Literature Review
From Steam to Steam: Earning the ‘A’
Prior to settling on a topic worthy of examination for the purposes of a formal literature review, I needed to succinctly define what form my involvement with the Urban Nutrition Initiative would take. As such, I arranged for a meeting of the minds with Jarret Stein, the all-purpose contact for any Rebel Venture-associated project falling under the UNI-Netter Center umbrella. While the day-to-day program operations and locations of the Rebel Ventures students and Jarret span such a wide gamut as to be almost dizzying, the takeaway from our meeting was as clear as it was challenging.
The two programs most needing of structural support were a) the Rebel Ventures brand and b) the after school mentorship program conducted for the Rebel program’s students. The disparate programs operating under Jarret’s thumb lacked a unifying identity — hence the need for an all-inclusive “corporate identity” pack, so to speak, for Rebel Ventures. As for the mentorship program, the college students providing counsel to the students were largely expected to improvise their day-to-day conversations and activities. While cognizant of the mentorship program’s mission statement to advocate academic support, college preparation, and early career counsel, the mentors, themselves, felt in need of counsel and guidance as to how to broach the subject of these seemingly “dry” manners while maintaining the attention of their pupil.
The optimal after school program would offer engaging instruction in the arts and entrepreneurship fields to further the students’ respective preparedness for college and/or the workforce, while rooting said instruction within a design-oriented curriculum that served to further Rebel Venture’s immediate need for student-generated artwork and branding ideas.
Thus, a complementary literature review needed to aggregate and appraise material available on the subject of:
a) effective, engaging arts instruction in a k-12 setting
b) strategies for structuring creative collaboration in a group setting, and—honoring the Rebel team’s civic mission of urban activism—
c) socially-responsible, thoughtful activities for engaging the urban environment and populace.
With at least a semblance of an operational thesis for my readings, I commenced a survey of the curriculum planning literature in the STEM field—an acronym representing science, technology, engineering, and math education, and popularized in the lexicon of curriculum planning in 2006 when the U.S. National Academies targeted said curriculum fields as ground zero in reversing the downward trend of domestic test scores comparable to our first-world peers.
Among the actions it recommended were improving K-12 science and mathematics education, providing additional training for teachers in these areas, and increasing the number of students entering college for STEM-related degrees. In response to these concerns, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act in 2007, which authorized funding for STEM initiatives from kindergarten through graduate school.
Accompanying the announcement of a new federal funding pipeline came an expected race to implement STEM education in the k-12 classroom; with that, similarly, came a deluge of publications on curriculum planning in the four core subjects. With this niche of the publishing sphere marking the obvious starting point for my research, I filtered through the ten or so texts on the subject boasting the most deafening positive praise and selected the following, on the differentiating characteristic that they featured “design” front and center in their titles:
Design, Make, Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators, written by Margaret Honey and David Kanter (President and Director, respectively, of the New York Hall of Science)
The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching and Learning, a compilation of think pieces concerning the integration of design learning, invention, and science into the modern classroom, compiled by Bruce Mau and composed by the likes of vacuum visionary James Dyson and others.
As it seems cordial to first offer credit to the authors where due, I begin by acknowledging the nobility of Honey and Kanter’s decision to stick to the script, so to speak, by aligning the book’s structure with the outline of the National Research Council’s new Framework for Science education, “which includes an explicit focus on engineering and design content, as well as integration across disciplines.” Undeniably honorable in theory, the effectiveness with which the authors delivered, in practice, on their mission ranges from what I deem proficient coverage of ideas for implementing technological and engineering-minded thinking in the classroom to wholly inadequate discussion of integrating design thinking into the curriculum.
Both the strength and the foremost weakness of Honey and Kanter’s piece arose from their commitment to the Maker movement—which is covered, in-depth as its manifesto is one of the works subsequently reviewed. For the time being, it suffices to describe the Maker movement as advocating hands-on tinkering, construction, and assembly. The text presents cogent ideas for integrating building and assembly into project-based learning that covers existing core curriculum subjects. Too often, STEM texts hurry through or altogether skip the technology and engineering subject matters en route to the science and math content that is more exhaustively and concretely tested for in the “No Child Left Behind” era.
Where Design, Make, Play’s devotion to traditions of the Maker movement lead it awry is the disproportionate reliance on pre-fab circuit and robotics kits advertised by Popular Mechanics and Make magazine. While the kits succeed in placing technological components in the hands of consumers and students, they fail in providing any educative value on the subject or science or technology—much less design—as the sole task remaining is rote assembly.
