There is now an Endowed Design-Based Learning Directorship in Doreen's name at Center X, a position currently held by one of Doreen's former master's degree students.
I am now retired from my second career as an adjunct professor and I am confident that the responsibility for carrying on Doreen's lifetime work is in good hands at UCLA, where it will grow the Design-Based Learning pedagogy to benefit future generations of learners.
—EUGENE TUCKER, EdD
INTRODUCTION
As a rebellious teenager, I would have laughed if anyone had told me that I would one day become a teacher and a teacher of teachers—and that I would love it.
I wrote this book imagining new teachers and seasoned teachers, who, like me, still aspire to make a difference in society through education. Most of us want to do more than just deliver dry subject matter to students. We want to prepare them for problem seeking and problem-solving around questions that are essential to society. We want the subject matter that our students need to learn to be put into a contextual setting that ensures their long-term memory retention so that they are able to apply what they learn to a wide array of situations. We know that teaching critical and creative thinking is the best preparation for an unknown future.
As a classroom teacher, it seemed to take me forever to understand where to look for answers to how to make learning stick, and how to teach in a way that would bring who I am, and my deepest family values, into my classroom.
In the late 1950s, my tough-minded, well-read mother, born in 1904, had just completed her high school degree, attending night classes at my high school. She had graduated with honors and was planning to go to college. At age 16, I had just graduated with a C+ average, and I agreed with my high school counselor that college wasn't for me. My mother disagreed in no uncertain terms. My entrepreneurial, endlessly creative, curiosity-driven dad (my role model) wasn't buying it, either. He had only finished the 4th grade and wanted both of his children to be well educated. My brother Frank (who would become the noted architect Frank Gehry), almost nine years my senior, my only sibling and lifelong hero, was excelling in his studies of architecture at USC. He told me that I was capable of doing something like that. I felt I had no choice but to go when my mother enrolled us both at Los Angeles City College (me during the day, her at night).
We had moved to Los Angeles from Canada after my dad's heart attack at age 47. In Los Angeles, with my dad too ill to work, the burden of supporting the four of us was on my mother's shoulders. She would come home at the end of the day from her job as a clerk at the Broadway Department Store in Hollywood, we would make dinner together, and after she tended to my dad, she would sit down with me and together we wrote essays for our classes and articles for the school newspaper, and studied for the sociology class we were both taking. My grades soared. I liked the teachers, the students, and the social activities so much that I decided to apply to UCLA.
As a student at UCLA, I went back to playing the harp, something I had studied seriously in middle school (with a harp my dad bought by working the night shift at a liquor store). I played in the UCLA Symphony for four years, and off and on in the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony. I changed my major a half dozen times, starting with Education, switching to Music, Anthropology, back to Education, then Sociology, then Art.
My brother Frank, meanwhile, had graduated from the School of Architecture at USC and with my family just scraping by, I had to be able to support myself. A UCLA counselor told me that if I took a few more Education courses and did supervised teaching, I could get a teaching credential in just one year, so I signed up—after balking at first because my mother had so often urged me to get a teaching credential to “have something to fall back on when you get married.” (Perhaps she was recalling that when I was in grade school, while my brother built model airplanes and made sketches of everything, I had corralled neighborhood kids who were having trouble in school, had them draw pictures that told a story, and taught them to read.)
My family's belief in the inherent value of creativity, perseverance, doing things for others, and community activism is the bedrock for my life's work. In Canada, where I grew up, my dad, who was an American citizen, was politically vocal. While I was at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, my favorite teacher was accused of being a Communist because she was against the supposed temporary relocation of residents in Chavez Ravine near downtown Los Angeles, where a new public housing project was to be built. (The city of Los Angeles had bought up that property through the power of eminent domain. The residents lost their community when the housing project never happened and the land eventually went to Dodger Stadium.) I joined protests against the city with my brother, and after that, during election times, he would take me to underserved neighborhoods to register voters and promote candidates.
When I became a teacher, I wanted to realize my strongly held belief that to equalize society, acknowledge cultural differences, and to prepare students to participate in a world of serious societal, political, economic, and environmental challenges, all kids needed to be taught to become courageous, original thinkers, capable of working together to make and evaluate proposals for change.
After 10 years of classroom teaching, I went back to school for a master's degree. I began developing my John Dewey-, Benjamin Bloom-, Jerome Bruner-inspired Design-Based Learning methodology. I zeroed in on two of the things that Bruner described as central to becoming an educated person: (1) creative thinking, the ability to imagine solutions to what would later be termed Essential Questions—the underlying powerful ideas, universal concepts, principles, values, and morals associated with high-level thinking—and (2) the ability to gather information from multiple areas of the curriculum to revise and refine what is imagined.
(I met Jerry Bruner in New York in the early 1980s when I looked up his name in the phone book and had the chutzpah to call him. To my surprise, he answered. After I explained that I had developed my methodology based in part on what he had written, he invited me to lunch. Jerry became a friend and supporter of my work, and I was honored and deeply touched by his offer [at age 100] to write the introduction to this book, in progress at the time.)
I eventually understood that during all my years of teaching, I had not been cultivating original thinking. I had long believed that building physical artifacts and role-playing within a contextual, cross-curricular “story” were vital for learning to become reusable. (Maybe it was my dad's passion for seeing how one thing could become something else that influenced me. As the owner of a furniture factory in Canada, he would explore how unique materials could transform the everyday products he designed and produced.) What I was missing was a way to unleash creative thinking in my students. That wasn't happening when the artifacts they made replicated what already existed and their “dramatic play” using those artifacts simply imitated others.
I wrestled with the meaning of Bloom's Taxonomy that pointed to creative thinking as the highest goal of education. Convinced that creative thinking is innate in all students, disenfranchised and privileged alike, and could be taught without sacrificing academic rigor, I began conceiving what would become the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning (formerly called City Building Education) to put creative thinking skills first.
I had been successful at teaching the drill and practice of basic facts for Specific Transfer of Learning (2 plus 2 equals 4; 2 apples plus 2 oranges equals 4 pieces of fruit). I needed to find a systematic way to teach for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning that would open the door to creative thinking and enable students at any grade level to use and reuse information, think independently, and advocate for themselves and others. Accomplishing this, I thought, would build community and cultivate equality.
To discourage students from engaging in replicative thinking, I wondered what would happen if I had them “back in” to learning what I was required to teach them. After trying out numerous ideas in my classroom, I thought about how a city's character is reflected in its location, its architecture, and the values of the people who live and work there. I thought about how the parts of the city could be a metaphor for creative thinking