esson number 4 kids, we must move in the direction of our fear,” David said amusingly after asking both of us what our fears were, to which I said: “losing my mind”. At the same time, Tianfang was ready to dive into a long joke about how he wants to be the superhero with the power of what he fears, which is actually spider, but unfortunately Spiderman was already taken by some guy in New York. Every day, as we go around Boston in David’s car moving between locations, we had long conversations like this, led by David’s provocation, tickled by Tianfang’s humor and meditated on by me. Among other things, I learned about Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and also about the whole Boston ecosystem.
In his own way, David taught us how to take any familiar object and fromducation there generate content for a class, or even a whole curriculum. After some brainstorming sessions, I developed a curriculum prospectus for a Paideia class, which I expect to teach next winter. It will be all about incubating makers and players in Reed’s own machine shop and fab lab!
Having come from a maker incubator experience in India, I was delighted to see the depth of the whole maker-based and play-based education movement. It seems that the current educational paradigm would soon be profoundly shifted from memorization tasks with the introduction of a “play-based, maker-centered, integrated, responsive, and emergent” teaching method. Thank you to Reed, David and Tufts CEEO for making this learning experience possible.