The thinking evinced by this choice is well-intended: robotics dazzle and that injects some much-needed excitement into an otherwise heady content area. However, what the project gains in alluring gizmos it trades-off in flexibility and room for interpretation for the student to experiment with multiple assemblies, approaches, or structures—sapping it of any instructional value in the realm of design thinking or the arts.
The Third Teacher, too, fails to provide students the interpretive wiggle room to practice artistic reasoning, mental modeling, and design thinking—though it does so in a more egregious, misleading fashion. Where Design, Make, Play misfires, Mau’s work outright misleads. The text opens with the fanfare of high-profile essayists and a passing nod to the pressing need for curriculum redesign, before digressing into a thinly-veiled advertisement for design services of the interior variety.
Amidst what, frustratingly, is a reasonably poignant discussion of the educational potential of a modular, flexible classroom stood telltale giveaways where product recommendations were disconcertingly-specific in the same way the recipe on the back of a Kraft macaroni box might glaringly demand the cheese used be strictly of the Kraft variety, in all-caps. Further exploration of the book’s path to publishing revealed the book’s ulterior commercial motive.
Bruce Mao, the curator of the essays, is a designer of modern furniture, employed by VS Furniture—the publishing arm of which is OWP/P Architects. The book amounts to little more than content marketing for an interiors firm. Even more disconcerting, however, is that a majority of the other texts recommended under the same subject area told the same smarmy tale of the authoring “design think tank”—or some permutation thereof—being merely the publishing branch of an interiors firm marketing their products, a textbook company endorsing their own materials, a design consulting firm selling services, or an academic institution subtly steering interested readers to its continuing education programs.
Disillusioned but not deterred, I followed up on each text’s respective promise while seeking to round out their deficiencies. Thus, for a more arts-rigorous curriculum than that detailed in the pages of Design, Make, Play, I reached beyond the STEM genre to its offshoot: STEAM.
While a relatively young movement from a policy standpoint, STEM field has already witnessed the birth of a younger sibling: the STEAM movement—the additional ‘A’, denoting “Arts”. Favored by left-brain advocates who object on ideological grounds to the omission of the arts from the education policy sphere’s buzzword du’jour (as well as a hearty helping of liberal arts faculty who object on the more immediately pragmatic grounds of being denied their share of the federal funding windfall), STEAM is championed as a more inclusive acronym and more robust curriculum.
While maintaining the quantitative rigor of the original STEM core, STEAM also makes full use of the arts’ unique ability to enhance student cognition and engagement through novelty—or so says David Sousa in the fledgling movement’s manifesto:
From STEM to STEAM: Using Brain-Compatible Strategies to Integrate the Arts.
In the wake of underwhelming test scores that come despite widespread k-12 adoption of STEM initiatives, Sousa precociously brainstorms, “What type of activities would increase student engagement, raise motivation, focus on relevant issues, and—most importantly—develop creativity? Oh wait a minute: That’s what the Arts do!” (Sousa 14).
The ensuing pages catalogue STEM lesson plans spruced up with an overarching arts activity meant to evoke and reinforce the core concepts. While agreeing with the sentiment that the Arts are deserving of a place in the core curriculum, I find it highly problematic that a book that has risen to such stature amongst proponents of the STEAM movement is content merely adding an arts activity to preexisting STEM lesson plans and presenting it as STEAM. Worse yet, the word choice of the promotional language—both with this book specifically and the sub genre, at large—seems to do so shamelessly.
Citing cognitive and social neuroscience research, Sousa touts the arts’ unique ability to enhance student cognition and engagement in his press release: “Creativity, attention, problem solving, memory systems, motor coordination, analytical skills—all critical elements to achieving the STEM objectives” (Sousa 18). Such phrasing problematically implies the arts are merely a vehicle of engagement through which to push the existing STEM curriculum. It fails to bake arts into the content matter of the curriculum, as is the driving mission statement, supposedly, of the entire movement.
If the Arts are deserving of this foundational consideration, they should be thoughtfully integrated alongside science, math, etc. in the development process — not an ad hoc addition hurriedly tacked on. Furthermore, Sousa’s attention grabber on the cover jacket, “Build the skills mathematicians and scientists need!” slights the Arts once more by failing to entertain the possibility that there are distinctly arts-based careers (Sousa x).
