Tour

A Look at the Makerspace

The Digital Space

The digital spaces of the course are constantly evolving. Each one offers some insight into what it means to run a makerspace in the Humanities -- to change the paradigms around instruction, student work, and feedback. Here is a partial list:

The Physical Space

A tour of the physical space starts, strangely enough, with two instructional posts. The older post ("Head Training") is about how critical the face-to-face interactions are, even in a course built around interstitial learning; the post from this school year reflects in-class efforts to experiment with what that physical space looks like.

After reading those, you can make better sense of the evolving pictures of the space, which changes shape and function regularly.

Concrete and AbstractTime to put our heads together and see what we can do with the physical space. That’s Paul Chadwick’s “Concrete,” by the way, which is well worth your time.

Head Training: The 36th Chamber – Sisyphean High – MediumBring the (pedagogical) ruckus

Photo Tour

The following section will (hopefully) continue to be updated with pictures of the classroom and explanations of how each modular piece fits into instruction, student work, and feedback.

Conference Corner

There is no "front" of the classroom. Instruction, student work, feedback, etc., are all interspersed throughout different stations. There is, however, a static corner for the teacher that serves primarily for conferences and individual workshops. Even in a collaborative atmosphere, the most powerful teaching happens one-on-one; the difference is the expectation that a better form of feedback generates a sort of herd immunity.

In the foreground is a charging station mounted to a table for students who need to charge their devices during the period.

Modular Furniture

210 is lucky enough to have tables that can be moved and reconfigured, plus chairs of different types: ones that roll, ones that wiggle and bend slightly, and taller ones for use with taller workspaces.

All of this is modular, which means it is designed, like every other aspect of the course, to be combined and recombined into different shapes.

Miscellaneous Resources

A traditional makerspace will have buckets of electronics, shelves of tools, etc., to help students create. Our space approaches resource management a little differently. The usual Humanities toolbox is there -- the cart of books in this picture includes 1984 and the latest editions of the school newspaper -- but we also provide students access to kinesthetic toys and activities. We know that playing with Legos boosts creativity, and working with our hands makes certain kinds of discussion and workshopping easier.

Akrasia Corner

The idea that it's hard to make the right choice is such an old idea that the Greeks had a word for it: akrasia, which was the centerpiece of a series of assignments in this year's makerspace. The goal is to forgive ourselves for the tendency to procrastinate, check social media, gossip, etc. -- and then to work harder to prevent those poor academic choices while in the space.

This corner is for students to put away computers, cell phones, and other devices during the period. It carries no stigma; in fact, choosing to remove distractions is perfect fodder for metacognitive writing.

Sisyphean High Posters

These are posters that showcase some of the alternative instruction and assessment systems used in the makerspace. A complete archive of all classroom posters is here:

Sisyphean High Posters

Most makerspaces decorate the walls with directions and guides -- reminders of what to do, how to do it, how to stay safe, etc. In our room, there's not much danger of losing a finger or an eye to power tools, so the posters and wall decorations cover grade abatement, the interstitial classroom, and how students can direct their own learning.

Course Calendars

The flexibility and responsiveness of the space paradoxically requires more structure in planning. This picture shows notes on daily lessons, with several iterations of course calendars below and to the right. Here are examples:

These are updates from the end of the school year.

Whiteboard Collaboration

This shows a rolling whiteboard next to a table with a whiteboard fastened to it. On the ground is a crate of smaller whiteboards. Students are able to brainstorm essay ideas, work on projects, etc., with these.

Digital Collaboration

The screen in this picture is attached to a Chromebit, which lets students who arrange themselves in front of the screen to work on essays and other writings at the same time. This is also the screen we use for presentations and the occasional lecture -- since even a makerspace with flipped instruction needs that capacity from time to time.

Whiteboard Writing (1)

This is an image of one of our whiteboards, which at this point was being used for writing-based instruction. Those are engineering loops that were inspired by the ones developed in Chappaqua for their makerspaces. In our case, the process uses a seven- or eight-fold system for writing, which has gone by a couple of different names over the years.

The earlier versions of this writing system are under "Bishop Composition" at the central site for Sisyphean High. The rubric, DAMAGES, still sees some use, but my current focus is on adapted an engineering loop like the one on this whiteboard that incorporates a lot of those old writing guides (like this one) into a more accessible form.

Whiteboard Writing (2)

Here's an earlier iteration of that writing process. This came from an in-class workshop on "character essays," which are most often connected to applications -- NHS, college, etc. -- and require Paul Graham's "river" (from this essay) to stand out among the crowd.