Most of us know how project-based learning can revitalize school by putting students face to face with authentic challenges, coming up with their own solutions to problems faced by real people in the real world.
But a lot of school content gets left out of this approach. You don’t need an understanding of the American Revolution or The Bluest Eye or the periodic table in order to make the local park more accessible or write a letter to the city council. So these subjects get left out of this more authentic learning, and end up getting taught pretty much like they always have been.
What if we didn’t? How could we teach this more traditional content like we teach PBL, in a way that puts students inside the works they’re studying, tackling problems like those the poet or the chemist or the representative to the constitutional convention tackled? How might we invite them inside these problems—so they can understand the trade-offs they faced, the design choices they made and the logic behind them, the alternate paths they could have followed
What if we change the way we think about the stuff those courses are made of? Not as a body of knowledge that was figured out a long time ago, textbooks full of stuff our kids need to get into their heads—but as the tracks left by ordinary people coming up with the best solution they could build to the challenges they faced. Which is, of course, what it actually is. Because most of school tries to fake us out. Takes the contingent mess of what actually happened (the wandering paths traveled by real people trying to figure out how to make things work), cleans them up, smoothes them out, and organizes them into numbered chapters. As though the painting on the wall or the poem on the page is the only one Picasso or Angelou could have made, and all that’s left for sts is to learn how to admire it properly.
What would it look like to reverse engineer the curriculum? What if we brought design’s skillset, mindset, and process to everything we do in school?
I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record…of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone. I learned…that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished….Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it.’
R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1932)
Maybe we’d turn the experience of learning this stuff into something like the experience of the people who discovered it. Put students face to face with the problem the colonist or the chemist or the poet faced and challenge them to figure out their own solution to it—and thereby understand that problem intimately. Then evaluate the solution this earlier person came up with, the way they handled the hard parts of the problem; how they balanced its trade-offs; how the place they were coming from (their personality, context, values, vocabulary) shaped the design choices they made—and how they framed the problem before them.