While acknowledging the rush to bring STEAM literature to market so as not to get left behind in the new funding cycles by more traditional engineering initiatives, the texts themselves shouldn’t read as rushed re-packagings of existing content. This serves only to ironically solidify the arts as an afterthought when the authors seek, it would seem, to do the exact reciprocal.
Sousa’s text and the STEAM publishings at a collective seem to suffer from too narrow a perception of what “the Arts” entail. By failing to consider the creative occupations of design — be that material design, product design, interaction design, user experience design, etc.—it reinforces the problematic assumption that the Arts’ sole role in the STEAM movement is as a novel tool for engagement. Further, the STEAM literature observed—directly as result of the definitional shortsightedness that omits consideration of the design industry—presents an infantile view of arts-based projects, seeming wholly content with cutesy, craftsy paper projects more fit for a pediatrician’s waiting room than a functional classroom setting.
Susan M. Riley’s text,
STEAM Point: A Guide to Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics through the Common Core,
improves upon Sousa’s miscues by backing up the STEAM movement’s claim that the arts are worthy of a face on the core curriculum Mount Rushmore by, as the title itself evinces, treating the Arts with parity as but one of the STEAM principles that need be integrated to existing curriculum. However, Riley’s piece serves to illustrate a second shortcoming characteristic of STEAM literature as a collective in its mutually exclusive treatment of “technology” from “the Arts.” By localizing consideration of the Arts to marker-and-paper activities, it fails to capitalize on the deree to which products like the Adobe Creative Suite have made the creative workflow a decidedly technology-driven process.
What’s to blame for this miscalculation found in many examples of Maker-inspired literature, I believe, is an all-too-literal interpretation of “tinkering”—an in vogue STEM ed. buzzword if there ever was one. Tinkering can just as easily imply mentally grappling with an issue of color or font as it can literally inserting a screw; however, it seems only the latter interpretation is ever really considered. In my critique of the Sousa text, I lamented the widespread use of pre-fab pc and circuit board kits. Upon further reading, it occurs to me that is merely one component of a larger problem holding back the STEAM genre: an overly hard-ware centric approach.
This is a bias that owes its origins to mid-century writings by E.F. Schumacher, the economist who foreshadowed the maker’s movement, yet persists in even the most modern of maker’s texts, i.e. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, a 2013 publication by Wired editor Chris Anderson.
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Wired editor Chris Anderson
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by economist E.F. Schumacher
Schumacher is known in economics circles for his socially-egalitarian take on capitalism—his school, of which, is rooted in the idea of an “intermediate technology” (Schumacher 176). In contrast to the blazing efficiency of capital and cost-intensive manufacturing equipment, Schumacher advocated this “intermediate” technology that was simpler, cheaper, and—while more labor-intensive—nonetheless productive. “The task in every case would be to find an intermediate technology which obtains a fair level of productivity without having to resort to the purchase of expensive and sophisticated equipment,” Schumacher writes (195).
His mid-century calls for “the imaginative exploration of small-scale, more decentralized, more labor-using forms of organization” drew upon the lean, decentralized Japanese business model of the time and foretold the modern-day Maker movement by nearly a half century. One need only turn to Anderson’s text to see the parallels. Echoing Schumacher, Anderson writes of the increasingly democratic landscape of small-scale makers he expects the new arrival of desktop fabrication technology and 3d printers to usher in: “bottom-up, broadly distributed, and highly entrepreneurial” with its roots in “artisan-inspired DIY manufacturing and small-scale, distributed batch production” (Anderson 34, 50).
From the perspective of a STEAM researcher, these texts provide tremendous positive reinforcement in that they promise that the STEAM-directed classroom would function as a scale model, nearly, of the business and manufacturing landscape awaiting the students in the workplace upon completion of their schooling. There is no better preparation, it would seem, than simulation.
As my own curriculum will undoubtedly exhibit, I am a staunch backer of the discovery-based experimental learning inherent to the act of “making.” Further, I find the cultivation and embrace of craft and artisan labor skills refreshing and long overdue amidst an educational climate that all-too-often glosses over well-paying contractor and construction jobs in its stale belief that a college degree, not a skill, is a prerequisite for employment.
However, both texts serve as further evidence of the troubling fascination with hardware at the expense of software training—a subject first broached in regards to Sousa’s robotics and again with Susan Riley’s narrow definition of “tinkering.”
