability to provide ongoing monitoring of conditions
  • An ability to document findings, tell, and share a story

A fifth set of needed abilities we had not planned to introduce as part of the discussion, was nonetheless covered as part of a broader conversation between discussion groups:

  • An ability to deploy, operate, and maintain an ROV

The discussion which followed covered opportunities to directly engage students, the importance of cultivating a sense of wonder, and the importance of soft skills — the ability of students to work effectively as a team to take on any of these challenges.

Across the participants we saw interest and excitement around:

  • The types of collaboration that might ensue
  • What K-12 students might gain from the experience
  • What individual participants or organizations might be able to do to support the efforts of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven directly, or to support FCW/K-12 collaboration in another area.

Given the discussion at the Collab Lab and follow-up conversations we see six areas to build upon to validate and scale the approach we’ve suggested, starting in the spring 2025 semester.

  • Facilitate the work of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven
  • Share that story as it evolves
  • Identify opportunities for other schools to support this effort
  • Identify additional opportunities for collaboration
  • Recruit participation from additional K-12 schools
  • Understand and document what has enabled this initial collaboration and a path forward to extend the depth and reach of these efforts

Notes From Initial Brainstorming

Ability to engineer prototype and test components

  • Teachers need to have a framework/plan to structure students’ learning experiences to develop their design & making skills
  • Teachers need to be able to and actually model failure & Learning so that students know what it looks like and what it produces
  • Students need self awareness & self management skills to monitor and adjust their emotions to persist and create
  • Students need to have practices or skills to stretch their thinking and ideate broadly so their ideas break new ground
  • Students need to be able to sketch/model their ideas so they can discuss and make
  • Students need to have clarity about the connection between the design and real world application so they can test effectively
  • Students need to have multiple experiences of the make-test-revise cycle and feel a sense of accomplishment and to believe there is value in failure
  • Students need to be able to see their efforts and failure as a part of a lifelong learning journey so they persist and learn
  • Students need to be able to let go of their ideas and take an adversarial approach to find flaws so they can go farther faster
  • Students need to develop an appreciation for the discomfort that comes from presenting their ideas, getting, feedback, being wrong, and being uncertain so they remain open to growth
  • All parties deal with failure — playing it safe leads to not enough prototyping


Ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples

  • Modular construction for multiple purposes — right tool for the tasks
  • Generalized tool vs specific tasks
  • Photography
  • Lighting
  • High quality camera
  • Shutter speed
  • Video vs photos
  • Coring
  • Water Samples
  • Sterility, DNA,
  • Grabber hand for artifacts
  • Mapping
  • Endless types of data (interdisciplinarity) to collect. Explore & let the science happen– don’t lock yourself in too soon
  • Underwater mechanics important to take into account
  • Streamlined
  • Multi-perspective
  • balanced/shifting balance
  • Transform something that works on land to something that works underwater
  • Research & Art
  • Videography – stabilization of film (See film all too clear film)
  • Need to know where you are
  • explore/make questions
  • Underwater special challenges
  • Design thinking
  • Project management
  • Give up control
  • Deal with failure
  • Visual thinking
  • Resilience


Ability to provide ongoing monitoring

  • A Reason Why
  • Creativity – draw from other disciplines
  • Story purpose
  • Community
  • Contributing (leads to story)
  • Reasons to do it in a certain way — e.g. being scientific
  • Model scenarios for winter tests
  • simulations
  • Drill through pond ice (winter strategy to get out on smaller lakes)
  • Big challenge is precise location
  • Get practice in an accessible way –virtual simulations, small scale trials
  • Data logging
  • System for submitting and maintaining data
  • Decentralized
  • out of silo
  • People doing a part of a bigger, longer term effort
  • Possibly revolving group with new comers
  • Internal story telling to bring in new participants
  • Data logging – consistent methods
  • What story are we trying to tell?
  • Knowing who the community is
  • Virtual training/accessibility


Ability to document findings, tell and share a story

  • Wonderment
  • Speak/voice
  • Listen
  • Kids speak
  • Share a story — kids, teachers, families
  • Kids — visual communication/posters/art
  • Cyclical feedback/revision
  • 37 sec reels [how things work]
  • Local pride/trust
  • clubs


Ability to operate an ROV

  • Put in
  • Take out
  • Know where I am
  • Know what I’m seeing
  • Maneuver reliably
  • Maintain it
  • Clean
  • Repair
  • Train other operators
  • Make use of a test environment to improve skills

A special thanks to our featured guests,

Peter Graven — Science & Robotics, St Francis School District

Marissa Jablonski – Executive Director, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin

Ashley Lemke — Associate Professor – Anthropology, UW Milwaukee

As always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 66: Engaging Families Thursday February 13th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Lab 64: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs ,

Our November Collab Lab explored placed-based engagement–what it can offer students, and the ways we might engage students around particular places in their neighborhood, their lives, or the broader community.

