NOTE TO CURRENT STUDENTS (9/14/18): We won’t be starting these projects until October 1, but I need the post online for organizational purposes. Set it aside until it’s necessary.
Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. Listen to “Kiddie Litter,” featuring Sage Francis, here. That song underscores, in a dark and surreal and imagistic way, the idea of being anaesthetized. Compare it to “Take Me Home,” by Brother Ali, which is a song about creating things and feeling pretty good about doing that.
Something Completely Different
This project is built on the “Genius Hour” framework, which you can read about here. It continues to evolve, showcasing the strengths of the classroom makerspace: the willingness to iterate, refine, and evolve an idea; the sense to reboot that idea when necessary; the openness to feedback of all kinds. Search this site for “Pareto Project,” and you can see the long arc of it.
The best place to start, however, is with testimonials and student work:
That showcases what is possible through these projects. And for each student, it will be projects, plural — one personal, one community-based, with the flexibility to expand and contract those projects as necessary.
Here is the guide to a successful Pareto Project:
Use the PDF if you have any formatting issues with the Google Docs version. When you open the document, you should notice the many hyperlinks, which indicate that this is designed to be read online, interstitially, with an opportunity to ask questions and research answers at your own pace. You can (and probably should) print individual pages, however, to help you workshop some of the steps.
This project is probably the best example of what a Humanities makerspace produces, because it frames the project with metacognitive writing and collaborative experimentation. It’s a prime example of how to unlock the real course. Take advantage of it.
Note: With some time and a lot of coffee, I hope to get a fully converted version of the guide online as an interactive post. This will be updated when and if that happens.