Schumacher, who wrote his text in the middle of the century, can be excused as software was still conceptually in its primordial soup phase. However, Anderson knows better to draw this false dichotomy between arts and technology with wording like, “… and so we move from an era of virtual art and design in bits to real world art and design in atoms” (Anderson 212). I contend that this flawed rhetoric of the maker’s movement has a two-part explanation:
a) the middle-aged engineer-turned-author archetype that describes many of the writers in this space came of age during the personal computer revolution—when DIY PC kits and the Homebrew Computing Club of Steve Jobs and Wozniak folklore—and they are projecting that culture and identity on the maker’s movement as a second-coming of sorts with which they can relate
b) the dichotomy of moving “from bits to atoms” and from the “web to the world” provides so eloquent and convenient a rhetoric that this stylistic phrasing actually creeps into the content and draws a starker divide than exists or perhaps even was intended by the author
My last point of critique of Anderson’s text and the maker movement at-large, which seems to provide the mantra guiding much of the STEAM publishing available to consumers, recalls our discussion of Bruce Mao’s The Third Teacher. STEAM and Maker-related texts spend a great deal of time musing on the details of the “makerspace” either in the work or classroom setting. This word references the collaborative digital fabrication labs—equipped with 3d printers, laser cutters, and other tools—that have popped up in urban areas across the country as sophisticated craftsman playgrounds, of sorts, for aspiring “makers” with the spare time and change to entertain the hobby (Anderson 42).
In the excitement surrounding the promise of desktop manufacturing, STEM planners often seem to forget that “technology” as its understood in college or workplace is still synonymous with competence in software programs, not hardware. Further, by discussing modern equipment and interiors as if they’re prerequisite to implementation of a STEAM curriculum, these texts risk creating the impression of a paywall to STEAM education that makes the subject less accessible to the public at the very time their trumpeting its supposedly revolutionary democratizing potential. Should Manhattanite Montessori parents want to shell out for the best equipment, I would praise their generosity and laud the educational opportunity. However, it need be more articulately emphasized in the texts that this is but a luxury and not a mandate.
When discussing methods of fostering creative collaboration and design thinking in the classroom, the emphasis need not be on details of space but rather, details of strategy. Following a glancing reference in Anderson’s text to the “agile project framework”, I turned to the two books that ultimately contributed most significantly to the formulation of my curriculum and the educational praxis and methodology underlying it.
Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer’s Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous
Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling
In the software world, especially in the past five years, the silver bullet has been agile methodologies. The agile project framework was spurred by a general dissatisfaction with the way that software projects were delivered—namely, splintering of roles, piles of documentation, and little collaboration.
“Design has become so wrapped up in its previous successes that it can be ego-driven, elitist, and exclusive. Design is invariably done in a self-referential vacuum of where no other factors are considered … Once the design is complete, the outputs are mounted on foam-backed presentation boards or described in heavy design specification tomes. These are then thrown over the wall for someone else to deliver or implement” (Ratcliffe 7). Failure at the time of execution is blamed on the latter party, not on perhaps, a faulty design submitted by the first party.
Reading this excerpt, specifically, I couldn’t help but see the parallel to creative curriculum planning. Agile was spurred in the tech world by a general dissatisfaction with the way software projects were delivered; perhaps it’s guiding methodology could similarly alleviate my dissatisfaction with the STEAM curriculum development process.
Agile moved away from discrete, sequential phases of work within siloed organizations (i.e. author, publisher, school district) and instead adopted cross-functional collaboration and concurrent working in short iterations. Another fundamental shift was to move away from the practice of doing too much of anything—including design—before realizing any value. The idea was to just enough to get started and then refine and recalibrate with short group think exercises and meetings as the process continued (Ratcliffe 113-120).
“Agile experience design is inclusive, rather than elitist; emergent with direction, rather than up front; integrated and collaborative, rather than handed over the fence” (Ratcliffe 9)
The above qualities seemed an apt prescription for fixing the flawed STEAM curriculum development process. Integrating the students would ensure engagement and educational value was maintained; flexible, emergent planning would allow room for on-the-fly tailoring of lesson plans to the specifics of the classroom dynamic that given day, and collocation and collaboration between administrators, teachers, and students would not only ensure all parties were operating on the same plane but show a mindfulness and consideration to the needs of one another.
