How it started for me

I’ve always been a maker, but my making was always walled off from my approach to the classroom by an impermeable barrier that was part habit, part misconception, and part stigma. In my life as a graduate student, and later as a professor, I saw clearly that the classroom was for lecturing, discussion, and note taking. In retrospect I can see that I had a secret yearning for more, but I had a hard time defining what was missing, or justifying doing something different. On the lower rungs of the academic ladder, innovation can be dangerous for your career.

Emboldened, however, by a semester I spent observing a studio classroom in a school of architecture, I introduced small hands-on exercises in my social science classes. The first time I brought a bucket of Lego bricks to my undergraduates, they were both thrilled and baffled. I asked them to make a quick “sketch model” of an environmentally sustainable community— that week’s subject—by arranging the Lego pieces on a tabletop in the classroom. The students’ alert engagement, their happy conversation as they used the Lego, their interesting accounts of what they had chosen to build, and their clear inability to apply any of the lessons of sustainability I’d been trying to teach them, all set me upon a path of inquiry that continues to this day. 

My Lego experience led to many other uses of hands-on materials in the classroom: having students, on the first day of class, spend five minutes building a Lego structure that expresses something about how they like to learn; using poster paper to have groups of students make and present quick in-class posters about a topic related to that week’s subject matter; using Tinkertoys to create collaborative “concept maps” that reveal the relationships within a set of ideas; and modeling the structures of the brain with clay to bring the image off the page and into three dimensions. These and other forays into terrain far beyond the standard model of classroom behavior have been a wonderful adventure for me and (for the most part) for my students. The success and the pure fun of these adventures led me to create a “studio classroom” for myself and my colleagues, full of hands-on materials and resources.