Doreen Gehry Nelson

Cultivating Curiosity


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on it. I obtained donated cameras to have my students photograph their homes. I thought that by looking at and being asked to imagine how to reconfigure where they live, the students would invent their dream houses. Instead, they came back with all kinds of excuses for not doing the assignment. I realized that their homes were not pretty to them and they felt powerless to change their environments.

      I showed them how one thing can become another in a dramatic way. I told them how Pop artist Claes Oldenburg had once given an everyday ice bag new meaning in his installation at the American Pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. His enlarged and rotating ice bag was not representative of a giant headache, Oldenburg had explained, but was a symbol of change and dignity as the cap of the bag caught the sun and the bag bowed to the audience as it turned, representing the healing that had taken place between the United States and Japan since World War II.

      Non-Specific Transfer of Learning was automatic, and what had started out as an art project had become a backwards path to teaching subject matter. I observed the students' involvement with subject matter lessons and saw that they didn't mind if my list of criteria for their costumes expanded whenever I thought of adding to it. As they built their New Skins, they willingly measured their small, real objects to figure out how many times bigger the objects would need to be to fit as costumes, and what kind of details would make their costumes recognizable. To decide what to use to make their body covers, they debated the difference between using soft fabrics or large rolls of paper versus hard cardboard boxes, and I had them research the costs for each. More Math, Science, and Language Arts lessons emerged. (One student, who had previously refused to read in class at all, managed to copy all of the detailed writing on his soda can and discuss why certain words were on the can in the first place.)

      Even those students who had difficulty crafting their New Skins learned to justify their creations. Some students made New Skin body covers that looked better than others, but that wasn't the point. I was teaching them to feel comfortable expressing themselves and leading them to reuse the symbolism and metaphoric thinking inherent in this experience.

      It is hard to forget the boy who chose to be a soup can to show that he loved to eat. Or the student who was a razor blade to show his desire to cut things into pieces. Or the girl who was a telephone to represent her fear of having no one to call when she needed a friend.

      Above all, my students were no longer inhibited in imagining themselves as designers. By changing the size and function of an object with intention, and embracing their New Skin selves, they had learned that they had the power to transform one thing into something else. This resulted in a high rate of student success. I had been concerned about justifying having students spend a few hours a day over a three-week period building, wearing, and storing their New Skin body covers, but it proved to be an invaluable use of classroom time, filling a solid month of academic study.

      Based on this New Skin activity—the precursor to what would become my methodology's sequential, curriculum-based Design Challenges—my daily Guided Lessons in Math, Science, History, and Language Arts were more comprehensive than any I had been able to teach over my then-10-year career in the classroom.

      Seeing how diligently they adhered to the required criteria, I graded them for meeting (or not meeting) what they themselves agreed they needed to achieve. If I had assigned grades for the “best” New Skin, I would have been recognizing them for their motor skills, not for their ability to produce and justify a creative object.

      For some time, I thought that the New Skin activity was the only way to drive home the point that large, student-built artifacts in the classroom made a difference in higher-level learning. I did this activity with students with severe learning disabilities, English Language learners, teachers, lawyers, architects, and computer scientists. After the initial shock of being asked to be silly, none had difficulty in introducing themselves to others as their New Skin selves.

      I developed an Object Interview with actors from the Mark Taper Forum, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, to apply my methodology to teaching theater to young children. The Object Interview, modeled after what actors do when they take on a role, involves asking a series of questions that interviewers might ask the New Skin Object if they met it on the street. The questions start with the Object's name, where it lives, where it was born, and who its immediate family and distant relatives are. They then move on to the Object's function, what it is good at, scared of, what it dreams about, its social class and economic status—and even what rules and laws govern its existence.

      Although I stopped using the New Skin activity as the gateway to my methodology, many Design-Based Learning teachers I've trained still keep at it. Some body covers are made instantly; others are detailed and precise. Some teachers have students arrange themselves into families of New Skin Objects to make a Venn diagram of similarities and differences. Some teachers create holiday plays, others have students decide which Objects would be the best leaders, based on their Objects' imagined character traits.

      In a class I taught at Cal Poly, Pomona, one teacher chose to be a rubber condom. “I'm not a giant prick,” he told the class. “I think of myself as a protector, caring for the world.” In a Liberal Studies class taught by a History professor I coached, one student presented herself as a chamois cloth. Her husband had chosen that object for her. She said that she was disappointed that he hadn't chosen something more feminine, until he had explained that he thought she was like a chamois cloth because she could be very firm under certain circumstances and soft in others. An engineering major, taking a course in design, made it clear that he felt the New Skin activity was pointless. The day the students were to bring their New Skin selves to class, he was late. He had made himself into a slice of bread covered with peanut butter and jelly, and hadn't been able to get through his front door. He hadn't calculated the dimensions and was forced to dismantle and re-engineer his New Skin in order to bring it to class.