College of Design in Pasadena, California, hosted the annual, five-day Design-Based Learning Summer Institute for K–12 Teachers from 2001 through 2019, providing scholarships for participants, many of whom went into the MA program at Cal Poly.
In Southern California, Nelson's Design-Based Learning methodology is practiced in individual public and private schools; it has been introduced at the UCLA Lab School and is featured in the San Gabriel Unified School District as part of its mission, and in the Los Angeles Unified School District in South Gate. The Walnut Valley Unified School District constructed a building dedicated solely to the Nelson's Design-Based Learning program at Chaparral Middle School, and established an Academic Design Program for 10th–12th graders at Walnut High School, applying the methodology to an integrated Math, U.S. History, World History, and Language Arts curriculum.
The UCLA Library Special Collections houses Nelson's archive with an oral history, and featured her life and work in an exhibition in 2017, the first time an educator has been so honored.
In 2019, Center X at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies established the UCLA Design-Based Learning Project, led by a full-time director holding a master's degree in Nelson's methodology. In 2020, a gift of $2 million was given by the Frank O. Gehry Foundation to endow the Doreen Gehry Nelson Director of Design-Based Learning position for UCLA Center X, now the permanent home of the Design-Based Learning Project.
Doreen Nelson has done us all a service by deepening our ideas about pedagogy. Her method of Design-Based Learning is not so much a formula for teaching, as it is an all-encompassing approach to how we as teachers can guide our students to think creatively and make sense of what we are trying to teach them.
Students can't reuse information they don't understand. It is indeed odd how little official attention has been paid to the actual process and significance of teaching creative thinking. This book will be an exception.
I do not wish to summarize what Doreen Nelson is telling us. She presents her point of view with clarity and grace. But it is a privilege to introduce the evolution of her ideas. Teachers will benefit from her account. Her book will be a wonderful example of consciousness-raising in our field.
JEROME BRUNER
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
New York University
December 2015
With admiration and appreciation, I dedicate this book to teachers who have taken my Design-Based Learning methodology and run with it, and to those teachers who will be inspired to do the same.
Lynne Heffley, my editor and teacher, and a highly-gifted writer, was at my side as I wrote this book, opening the door for me to find my voice and think of myself as a writer. She is one of the kindest, most patient people I know. Working with her on this book has been a life-changing experience.
FOREWORD
I have watched in wonderment as my kid sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, has explored the world of K–12 education.
She has worked in the California school system and beyond for years and, along the way, she discovered that opening the floodgates of curiosity leads to all sorts of educational benefits. She experimented over the years with various teaching models that she developed and became quite practiced in the search for a better way.
Doreen has always understood that sparking people's curiosity opens doors to beneficial thinking. Over the years, based on this guiding principle, she has developed her Design-Based Learning methodology, which has proven its value time and time again. It engages individuals with their own feelings and their own ideas as they pursue the inventive experiences that unfold in the classroom under Doreen's methodology.
She has guided teachers to ignite their own imagination, develop their own intuition, and harness their own humanity in order that they can cultivate the same in their students. The power to imagine is the path to a better and richer and more equitable society for all. This is the power of the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning.
I have participated in some of those events and have been personally inspired by Doreen's vision and her work. She is building a network of hope for kids, helping teachers light the fire of curiosity and possibility in their students. She is providing light at the end of the tunnel. I'm very proud to endorse her work.
—FRANK GEHRY, ARCHITECT
FOREWORD
I first met Doreen Nelson in the early 1970s. She had made an appointment to tell me about what was then called City Building Education (now called the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning). She asked for my support in introducing her methodology in the small elementary school district in north Los Angeles County where I was the new superintendent of schools. Like Ms. Nelson, my beliefs about teaching and learning were influenced by the teachings of John Dewey and the Progressive Education movement, and the education that my three children received at the University Elementary School at UCLA (now called the UCLA Lab School). I was pleased with the notion of bringing her work to my middle-class, blue-collar community, where I thought the children would benefit from a cross-curricular methodology rooted in the teaching of creative thinking skills.
I told Ms. Nelson that if one of my school principals and one or more teachers at that school were willing to try out her methodology, she would have my support. After listening to Ms. Nelson's presentation, one principal brought the methodology to her school where two teachers agreed to learn to apply it in their combined upper-grade classrooms. Although I didn't pay much attention to what was transpiring, I did visit the classroom several times. The principal and the teachers appeared to be satisfied with the response of the children.
When I accepted a superintendent position in a considerably larger school district several years later, Ms. Nelson contacted me about implementing Design-Based Learning in my new district. Two principals agreed to try the methodology in several classes. Satisfaction appeared to be high until I received a call from one of the principals. She said, “We love the program, everything is wonderful, but get Doreen out of my hair.” Like an overanxious mother, Ms. Nelson was much too intense as she worked to assure fidelity in her methodology's implementation. She later told me that the incident led her to better teach and support teachers.
Although I believed that Design-Based Learning had great potential for improving student learning outcomes, educators were under pressure to improve achievement test results and were loath to risk trying new pedagogies, especially those that were unfamiliar. Making changes in the way teachers teach, even in the most favorable conditions, is difficult. After all, the grammar of schooling has not changed significantly since the mid-nineteenth century. Doreen Nelson was not deterred—discouraged perhaps, from time to time, but never one to give up on her vision of finding a more effective way to teach creative and critical thinking skills that will last a lifetime.
After a 40-year career as a K–12 educator, 23 as a superintendent of four California school districts, I accepted a full-time position as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I kept in touch with Ms. Nelson. I watched how the presentation of her pedagogy, first introduced 50 years earlier, matured and how successful her approach to training teachers became. Doreen has taught her methodology to cadres of teacher leaders in a master's degree program at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, and in summer institutes at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. I am delighted that Design-Based Learning has been adopted as an instructional method by several school districts. I am especially pleased to have introduced her Design-Based