Classroom Connection

A Real "Classroom Connector"

With less than 12 hours left of 2009, I felt compelled to finish the year with a posting to honor a dear friend and design educator who passed away this year. Dr. Nathan Shapira, professor and head of the Industrial Design program at UCLA was foolish enough to recruit me to a teaching position in 1980 right after my graduation from The Rhode Island School of Design. The official UCLA memorial statement follows but what it doesn’t include are references to perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments- his life in the classroom and role in elevating design beyond the acts of styling or production of artifacts. Long before it became fashionable, Dr. Shapira was much more concerned with “Design Thinking” paying much more attention to understanding the needs of people than simply looking at how to develop the next new gadget. Before the terms “Universal” and “Sustainable” Design came of age , Nathan was looking at how desing could play a role in improving the lives of people with disabilities or those living in poverty.  He dedicated his life as an educator toward networking people to people and people to causes.  In retrospect he was a pioneer in the world of community service learning. 

As I ponder Nathan’s passing, I’m reminded of the title of this blog “Classroom Connections” Nathan indeed connected the classroom with a very large world…Work has begun at San Francisco State University Depart of Design and Industry to establish the Nathan Shapira Archive.  It is quite fitting that the director of the archive project is Prof. Ricardo Gomes.  Pictured on the right in the above photo, Ricardo was as much a “son” of Nathans’ as he was a protégé. Those interested in the archive can contact Prof. Gomes, Chair Department of Design and Industry at SFSU.  rgomes@sfsu.edu

The following is drawn from the UCLA School of Design/ Media Arts website:

Nathan H. Shapira, an internationally renowned design scholar, curator and critic who was a UCLA faculty member for more than 40 years, died May 16 2009 at his home in Santa Monica. He was 80 years old.

Professor Shapira was a member of the Department of Design faculty since 1963 in charge of industrial and interior design. He was an authority on design for developing countries, on architecture and design in Los Angeles, and on Italian design throughout the United States and Europe.

He won many national and international design awards, addressed major international design conferences and contributed to leading international design periodicals, including Abitare, Construire, Domus, ID Magazine and Ottagano. His professional practice included graphic design, product design, packaging, architecture, interiors and exhibition designs.

He had a special interest in design for social responsibility and its relationship to industrial design and advanced technologies. His research and writings frequently addressed the theory that technology has widened the gap between rich and poor societies and that design could alleviate this problem. He maintained that future designers must concern themselves with the quality of life, not merely the decorative arts.

In 1987, the city of Trieste, Italy, honored him with the title of "Cavalieri," the Italian equivalent of a knighthood, for his curatorial direction and exhibit of "The Quest for Continuity" exhibit and other contributions to Italian society, culture and design. He also served as a research fellow at the universities of Trento and Bologna in Italy.

Most recently, Professor Shapira served as a consultant to the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles and a guest writer for the international architecture and design bilingual monthly, Ottagono, published in Italy.

"Ring" in the New

  
 
 

It is now a little over two weeks ago, that on a very rainy Friday afternoon my doctorate in education was approved. I signed the last of the official graduation papers and as I began to make my way out of the Graduate Studies building at the University of California, Davis, a bell was rung and a voice from within shouted out- "Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you Dr. Brian Donnelly.  Apparently the bell ringing is a long standing tradition to officially acknowledge the awarding of a doctoral degree.  After many years of hard work I thought this moment would bring a sense of exhilaration- liberation from all of the nights and weekends of taking courses, reading, writing and analyzing data. Alas, it was 7:45 a.m. – there was no sense of exhilaration- and I had little time to waste.  I needed to be back at my middle school Industrial Technology classroom and ready for the 150 plus students I would have the opportunity to work with that day.

