PAA in Boston: Growth through Conversation and Collaboration
There comes a point during the creative process where it is absolutely impossible to look at one’s own work from different perspectives. It is at this point that outside opinions and experience become crucial to the growth and development of the project, as well as the creator. The coming together of fresh eyes and ideas is how innovation occurs. With this is mind, together with a team of my PAA colleagues, we traveled to Boston, Massachusetts in search of like-minded creators and educators to help inform the work of our arts integration lab and to share with them insights from our recent work. We were certainly not disappointed by the incredible range of artists, inventors, and scholars who participated in our conversations and we were excited that the work we have been innovating was so well received.
I was particularly struck by our meeting with the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Representatives from The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco also joined our conversation. We were given the opportunity and time to share our work, and to compare the Maker movement with that of successful arts-integration. We ended our brain-storming session by collaborating with our MIT and Tinkering Studio colleagues and making our own Scratch Lego WeDo kinetic sculptures. Through collaborations, failures, and successes, there were soon sculptures made from Legos and Makey Makeys scattered across the table. Though the sculptures varied in many ways, they all displayed elements related to the senses: sound, touch, and visual effects resounded throughout the room. The video above is from my experiment!
I left the Media Lab with a renewed sense of purpose, full of inspiration and ideas for future projects and residencies in PAA’s partner schools. I have been comparing this productive atmosphere to our brief sessions with students, and I cannot help but wonder what we could do to encourage more of this imaginative thinking. In order to make arts-integration more successful, we need extended time within the classroom. Students need time to fail, to learn from that failure, and to succeed. They need time to understand the various media we provide, and to experiment with them.
Educators need time as well, to encourage these innovations; time to collaborate with other artists, and to develop new ideas and processes. During a meeting with Harvard’s Agency by Design member Edward Clapp, he mentioned his “STEAM with stickers” concept. This refers to making something educational, and adding “decorations” for the art portion of the work. In order to promote truly artistic making and collaborative learning, and to avoid the “STEAM with stickers” stigma, extended time in the classroom is necessary for high quality arts integration.