With this epiphanic moment, I had, it would appear, the three methodological tenets of the design-oriented STEAM curriculum to implement with the students: Design thinking, service design, and the lean start-up ideology that advocates flexible lesson planning and frequent meeting of the minds with the students themselves to ensure they see the merit of the lessons and if it lacks said merit, notifies the teacher so they can reset and recalibrate the agenda.
Design thinking appeared on the scene a few years ago and takes the creative approach of traditional design into a business context. The idea is to enable nontraditional design people to use the creative methods of designers to inspire original thinking.
The aim of agile is to get to [end user] as quickly as possible. By including design in the process we can ensure that the [product] produced adds value to the business and is desirable to the end customer. There’s no point in [the product] if it doesn’t deliver value. So we need to check every decision, every action, and process throughout the product development life cycle and ask, “Where’s the value?” We need to take the time to understand why we’re doing the project, what value means in context and what that value looks like, and how to deliver and measure the value” (Ratcliffe 9).
Service design is about creating ecosystems of connected products, services with a production process that gathers individuals across organizational silos, across systems to collocate, collaborate, and co-create value.
End user, product designer, and subject matter experts work concurrently and collaboratively to develop multiple original ideas, which are tested at an early stage. Ideas then go through several rounds of end-user feedback an refinement before implementation (Ratcliffe 59 — Kneeshaw 59).
Lean start-up applies the philosophies of just in-time and just-enough to the business start-up process. It looks to rapidly generate and test business ideas in the marketplace at lightning speed. Test your ideas with the market as early and often as you possibly can. Get out of the office and onto the streets to get feedback from the target audience.
[It is paramount to] solicit regular and timely feedback about the designs from the end customers (the students). The aim is to test with customers (students) during every iteration, to ensure that the emergent designs are value-based, useful, usable, and desirable (Ratcliffe 13).
The idea is to either fail fast—that is, kill the concept that isn’t working as quickly as possible, before wasting any time or money developing it further, or scale quick—so for concepts that have shown promise of success in early testing we want to get the “minimum viable product” into the hands of customers so we can test and learn (Ratcliffe 58).
The “feedback” heavy lean start-up principles quite artfully complement the other watershed text I came across in my literature review:
The Art of Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Ed Schein
Schein provides a new and thoughtful reframing of interpersonal dynamics that advocates a move away from the status quo emphasis on “task orientation” and leaders telling subordinates how best to do their jobs.
I originally selected Schein’s piece, expecting it to provide content I could channel and re-purpose as a lesson for the Rebel Ventures students on active listening during field research and how best to draw meaningful feedback from customer interviewees. However, as the text ultimately concerned itself more with organizational power dynamics, its utility for my research morphed into something else: largely, a guiding doctrine for myself as I shaped the wording and structure of my lesson plan.
Schein advocates that the leader of a work unit — be that a manager in the boardroom or, in my case, an instructor in the classroom — focus less on controlling the content of discussion and more simply the process. Thus, the leader assumes more the role of facilitator than director.
A project manager has two primary goals: ensuring that there are clearly defined project objectives and parameters and that the project team meets the objectives. (Schein 86).
In this sense, Schein’s proposed work flow has much in common with the agile project methodology. However, where Agile Experience Design outlines defined best practices and roles to be implemented in a workplace where a culture of cross-hierarchical collaboration in large part already exists, Schein provides an instructional as to how a leader must alter his communicational comportment and demeanor to sow the seeds necessary to cultivate co-worker relations founded in trust and mutual respect and an environment, at large, that welcomes open exchange across those organizational lines.
When the leader takes a step back to consult his/her subordinates for honest feedback on an issue or on the merit of the manner by which he/she is going about discussing the issue, itself, it demonstrates a vulnerability and fallibility that “arouses positive helping behavior in the subordinate(s).” It shows genuine interest and curiosity in the opinions of the subordinate workers, signals a willingness to listen, and thereby empowers the worker.
If i want to convey to the students that they can trust me, how can i convey that? If i want to be genuinely helpful and caring over the course of our interactions, how do I convey that without unwittingly offending them by offering them a lesson they don’t particularly want or need? These are doubts that lingered as I worked and, frankly, that undermined my own confidence in the project at times.
It would be crucial for me to assume a more humble, vulnerable, directly-accessible position in the conversation, thus reducing the age and implied status gap and allowing a more informal, open exchange, and personalizing the interaction to a degree that transcends the strictly-codified teacher-student dynamic. Such talk is good and fine, but I was mindful of the fact that theory-level re-hashing of Schein’s thesis was no good without a feasible, finite plan for implementing his ideas in the classroom.