 Looking back, I now find my self thinking about an intriguing experience that occurred on the same day that perhaps explains what happened in the morning. Students in my second period class were excited about a new project we just started using Autodesk Inventor software and a 3D printer that has been generously loaned to us by Klein Educational Systems. After completing an Autodesk Design Kids curriculum jewelry project, I had challenged student to develop designs for rings that we could fabricate with the printer. Amidst the classroom chaos that I’ve grown to embrace, kids were running around trying to determine the proper diameter for their rings, how those dimensions related to the inner and outer circumference which in turn determined the size of the flat rectangle that they would create and sketch on prior to using the bend command. Here were some of the same kids who I often heard say they hated math – and they were whipping out the calculators, arguing about whether to use 2 Pi R or Pi R squared or predicting the mass of the finished ring and volume of material required to produce it.  Well I can’t say that my emotions reached the level of exhilaration- but I certainly felt good inside. 

This to me was where the rubber was meeting the road. The doctoral work lead me to investigate countless books and articles extolling the virtues of integrating academics and relevant experiential learning.  Yet, here  I was in a public school that based on traditional standards was considered high achieving. But there are still many students who are struggling, especially in the areas of math and science. Like the vast majority of schools, we deliver academic course content through a system that is still largely driven by an archaic 20th century model of discrete course sessions. I think I felt good for those few moments because I was reminded that my heartfelt belief in the need to dramatically change the way we “do school” was validated by the enthusiasm with which these students’ took to this “math” project. But my course is a stand alone elective- after the bell rings they will still find themselves at some point in their day sitting in a math class for another 55 minutes. 

 Maybe it wasn’t so important that I didn’t feel some thrill at hearing that bell ring pronouncing me “Doctor”.  Maybe the exhilaration comes in sensing that I’m on the right track-- advocating for greater integration between “academics” and experiential learning- where learning isn’t dissected into neat 55 minute packages.  Maybe- hopefully, the thrill will be in discovering how to use this newly minted doctorate to contribute to the groundswell of educational reform efforts where seemingly insignificant activities, like designing a ring are viewed as rich learning opportunities.

"Thinking" Like a Design Engineer

 
  
I’ll call her Alyssa.  She is in 8th grade and has this wonderful sense of curiosity and enthusiasm for problem solving.  This is my first time working with the Autodesk VEX Robotics curriculum ; so I was up with Allysa and her classmates – “I’m going to learn along side you”. I had some advantages having worked with Inventor for several years and participating on developing some of the STEM content for the curriculum. But this wonderful group of students seems to be perfectly ok having a teacher admit that they too are a learner. So Alyssa has this idea- how can I assemble theVEX components to create a device that could pick up and “deliver” a bowl of cat food from the floor to the counter. With confidence,(despite uncertainty) she emerged a few days later saying check this out…clunky yes- but did it work- yes.

So why am I excited and intrigued by this. Simply put, I think this is what learning is about, i.e., “making it your own”. This notion of students taking control of their own learning is central to the important theories of constructivism and cognitive development- theories that are often ignored in the quest to standardize learning.  What was Alyssa doing?  She was embracing this constructivist approach that emphasizes using prior knowledge and experience- (she had spent a couple of weeks going through the Autodesk VEX curriculum ) and then taking that knowledge and experience and “applying it to new situations”.

I’m not sure if it was a completely conscious decision, but the structure of the Autodesk VEX curriculum encourages this sort of “Disciplinary Understanding”, that Educational Psychologist Howard Gardner espouses. (Gardner is attributed with the notions of multiple intelligences).  So Allysa , although she might not label it as such, was reaching for deeper understanding as she engaged in “thinking like a designer or engineer”.  
 
The Autodesk VEX curriculum in this sense might be seen as a model that challenges the typical cookie cutter “drill and kill” curriculums that dominate our standards based (can you say “No Child Left Behind” ) curriculum. There is plenty of guidance to get you started, but learners are encouraged to use that experience as the platform to dive into their own ideas.  It doesn’t matter if Alyssa or any of the other students in my class become engineers or designers (Although I bet a few will). What matters is that our classrooms must become places for contextualized problem solving. Places where students use resources, build on prior experiences, collaborate with others, and interact with other cultures.  One curricular “kit” is not going to solve our educational crisis- but the focus on problem solving found in the Autodesk VEX curriculum is definitely on the right track.