weather changes—or because of poverty, human interventions, and inventions. They freely projected themselves into the future, imagining change from their own perspectives. It was obvious that my students had gained a sense of power over their learning. They loved that there were so many ways to be “right” and I did, too. As their City of the Future came to life, we all became a family of learners.
Over the months, my students made significant gains in their academic skills. This propelled me to go on to explore ways to deepen the understanding and practice of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning through my gradually evolving 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™, the heart of my Design-Based Learning methodology.
I discovered that what I called things mattered. To avoid starting at the lowest level on Bloom's Taxonomy with what is known, I asked for Never-Before-Seen everything. They built Never-Before-Seen Creatures to learn about the characteristics of animals, Never-Before-Seen Shelters to learn about protection, Never-Before-Seen Ways to Move People and Goods around the City—and later, a Never-Before-Seen Way to Transmit Disease to study a viral vector.
For each experience, I gave the students a checklist of specific criteria that I derived from subject requirements. These defined the conditions they needed to meet to achieve their designs. Real designers always have constraints—from the client, from government regulations, or from the description of the design problem itself. Artists and scientists work within a set of constraints, too. When I gave my students my Criteria List, I was the client.
I taught them to describe their design solutions orally in different settings (one-on-one, in small groups, and to the entire class), to learn to own what they had made. My students grew so attached to their creations that they wanted to read, research, and write about how what they made compared to real-life solutions—and they frequently said that their solutions were better!
None of these student-made designs required elaborate materials or inordinate classroom time. The initial Never-Before-Seen designs were “instant” physical representations of students' creative thinking, built in only 30 to 45 minutes. The result was as simple as a piece paper turned into a three-dimensional artifact. Having it, being able to describe the thought process that got them there, then refining their initial creations with new vocabulary associated with the design dilemma, led my students to learn required information and remember it.
While my students were applying creative thinking to the design of physical artifacts for their City, Ruth's 3rd and 4th graders expressed their creativity in filmmaking: their documentary-style film, The History of Oakwood, about the real Oakwood community, won a prize at a children's film festival.
In my longitudinal study 10 years later, when I made a film (Classroom City) surveying students from my 1969–1970 class, a nonreader had become the editor of the student paper at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a once-average student was an attorney, a shy girl (who was removed from her abusive home and placed in foster care while in the class) became a published author and based many of her stories around that time period.
My research from my class in Venice, and my subsequent experience in training K–12 teachers in cross-curricular “City Building” gave me a comprehensive template for teaching the theoretical underpinnings of what would become the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning with 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™.
I had been searching for a limitless context. The City was it.
LESSONS ALONG THE WAY
Iconic designers Ray and Charles Eames, whose Venice, California, office was across the street from Westminster Elementary School when I was teaching there, discovered my work in 1971. After showing their films and pictures of their furniture to my students, I wrote and asked the Eameses to come to see the “City of the Future” that my students had built, based on the Oakwood area of Venice that included their office. The busy designers politely declined. Undaunted, my students, whom I had taught to advocate for themselves, wrote a giant, knock-out of a letter, complete with drawings of their City, and delivered it in person to the Eames Office. Ray and Charles showed up the next day and, after witnessing my methodology in action, saw to it that I received National Endowment for the Arts funding (Charles was on the board of the NEA). They took 6,000 slides of classrooms for a visual presentation and a film about my methodology as I trained other teachers in diverse neighborhoods, and gave me space in the Eames Office for the making of a film about my methodology.
Some years later, I mentioned to Ray Eames with pride how, early in 1971, I had taught my 4th and 5th graders in Venice about the art of American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Frank Stella and taken them to an exhibit of his work at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).
I was married to an art dealer then and we lived upstairs from his cutting-edge Los Angeles art gallery, so I was surrounded by such artists as Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, John Chamberlain, John Altoon, Edward Keinholz, H. C. “Cliff” Westermann, and Louise Nevelson. Taking my students to see art exhibitions had become part of my regular teaching practice. I hoped to inspire them to think creatively and to be creative, so for each new exhibit, I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to prepare them for what they would see.
(After one such excursion to the Pasadena Art Museum to see a show about the Bauhaus School, as the bus drove home to Venice through downtown Los Angeles, one of my students pointed to the skyscrapers and yelled, “Look! Bauhaus is everywhere!”)
By the time the Frank Stella exhibit came to Pasadena, I had conceived my Design-Based Learning methodology. Wanting to teach my students that artists were not a rarified group, I decided not to first show them Stella's work, but to have them “invent” what it was like being him.
I moved all of the desks in the classroom to the side and brought in large rolls of white butcher paper, bottles of brightly colored tempera paint, and scale-enlarged compasses and protractors. I told my students that they could do anything they wanted to do, but they had to use the tools that I had provided. My hope was that they would make giant and bold geometrical paintings that resembled Frank Stella's work. That's exactly what happened. They even trimmed the butcher paper where paint had been applied sloppily, with results similar to Stella's shaped canvases. (One student, instead of making art, went to the library—with my permission—and ended up writing a lengthy report on the history and function of the compass and protractor.)
After my students completed their projects, I brought them to the Stella Exhibit at the Museum, where the Grinstein Family, cofounders of the renowned Gemini G.E.L. artists' workshop, arranged to have my students meet Frank Stella and show him their work.
Stella greeted my students, who eagerly unrolled their large paintings for his perusal and happily accepted his compliments. When they saw Stella's own work, they could not contain themselves. “He stole our ideas!” they exclaimed. All of the adults in attendance were enchanted by this reaction and by what the students had painted.
In relating all of this to Ray Eames (who was herself a painter), I was sort of patting myself on the back, telling her how I had empowered my students to think like artists. When I finished the story, Ray smiled and said gently, “Yes, but they didn't learn how Frank Stella knew to use those instruments, those geometric shapes, bright colors, and to shape his large canvases. That,” she said, “is the real struggle: to find one's own voice.”
I realized then that I had unintentionally tricked my students into replicating Stella's artwork, contradicting my intended goal: to enable students to achieve higher-level learning through original, creative thinking.
THE SMITHSONIAN
A significant “aha” moment for me occurred in 1971 at the Smithsonian, where I began to dig deeper into how to teach my methodology to others. In the spring of that year my brother, Frank Gehry, was asked by the director of the Smithsonian Institution Associates to teach a class for middle school students with a woman whose classroom in Venice,