How would this humility and vulnerability manifest at the ground level? How would I demonstrate in clear-cut fashion that as co-creators and collaborators, we needed to do away with status boundaries and openly exchange ideas?
The answer: early and often, I need turn to the students, pausing and asking, “Is this engaging? Do you find this useful?” to allow both myself and the students to “reset, restate what they are here for, what they want, and, in other ways, recalibrate [our] expectations” (Schein 49) . This would serve to breed relationships founded on trust and mutual respect, thus allowing and empowering the student to feel psychologically safe to engage in open communication and submit their own ideas.
This quite vividly recalls the central premise of the agile methodology: that of pausing in each step of the product design process to ensure that the product still possesses value to the end user.
The end product in my case, naturally, is a curriculum and the students are the consumers, i.e. the customer in the metaphor. Thus, these periodic asides where the students and myself analyze where we’re at and where we’re headed and if what we’re doing is of value to them, we are able to contextualize, indeed, what educational value means in this context, what that value looks like, and whether it is present in our classroom.
Lean Start-Up applies the philosophies of just in-time and just-enough to the business start-up process. It looks to rapidly generate and test business ideas in the marketplace at lightning speed.
Thus, the agile product design process can be adapted to curriculum development, with the use of showcases, stand-ups, and retrospectives ensuring that the material being taught is student-centered, useful, usable, engaging, and — frankly, desirable, by the students. With agile composing the process framework, humble inquiry should be understood as the tool necessary to reach out to the students and break down, in their terms, what constitutes value, usability, and the like in their collective mind’s eye.
I predicted an obstacle that would arise during our creative brainstorming might be a general unwillingness to volunteer ideas, both out of personal insecurity and the culturally, age-engendered sense of deference to me as the authority figure possessed by the students. The inclusive, decentralized, open-forum of an idea generation session adhering to agile practices would surely constitute a stark break from the students’ norm of a fairly rigid teacher-student power dynamic.
As such, I could see them not truly realizing the sincerity or degree to which I was actually handing them the baton to steer our coursework and voice their opinions. Schein, himself, warns “situations in which the participants have different perceptions of their roles, ranks, and statuses are … the most vulnerable to miscommunication and unwitting offense or embarrassment (Schein 96).”
Thus, it would be essential to frequently turn to an agile process review period where the group and I stop, review, and analyze where we are headed in the decision-making and/or creative process. By demonstrating sincerity of interest in the students’ respective doses feedback drawing further contributions out from the students with non-guiding questions marked by genuine curiosity, I should hope our class grows to more closely approximate a learning environment where the cultural norms of “classroom instruction and expectations of student deference” may be temporarily suspended. Only then may the students speak in frank and forthcoming fashion about their perceptions of what has gone on and how the class may be better tailored to their needs or desires (Schein 106).
Thus concluded my analysis of material pertinent to implementing a student-directed design curriculum amongst the rebel students. I identified promising direction from the tide of STEM and STEAM-related curriculum guides entering the market but lamented:
a) the hobbyist bias that favored robotics and circuit assembly kits over a more free-thinking activity that allowed more interpretive room for design thinking to flourish
b) an oversimplification of what constituted an “arts” activity—verging on infantilizing at times—that implicitly subordinated the arts to merely cosmetic packaging for an existing STEM lesson plan rather than a viable content area deserving of equal inclusion within the subject matter
c) a creeping commercial ulterior motive within makers-inspired texts that sought to subtly push interior products and design services—thus capitalizing on an educational culture of the early-2000s heavily influenced by a charter school boom that emphasized re-thinking of school interiors and suffered from lack of administrative and fiscal oversight into the merit of overhead expenditures
Unexpectedly, the two texts that best informed my methodology in curriculum planning were those concerned with creative collaboration in the business sphere and that offered finite strategies and practical advice on implementing group-think and student feedback in the classroom.
The remaining reading work set out for me lied in the realm of guerrilla marketing, art, and activism texts that informed the curriculum activities that follow—though were not rigorously discussed above as they taxonomically fall outside of the realm of peer-reviewed “literature.” Nonetheless, I offer credit and citation below.
Lean Marketing for Startups: Agile Product Development, Business Model Design, Marketing, and Other Keys to Uncommon Success by Sean Ellis
Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday
The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith
