UNC Charlotte: Making at the Intersection of Arts and Sciences

The Charlotte Intersections project, called Making STEAM, is a partnership between Discovery Place and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Writing Project (UNCCWP). This project was born out of the institutions’ shared values and work history, as well as common interests within the leadership team, all of whom believe deeply in the integration of arts and sciences. Making STEAM focused on “making” in both the school and the museum settings. As one project leader explained,

We explore ‘making’ as a concept, as way of teaching, and as a set of actions requiring literacy, science, mathematics, engineering, technologies, and creativity to engage students in the learning of science through literacy and technology-rich experiences. By ‘maker,’ we mean what Dale Dougherty in his TED talk calls ‘curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries.’ A ‘make’ in this project invites students to play with, try out, or represent ideas through physically and digitally making things and then sharing drafts in progress in various ways ([e.g.,] Google+, Twitter, classrooms, face-to-face forums). Makes in this project are science content­– and literacy-rich. Makes bring science learning and literacy together by following the recursive processes of writing: launching an idea, composing, reflecting, sharing, and looping back and around.

The project involved informal educators from Discovery Place, who teamed with pairs of teachers in three different Charlotte-area schools (a writing project teacher-consultant and a science teacher at each school). These groups of three worked in schools to guide the writing project teacher-consultant’s and science teacher’s students through make cycles, weeks-long activity cycles in which students, the pair of teachers, and the informal educators were engaged in making activities focused around specific themes (e.g., wonder, play, and curiosity) in both their science and language arts classes. These themes were also extended to activities completed at the museum during field trips and special events. Students then shared their collective work through an online Google+ community group that was open to all participating teachers and students, university students of UNCCWP faculty, and the members of the Intersections project network. One participating educator, Steve Fulton, explained an example of a paper-engineering activity that took place in his classroom:

Most recently, we played with paper engineering and pop-up books. The project grew out of novels students were reading in my eighth-grade ELA [English language arts] class. The novels, which all fell in some way under the broad theme of ‘injustice,’ were read by students in small book club groups, or literature circles. Toward the conclusion of their novels, students brainstormed themes and subject matter related to the text that they felt [were] important to their lives and/or community, and used this area of interest as a starting place for both research and creative writing. Building a pop-up book required students to be able to do more than write a compelling narrative; they would also need some familiarity with the mechanisms commonly employed [in] creating [pop-up books]. Robby Stanley, the informal educator from Discovery Place, collaborated with the science teacher, Mrs. Green, to transform her classroom for a few days into a paper-engineering workshop. With plenty of scrap paper, scissors, and markers on hand, the two teachers guided students as they worked through iterations of each of the four mechanisms commonly used in pop-up books: pull tabs/sliders, flaps, layers, fold-outs, and wheels. On the days … students tinkered with paper in science class with Robby and Mrs. Green, they were finishing and sharing their creative writing pieces in my class, negotiating collaborative groups and the stories that their books would feature, and beginning to storyboard the individual pages. While all students were creating a similar form, how they crafted that pop-up book—from the story it told [to] the pop-up mechanisms it employed [and] the ways illustrations supported and interacted with both—was up to them. What was also up to them, and perhaps the greatest challenge, was how … to make this all happen as a group. The students created these stories that were inspired by readings in both their science and their language arts classes … so, the content worked its way in, both in the books that they made and in the process they went through to make them. The way that they composed the books gave them experience with both doing science and doing literacy. It was the most rigorous experience with composition that has ever taken place in my classroom.

Students also participated in and facilitated making experiences for the broader community at Discovery Place and annual Maker Faires held at the local children’s library. As one teacher wrote,

We brought the affordances of the science museum’s informal learning structure to the formal learning environment of public schools through making, and we remade the school field trip to the science museum so that students were actively participating in and contributing to the science museum.

Benefits to participants

Ongoing, formative-evaluation interviews with participating formal and informal educators show that both benefit from the project in myriad ways. Both are learning more about making and how to integrate making into their respective education spaces. The classroom teachers become familiar with science content and the engineering design processes, project planning, and informal learning strategies from the museum educators, whereas the museum staff learn from the NWP teachers’ writing strategies that they are incorporating into other museum education programs. For example, on one recent field trip, one of the formal educators participating in the project asked his students to facilitate making and science learning experiences for other visitors. Students helped demonstrate how to make stop-motion animations at a museum station; other students shared the pop-up books they had made in their science and language arts classes and facilitated pop-up engineering activities for other visitors. From observing these young facilitators, museum staff learn how to connect with and draw visitors into facilitated experiences.