Discussion

We started the conversation by asking participants to describe for their tablemates a public space that holds meaning for them. We then asked each group to identify the what helped create that sense of meaning. Across our discussion groups, several key themes emerged:

  • The opportunity to experience a place over an extended period of time– within a single visit or across multiple visits
  • The sense of agency/ownership/belonging/feeling of welcome individuals had within those places
  • A feeling of connection to a place’s history, their own experience within it, or with the people of that place

The ability of participants to experience a place through multiple senses, bring their own knowledge or experience to their understanding of a place, physically engage with or within a place, or recognize a feeling of peace (or danger), all add to the ways we find meaning or a sense of magic and wonder in a place.

From there we asked participants to identify what they came to understand about places which hold meaning for them, that a casual observer, or one who had not spent much time in the place would miss.  Here, the temporal experience of places came to the fore– how it changes during the day, with the seasons or over the years; how it evolves or adapts physically, in how it is used, and the meaning it holds for those who inhabit or care for the place.  Participants also recognized that much of the meaning a place has for them is a product of what they bring to the place, that there are multiple ways of experiencing the same place, and often unwritten rules which guide one’s conduct within it.

As a final point of discussion, we asked how students might gain that sense of meaning, or a deeper understanding of places within Milwaukee.  Here, we found clear agreement across the discussion groups– “Get out of the way”. Students need time and the freedom to experience and explore places on their own terms.  The meaning of a place can’t be proscribed for students, it needs to grow organically from their experience, knowledge, and understanding of that place.

We can however help set up the conditions that can allow that to happen:

  • Don’t fill or control every minute of a field trip or field experience, leave time for students to explore and experience the place you’ve brought them to on their own terms.
  • Build a classroom culture that welcomes reflection, understanding of the experience of others, self exploration, and a willingness to share ideas
  • Leverage the fact that each student comes with their own experience of the city and connections to different parts of it
  • Start with places students do know and care about, and let them explore outward from there
  • Allow students to engage with new places in the context of issues they care about

Participants recognize that curriculum, access, proximity, and time all pose constraints as we seek to engage students in building a deeper understanding and connection of places within Milwaukee. But there was also a hopeful thread of thought that looked to kindle a re-enchantment with the world for students and a recognition that one can find wonder and meaning within the most mundane places.  That starts with simply creating the opportunity and getting out of the way.

Thanks

A big thanks to all who were able to join us for the discussion, and especially our Featured Participants:

Lauren Instenes— Project Coordinator for the MKE Roots Project, Marquette University

Joseph Kaltenberg — MKE Parks Manager, City of Milwaukee – Department of Public Works

Arijit Sen — Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies, UW Milwaukee

Angela Vickio — Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Thanks also to MSOE’s STEM Center for hosting us.

Resources

We didn’t get much time to talk through Arijit Sen’s Field School project, but he did share several links to that work with us:

J.B Jackson’s work looking at ordinary landscapes was also mention. Here’s a link for further reading https://daily.jstor.org/j-b-jackson-and-the-ordinary-american-landscape/

 

 

Collab Lab 63: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs , ,

The ability of teachers and students to engage effectively in difficult conversations, across that gap or amongst peers is central to creating the kinds of opportunities we want for students. At a bare minimum, those skills are needed to offer and receive effective feedback on student’s work. They are even more important if we want to engage students (and teachers) on challenging topics or to drive change within their school or in the broader community. The centrality of those skills seemed like a good place to kick off our  9th season of Collab Labs.

On October 10th we gathered at UWM’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center for Collab Lab 63 and a discussion focused on Empowering All Voices. Our work for the evening engaged participants to map factors that allow all voices to participate in brave conversations.

The maps shown here were captured and included here unedited. The primary two goals of creating this experience for the attendees were to:

  • Discuss and reflect on what group members with different backgrounds but shared purpose consider relevant factors and how they relate and impact each other.
  • Reflect on how you would apply the insights generated to your own ‘self-management’ in a group setting with familiar and unfamiliar participants.

We did not explicitly ask attendees to consider a K12 setting with teacher-student(s) and teacher-teacher interactions. We are in the process of integrating these maps into our larger model, and will share that work in a subsequent post.

