CC#6 – who is it about?

I’ve just reached the end of a student presentation cycle in my senior Social Studies class at work which was an intentional foray into project-based learning (PBL) with a focus on personalization… sort of. Students could choose their topics and I coached them on appropriate specificity (think of them focusing on interactions between climate and architectural design response in countries x/y, instead of simply comparing features of traditional styles of buildings in x/y), with the end product being a presentation, ideally for the whole group. Everybody had to focus on the same two countries, and people could work with a partner or alone; the students helped build the ‘top end’ of the scoring rubric.

The idea was people would follow their field of interest and come up with a comparison between the places, and when it worked it worked well: the audience was able to glean interesting insights to the interplay between one of the countries’ textile designs and the art deco movement if they listened as well as I did, in another good example. The issue here is that OF COURSE the studious kid who makes their own clothing was going to come up strong with a great fashion presentation – fish do swim in water. They followed a ringing passion as a student and raised the class’ knowledge of textiles while scoring assignment points and looking smart in public: pretty much ikigai material there, to borrow the Japanese term, for a high achieving student. They were living in the white centre of the diagram from our week’s reading on Self-Determination theory.

They were one of the first presenters; I kind of wish they hadn’t been, though, as the quality was not all at their level.

Why, then, were some talks comparatively pedestrian? I’d posit that the lack of personalization in a project predicated on the concept is partly to blame. Some people recoil from the idea of talking to an audience, and yet there they were; some would only do the talks at lunch or after school to limited/zero audiences, no doubt cursing me the whole time. I cursed me the whole time, to varying degrees.

For the next iteration of a PBL project in class, I’ve already let them know they will get to choose their own country to focus on in addition to being able to choose their subject area of interest. Dare I let them choose the product produced, or even how best to assess said product? I’d have to be able to get my head around a potential 18 wildly different assessment models – though the talkers will probably still default to talking – but if the goal is personalizing learning I’d be hitting more of these bases from our readings this week…

…than I’d be missing if I really let them ‘go off’. I’ll certainly have to be a “partner in learning” if the textile wizard produces some Bayeux-adjacent tapestry of knowledge, having last sewed a dodgy windsock at the age of 12 in an exploratory class. The weft might be worth it, even if it warps the project – I’ll just have to shuttle around a bit…and it’s not really about me.

Image/idea from:

Bray, B. and McClaskey, K. (2015). Make Learning Personal: the What, Who, WOW, Where, and Why. Corwin. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483388090