Both formal and informal educators became more comfortable with implementing making projects in their settings. As one project leader noted in a formative interview, the educators apply making principles to include writing as a form of making and recognize less-obvious science and literacy intersections. For example, one participating English teacher spoke about how the interdisciplinary work, combined with a focus on making, has spread beyond the activities in the project to other areas of his teaching:

The underlying principles of making—the open-endedness, the student self-directedness—I have pulled and worked into other class assignments, too, and changed the way I teach and the way my students go about learning. When students know they have to figure things out, and I am there to support them; the whole dynamic of my class changes throughout the whole year. And when the learning that happens in science class intersects with learning in language arts class, where students can translate their learning from one class to another, it has gotten more kids engaged. And the students take what they do when they are making and apply it in their science work and in their language arts work. When we have the space for students to make, where it isn’t scripted and the notion of trying again is a big part of it, their attitude[s] change. When they have a problem in front of them in science class, they aren’t as afraid of not having the right answer or not getting it right the first time. And this translates to the writing my students are doing—they are more likely to jump in and get words down on paper. So this gives the students the chance to think about how the skills they are learning through [making] are the same skills they need to be writers, scientists, and learners in general.

Many of these ideas and practices have spread throughout the museum culture as well, as “the educators who participated in this program share their learning with those who did not have the privilege,” notes Gábor Zsuppan, a project leader. Informal educators are incorporating strategies learned from their writing-project colleagues into other programs they run at the museum. For example, one informal educator said:

I am able to take what I am learning with this and apply it more directly because I am the camp coordinator and I write all of the summer curriculum. So, I am starting to bring in more literacy-based activities, like writing reflections on camp activities, to our science camps.

Participating educators have reported to evaluators—and formative-evaluation observations corroborate—that students of the formal educators have been highly engaged throughout and have benefitted, both from their integrated science-and-literacy-through-making experiences, as well as their deeper relationship with Discovery Place. Students shared how powerful they felt it was to have subjects that were normally taught in separate classrooms taught together. For example, high school students reading 18th-century novels in their English class were asked to create 18th-century theme parks based on their novels. Their projects, made from cardboard and other simple materials, highlighted one particular invention of the era and the physics or engineering behind that invention. They were assisted in this process through the coteaching of the English teacher, a writing project teacher-consultant, and an informal science educator from Discovery Place. The theme park activity was complemented by a field trip to the museum, where students explored phenomena through their interactions with exhibits that tied back to what they had been learning in physics and making in English class. As one student described:

The museum was really interesting. We walked by and there was this [museum program] on momentum and we were just doing momentum a few days ago (in physics class). We saw inventions and we were just talking about some of the inventions of the 18th century and so that kind of tied in with that and it was nice. At the Discovery Place we definitely saw connections in the things that we got to play with. A lot of those were based off of things that we learned in physics.

Another making activity students engaged in was creating a visual map of a poem in one class period (Figure 2).

The value of this process is described by one of the students:

When you read [a poem], and you think about it, you might pull out a few things, but when you have to actually create something, you can’t just have one idea or one symbol because that is boring. So you have to pull out a bunch of different symbols and make them relate and you will find that the author does that, but you usually don’t see it until you dig deeper. So it is a really cool and fun way to get you to really dig deep about the poem.

These students valued the combination of science and literacy: Another student said:

The integration of subjects has been great, because we think that subjects are very boxed, confined into their own little compartments and they don’t really mingle. So we are using physics in our projects, and doing the engineering part of it, and we are writing about our projects, and we are creating and we have all of these different pieces to make this one whole … I learned that it is difficult at first and you might not really know where to start, but once you do, you find your way and realize that it is not really 12 different subjects, it is just really one subject.

I had never done a lot like it, actually having physics in English, together … I feel like I learned more this semester than I have in my past two years.

Lessons Learned

In its first three years of work, the Intersections project has already touched the lives of many people—nearly 300 preK–12 formal educators, over 150 informal educators, and over 700 youth have participated in these 10 projects. Formative evaluation has focused not only on gathering data about the nature and quality of these local projects and the experiences of and contributions to participants, as we have highlighted in these two cases, but also on the feasibility, strengths, and challenges of the local partnerships, as well as the work and the benefits of the network. (Summative evaluation of the program will take place in the winter and spring of 2016.)

The work and evaluation of the Intersections project show, and the two cases in this article highlight, that perhaps most significantly, the project has fostered professional learning communities on multiple levels. On a national level, the partnership between the NWP and ASTC has created opportunities for these two organizations to learn from one another about facilitating local partnerships and providing high-quality professional development. In addition, meetings and sessions at the two organizations’ annual national conferences have provided opportunities for members of the broader informal STEM and literacy education communities to learn about innovative science-literacy programming. Additionally, the two organizations’ work in other areas (e.g., NWP’s Educator Innovator community, ASTC’s communities) has allowed the network’s participants to connect into other, larger communities engaged in similar efforts.

On a local level, the partnerships between writing-project sites and science centers have engaged in and learned from designing and implementing locally appropriate science-literacy projects. These projects have fostered ongoing opportunities for leaders of these organizations and the participating formal and informal educators to inquire into many different subject areas, from place-based education to fostering youth development through science and literacy, fostering curation, and better understanding best practices in product-centered design. In some cases, they have also engaged professionals from other local schools and community-based organizations in their efforts, such as citywide science festivals, after-school programs, local poetry organizations, art museums, and libraries.

Becky Carroll (bcarroll@inverness-research.org) is a senior researcher at Inverness Research in Inverness, California. Tanya Baker (tbaker@nwp.org) is Director of National Programs at the National Writing Project in Berkeley, California.