  • What do you see in the maps when you look a bit more closely? Are there commonalities that stand out to you?
  • What would be a question you might ask (one of the teams) to help connect some dots or further complete the map?

Thanks again to our Featured Participants:

Thanks also to Ben Trager from UWM’s Center for Student Experience & Talent for hosting us at UWM, and to his Ed Policy students who were a great addition to the conversation.

Join us on November 14th for Collab Lab 64: Place Based Engagement

Collab Labs Return for Season 9

Pete Reynolds Blog

Looking for a little rejuvenation?

If you’ve missed the chance to connect with passionate individuals from K12 and beyond, find a bit of inspiration, and get energized for what the school year could be, you’re in luck.  We kick off our 9th season of Collab Labs on Thursday October 10th at UWM’s Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship. 

Collab Lab 63: Empowering All Voices

Collab Lab 63 will focus on Empowering All Voices– what does it take to enable brave conversations with and between students? What becomes possible when we do? Join us at 5:30 for a bite to eat before we dive into the discussion at 6:00.

 

Collab Lab Sprints

If you want a jump start on putting ideas from a Collab Lab into practice, join us for a Collab Lab sprint.  We’ll kick off the first of these mini projects on Monday October 7th with a four week sprint focused on brave conversations. Over the course of the sprint we will give you the framework for short exercises you can run with your students. A check-in call each week with us and peers participating in the sprint  will give you the chance to share what’s working, and where you have questions, and what your students have been able to do.

Other Sessions

November through May, we’ll be back at MSOE’s STEM Center on the second Thursday of each month that doesn’t begin with “Januar”.

November 14th
Collab Lab 64: Place Based Engagement
December 12th
Collab Lab 65: Beyond Skills – Building Capabilities
February 13th
Collab Lab 66: Engaging Families
March 13th
Collab Lab 67: Connecting to Community
April 10th
Collab Lab 68: Making Progress in a Turbulent System
May 8th
Collab Lab 69: Celebrate & Re/Connect

 

Dream Big

Pete Reynolds Blog, Initiatives

What’s your moonshot?

What’s the big thing you’d like your students to accomplish– not this year, probably not the next, but what you and they might work up to over the next five years or so?

Coming off the pandemic has been tough, for students and teachers. Next year could be more of the same. Or it could be a chance to work towards something you are passionate about. How much more energy would you have if next year was the first leg of your moonshot.

During the week of June 17th we’ll offer a workshop to help you and your like minded compatriots craft that big vision you want to work towards. You’ll identify what needs to happen to get there, the partners you’ll need along the way, and the first steps to take to start moving.

That same week you’ll also be able to participate in any of several sessions where we will explore moonshot visions for:

  • How we might engage students to take on big challenges related to water, sustainability, and the environment?
  • What would we want students, parents, and teachers to experience to heal the anxiety too many of them have around math?
  • How can we equip students to take on challenges related to the built environment and advocate for the changes they would like to see in their schools, neighborhoods, and cities?
  • What student led enterprises could leverage the assets of a school to offer rich learning experiences and create new opportunities to engage with the community?
  • How can we foster brave conversations, build trust, and elevate student voices to drive the changes that allow students and teachers to feel safe, affirmed, and masterful at school.

Where there is interest and energy, we’ll reconvene for project design workshops the weeks of July 29th and August 5th. You’ll come out of those sessions with a solid plan for the 2024-25 school year that moves your big vision one step closer.

We have a short survey to capture interest. Please take a minute to share your thoughts. You can find that here.

Yes, I can dream big!

Building out our system map

Pete Reynolds Blog

 

Student’s in the Champion’s Program at Wauwatosa captured what drives a sense of belonging for them.

Where we started

In our final two Collab Labs last spring, we explored and mapped factors that drive feelings of safety and affirmation for students and teachers. Since then we’ve been tweaking the system map to reflect what we hear in Collab Labs and from educators who have used the map to spur conversations with their students. 

While this is a great starting point, we think there’s a lot more that could be done to:

  • develop the model,
  • explore how it can be leveraged to elevate student voices, build stronger relationships between teachers and students, or address other key factors exposed within the model,
  • develop a platform and processes that allow ongoing contributions, refinements, and extensions by students, teachers, and the broader school community.

