In 77 days... "Go & Make"
The month of June marks the final month of my time as a Fellow at the Foundry Makerspace.
Ever since my daughters started watching Phineas and Ferb years ago, every time summer rolls around the Phineas and Ferb Theme Song queues up in my head.
"There's 104 days of summer vacation
And school comes along just to end it
So the annual problem for our generation
Is finding a good way to spend it.
Like maybe... Building a rocket Or fighting a mummy Or climbing up the Eiffel Tower"
I never understood why the inventing brothers and their classmates got 104 days of summer vacation. The summer vacation for the Harrisburg School district is just 77 days (6/5 - 8/21, not including 8/21). I finally looked it up and found on the SciFiStackExchange, that the creators Dan Povenmire & Jeff "Swampy" Marsh" thought the show would last only 52 episodes, or 104 days. You can thank me later for the useless trivia.
Since my first viewing of Phineas and Ferb, I was captivated by the approach of go make an amazing summer. Each episode they go and invent something new that always disappears before their sister Candice can "bust" them. It is a great anthem for summer. Go & make. As Horace famously quoted, "Carpe Diem".
During the past 11 months I have enjoyed working with the other Fellows and the individuals within Camp Curtin Academy Middle School and SciTech High School. Overall 3 school projects were completed at Camp Curtin and 2 at SciTech. Two additional projects were completed through the United Way Day of Service and MLK Jr. Day of Service. Within the school year timeframe, other projects were conceptualized. That is part of the process in building capacity. This is Design Thinking. What has become clear within the Foundry this year, is a need to model the 4Cs in all that we do. We have challenged each other in deep discussion to locally affect education. In that building capacity, we hope that the projects have helped to inspire lifelong learning.
June also brings along with it an annual family vacation, which allowed me time to decompress. During the week away, I was reading through several books, which I really cherish. I always have difficulty selecting books when I travel. I find that I always over pack the number of books, because I look deeply at how they overlap. I see each book as a traveling buddy. I like to jump around through various chapters and see how each one feeds one another. I see each book as a person/voice in a continuous conversation. I like the challenge of trying to find the connections between them. During this trip I happened to bring along Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States with my selection. I had skimmed through it years ago, and for some reason it was calling me to go on vacation after I re-read Zinn's quote about historians:
"Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressing the way a mapmaker' technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation - for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, and nations."
I always find this quote meaningful, because it describes some of the honesty that we must seek in teaching concepts. The context is extremely important as our lives are filled with nuance and complexity. Recently I find myself in the midst of the last portion - pushing education and knowledge beyond “technical problems of excellence,” and rather the messiness of human existence. I continue to help students understand a deep quote that I carry with me. It is a famous quote is by Frederick Douglass in his speech of Blessings of Liberty and Education,
“Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.”
Our inherent freedom is within our continual learning. I tell students we must never stop. To stop is to not adapt. Sometimes I find that students have given up on the pursuit. Or that they have been dissuaded through the stumbling along in a system that does not either, fully understand their perspective, or could provide them a means to express their own needs.
I find that both of these issues connect to the end of last month’s blog discussion (5/30/2017), where I mentioned the books The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It (Richard Florida, 2016) and Human Capital: What It Is and Why People Invest It (Thomas D. Davenport, 2007).
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the city where Foundry Makerspace originates, has been deeply affected by a multitude of issues. The past year, I've found it easy to connect them to the Triple Bottom Line thinking of sustainability: People (social equity), Profit (economic prosperity), and Planet (environmental stewardship). These are easy enough for people to remember. Living in Harrisburg for about 12 years, and studying the city during my graduate and undergraduate life, I see that Harrisburg has really focused on one of the areas. That is Profit.
Don't get me wrong, there have been organizations and individuals, who have generously gave to build the other two areas, but when one looks at the current situation, the city's human capital has been neglected and the environment (both physical and natural) have been neglected. This is why I find the intersection of the two books to be extremely important for a shift in Harrisburg's future growth for all. To borrow Florida's term: Urbanism For All. I found in Davenport's book an interesting equation that I am going to adapt for any future discussions on the topic of strengthening human capital among students. From page 21, The Total Human Capital Investment equation, i.e. "Student as Investor" model, can be expressed as:
While I had hoped to push through all of these books, it just did not happen. There was not enough time in the 168 hours of each week among all the other tasks. I did however find some final important concepts from Peter F. Drucker’s, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, written way back in 1985. Reading these things were like taking a time traveling trip.
“Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.” (Drucker, 35)
He then describes “Seven Sources for Innovative Opportunity”
Within the Enterprise:
The unexpected = the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event;
The incongruity = between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it “ought to be”;
Innovation based on process need;
Changes in industry structure or market structure that catch everyone unawares;
Outside the Enterprise:
Demographics (population changes);
Changes in perception, mood, and meaning;
New knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific.
“Successful entrepreneurs, whatever their individual motivations - be it money, power, curiosity, or the desire for fame and recognition - try to create value and to make a contribution. Still, successful entrepreneurs aim high. They are not content simply to improve on what already exists, or to modify it. They try to create new and different values and new and different satisfactions, to convert a “material” into a “resource,” or to combine existing resources into a new and more productive configuration.”
(Drucker, 34)
My hope is that in year 4 of the Foundry Makerspace, there is a continued shift into these areas of innovation and human capital, connecting to the ongoing dialog started through the local Maker culture, above all, honed in on an impact that is Collective for All.
STEAM Making @ Foundry Makerspace
While the projects wrapped up at the end of May, the Fellows were busy completing Assessments, putting together the Curriculum Binders, finalizing the School Playbooks, and packing up equipment for storage during the final Inventory Process.
The following collection of photos is a means to document the final 30 days.
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