Products & Projects
What Students Make in a Humanities Makerspace
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The first products of a Humanities makerspace are the students themselves. They design blueprints around universal skills and traits, which are understood in the context of their needs and goals. This is best showcased through student testimonials, especially those steeped in the language of universal skills and traits.
The second products are the relationships formed between the different stakeholders in the system. The goal of a learning environment like ours is to bring real-world collaboration into a public high school -- that is, collaboration driven by shared beliefs and goals, not grades. This is why empathy is the first skill taught and honed, and why it is tagged with an image from Ken Robinson's seminal speech on educational paradigms.
The instructional post embedded here introduces empathy in this respect, couching it in terms of what it produces -- including how it helps students be more prepared for the work expected in college and careers.
The third products -- and the most salient ones for this sort of thing -- are the projects and student writings that are collected below.
You can also look at the embedded page for Senior Talks below, which is the default landing page for all final projects in senior year.
Load the site here to view student projects of all kinds, from letters to TED Talks to literature studies.
These Senior Projects have incorporated the work formerly showcased through the Pareto Projects and student writing collections below.
The website embedded here is 20Time.org, which served as the inspiration for the first Humanities version in 2016. Later year saw numerous tweaks to the process, resulting in some excellent student work. See more here:
Writing in our space is influenced by the philosophies of Joan Didion, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Neil Postman, and many others. The most influential text, however, is from a name less familiar to most of us: Paul Graham, whose "The Age of the Essay" inspires a break from traditional writing work.
The products of students who study his perspective and use the makerspace's writing process are wide-ranging. In this post, for instance, the focus is on writing without screens and exploring the kinesthetic side of creation; other prompts are all about self-exploration; still others are test-driven.
Here are examples of what students have produced in 2017 and 2018:
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