At this point the model has been captured in Kumu as a system map. To move forward we’re putting together a series of challenges that students, in collaboration with their teachers and community partners, might take on to advance specific aspects of this effort. The design work for that challenge will get going this summer, but here’s a sense of what that could include:

Revise and Extend the Model

  • Identify factors, relationships, or actors not already shown in the system model which directly or indirectly impacts factors that are shown.
  • Produce content related to a factor or cluster of factors that would help others better understand the experience of students, teachers, or other members of the broader school community
  • Identify assets in the community (resources, organizations, programming, etc.) that may be useful in addressing one or more factors or clusters of factors.
  • Identify alternate, or more appropriate terms for factors and actors represented in the model
  • Propose revisions to the system map where the factors, relationships, and actors shown fail to adequately capture the experience of students, teachers, or other members of the broader school community.

Platform Development

  • Propose a method or platform by which the system map may be shared, amended, updated, and extended with input from individuals or teams working in different organizations, and locations
  • Propose a method or platform by which user generated content (video, audio, text, images) related to a factor or cluster of factors may be shared with others.
  • Propose a method or service by which 1) factors identified within the system map might be used to assess the current state of a school, school community, or district
  • Propose a method or service to capture data that could be used to assess the relative importance of relationships between factors

Process

  • Develop and document methods to validate the relationships shown in the system model
  • Develop and document methods to elicit exploration of the model by one or more groups within the broader school community and capture that thinking.
  • Develop and document methods by which students or other members of the broader school community might create compelling stories or images related to a specific factor or cluster of factors that would help others better understand their experience.

Solutions

  • Design, prototype, and test an intervention to drive a specific factor or cluster of factors in a positive direction within a learning environment.
  • Design, validate and implement a process (product) for students and teachers to build awareness and practice of the factors and how they can adopt them in their learning culture for improved learning results.

Design Goal

The week of June 17th we’ll pull a group of students, educators, and community partners together to frame the challenge. Our goal is to equip students and teachers to take on specific elements within the challenge that align with their interests and the learning experience educators want to create for their students. We’ll look for opportunities for students and educators to collaborate with peers from other schools, share what they have learned/developed, and engage with community partners that can support their work.

Intrigued? Let us know, and we’ll keep you up to date as we set up the work for June.

    I'd like to learn more about Learn Deep's System Map Challenge and how I can get involved












    Arch 302 Students Review Findings

    Pete Reynolds Blog

    Students in Arijit Sen’s Arch 302 class gathered in the SARUP Commons this morning to talk through what they’ve seen in the first month of their service learning/field experience supporting K-12 students and teachers at 17 area schools. This is all part of an effort that will culminate in design proposals for each school which better align the physical design of classroom with the needs of educators and learners. In the process, a huge number of Milwaukee students engage on a weekly basis with a near peer mentor pursing an architecture career. It’s what can happen when UWM’s School of Architecture & Urban Planning and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Student Experience & Talent have the chance to connect with area teachers who want a richer experience for their own students.

    UWM Architecture Students Supporting 25 Teachers in 17 Schools

    Pete Reynolds Blog, Experiments , , ,

    We’re in our second year of a working with Arijit Sen’s Architecture & Human Behavior class (Arch 302)  at UWM. In collaboration with UWM’s Center for Student Experience & Talent (SET), we’ve placed the 150+ Arch 302 students in service learning roles with 25 teachers in 17 area schools, and with us. The focus of students’ work for Arch 302 is the design of learning spaces, and the 1-2 hours per week they each spend to support teachers and students serves as a field experience and preparation for their design challenge. Over the course of the semester, In teams of 2-3, Arch 302 students will develop design proposals to better address the needs of teachers, students, and staff who use the classrooms Arch 302 students are supporting.  At five of those schools, teams are supporting teachers and students who have take on a parallel design challenge at their school. The two teams placed with us are focused on the room we use for most of our Collab Labs at MSOE’s STEM Center. 

    The framework we have in place for this effort creates wins all around– a richer experience for Arch 302 students, classroom support for teachers and schools, and exposure to new ways schools might look at the learning spaces they offer. Beyond all of that, given the number of Arch 302 students involved, roughly 2,500 K-12 students most of whom are in majority minority schools with high percentages of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, have weekly exposure to a young person pursuing the field. For an industry with a shocking lack of diversity, this is a big step in building a pipeline of talent that looks a lot more like Milwaukee.

    This collaboration was made possible because Professor Sen had a vision for what it could mean for his students, SET had processes in place to match UWM students to placement opportunities, and we’ve built up a big enough network of schools and teachers that we could find placements for everyone in such a large class. We’re continuing to explore how we can continue to sustain and leverage this model. if you’d like to get involved, let us know.

     

     

     

     

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