Dan Wishard in his New Skin hammer as a 6th grader in Saugus, California.
JARED'S STORY
The New Skin exercise became personal for me when my step-grandson Jared's other grandmother died and I took him out while his parents made funeral arrangements. We went to see a movie selected by this seven-year-old boy who had a learning disorder and was usually very jumpy, but as we watched the movie, he sat rigid and still. I felt how affected he was by his grandmother's death.
We left the movie and wandered aimlessly through a shopping mall. Tired of it all, I thought of the time Jared had dressed up for Halloween as an Object—a truck costume made by his dad—and I became the educator. I asked Jared, “What if I suddenly turned into my wristwatch?” That hooked him. From then on, I was a wristwatch as he gleefully answered my probing questions about my friends, relatives, my ancestry, enemies, and dreams.
In the Brookstone store, Jared shouted, “Look, there are your relatives!” as he dragged me to see wristwatches, wall clocks, and anything else that ticked or kept time. He explained how each object was like me, but not quite the same. Each store in the mall became a treasure hunt to find a relative, and the relatives got more complex. If they were even made out of the same material as my wristwatch, Jared called them “almost relatives.”
I was doing a verbal version of the New Skin activity. I am always struck by the strong attachment that students have to the physical objects that they build in the classroom, but I was surprised by how long Jared wanted to sustain this verbal game. Just before leaving him that night, he said, “So, if you're a wristwatch, when you die, we can just get a new battery and you'll be okay.”
His parents said that for the first time in days, Jared went to bed alone that night and slept straight through until morning. Now in his twenties, he still remembers everything about that day.
THE GENESIS OF THE STUDENT-BUILT CITY
I was convinced that teaching students to become creative thinkers had to be integral to all required subjects. I was looking for a way that my method of Design-Based Learning would enable all students—not just those designated as gifted or artistic—to practice creative thinking. If students were asked to design or invent their own solutions to topics and concepts underlying subject matter, before formally learning that information, self-expression would bloom and they would become adept in transferring what they learned from one setting to another. They would learn that information was theirs to use and reuse. My research and experience with the New Skin activity had underscored the power of the spatial domain for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. Now I needed to find a practical way to realize what I had always imagined as the perfect context for learning: a student-built, student-run City of the Future in the classroom, prominent and versatile enough to accommodate the teaching of any subject.
This was on my mind in April 1969, during a trip to Bourton-on-the-Water, an old-world English village tucked away in the Cotswolds, where I walked through a replica of the village built there in 1937 to a one-ninth scale. All of the elements of a real place could be seen at a glance in a tactile example of the power of miniaturization and contextualization. I wondered if my students could build a small City representing their own community, not as it was, but as it might be. The rough artifacts students would make for their City of the Future would not be an end-all. They would be a way for students to think of themselves as inventors, sparking their interest in related subject matter, and motivating them to learn to reason their way to an understanding of how and why a solution to a question or need came about.
I pioneered this process with my “New Skin” students who continued on with me in the 1969–1970 school year. My Westminster Elementary School principal, Sylvia Coop, gave me the green light to teach the yearlong course of study that I was devising for my master's degree using a city as context to promote Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. I team-taught with 3rd- and 4th-grade teacher Ruth Glatt, an artist, sounding board, partner, and friend, who engaged with me and my combined 5th- and 6th-grade class throughout the process. In essence, the existing wall between our classrooms periodically disappeared as collaboration occurred, and over the school year, with contributions from Ruth and her students, my students designed, built, revised, and ran a roughly to-scale City of the Future that represented their Venice, California, community of Oakwood.
To prepare my students to build what they imagined Oakwood would look like 100 years in the future, I first had them locate their homes and local landmarks on a map. We took a field trip to walk around their community with the map so that they would learn what maps were for and how to notice and read details. Back in the classroom, I projected an enlarged map of Oakwood onto a 5- × 7-foot piece of butcher paper and had students trace it.
Because the map was so large, they became actively interested, wanting to know more about how to read a map, why things were where they were, what a legend was, and how maps were made. This led to in-depth Geography lessons that included looking at USGS maps to identify topography and land formations elsewhere. They noticed that their Venice community on the map was flat because it was near the beach. As they looked at different types of maps, they learned that human beings make maps to represent places not easily viewable at a glance. They wrote stories about their existing community. I had them make up word problems related to time and distances between locations. I was able to teach Math, English, Geography, and Science to every type of learner in the class.
I moved the desks to surround a 5 × 7-foot piece of Styrofoam on the floor, topped with our wall map of the Oakwood community, and had the students determine the boundaries for their City of the Future. They outlined Oakwood's main arteries and landmarks on the Styrofoam to make clear that some of what already existed would probably remain in the future for their reinvented community. I put them into Council District groups to simulate a government and had each District make a plan for how to divide the map up so that each student had his or her own piece of “real estate.” I taught them how to give oral presentations to justify and advocate for their plans and how to use descriptive language in writing about them. In a City meeting, the whole class voted for the best plan. I cut the Styrofoam into pieces to match the students' agreed-upon plan. Over the next few weeks, as I coupled having students experience democratic decision-making with creative thinking, their inventiveness began to flourish and my Backwards Thinking™ process took form.
After selecting individual land parcels and taking them back to their desks, the student designers had to follow the requirements on my Criteria List. The “Don't Wants” and “Needs” on the Criteria List proved invaluable as a guide, telling students the population of futuristic Oakwood and itemizing the basic needs for any City to be considered a City: shelters, places to exchange goods and services, ways to move around, medical and government services, etc. (This list of needs comes from The Image of the City [1960], a seminal work by urban planner, author, and MIT professor Kevin Lynch.)
With the Criteria List as their reference, and my emphasis that their designs not copy what already existed, my students built three-dimensional, very rough models of futuristic houses, power plants, community centers, recreation sites, commercial complexes, and underground and overground ways to move about on their City land parcels. How the finished products looked didn't matter. This was to be a Starter City made of recycled materials that students brought to class, to be revised as they studied and applied related subject matter. Ruth Glatt provided tools and techniques that my students used to craft and revise what they envisioned.