Unschooled by Kerry Mcdonald

Author:Kerry Mcdonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Modern Makerspaces

Just down the road from Powderhouse is another exciting learning space focused on unschooling principles. Located along a busy city street just outside of Boston, with the words LOTTERY and SPICES still visible on the red awning of this former convenience store space, Parts and Crafts serves as a fascinating and successful model of natural learning for urban children aged six to fourteen. Inspired by the burgeoning “hackerspace” movement, Parts and Crafts is a child-centered makerspace for unschoolers, after-school students, and summer campers. Parts and Crafts founder Will Macfarlane left MIT after his freshman year and became interested in alternative education. He grew increasingly convinced that “school was most effective when it got out of the way and allowed informal learning communities and partnerships to form.”

Much of Will’s education worldview originated from his own experience in school. He didn’t like school as a child. His mom was a teacher, but she recognized that school performance was not the full measure of one’s abilities and talents. After leaving MIT, Will became interested in the Sudbury model of learning, with its emphasis on noncoercive education, personal responsibility, and democratic governance. He read A. S. Neill’s Summerhill and worked for a while at a Sudbury school in Oregon, growing more committed to the ideas of freedom, autonomy, and community in education. He was also fascinated with tinkering and technology and the marriage of the two, and he taught himself computer programming, eventually writing software for an architecture firm.

Will’s interests in computers, technology, democratic models of education, knowledge-sharing, and tinkering dovetailed with the burgeoning hackerspace movement of the 2000s. Hacker culture was nurtured in the 1960s and ’70s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Seymour Papert was codirector before the Media Lab emerged. It spread slowly, often through small computer clubs where like-minded people would tinker with new technology. Modern hackerspaces first appeared in Germany in the 1990s, spreading more rapidly throughout Europe and the United States in the early part of this century. While their specifics vary, most hackerspaces are open, publicly accessible, collaborative spaces where community members gather together to share knowledge, tinker, and build with both manual and digital tools and machinery. Some of the key characteristics of hackerspaces, or what are now often called makerspaces, are autonomy, freedom, access, hands-on learning, collaboration, sharing of ideas and resources, and lack of hierarchy.16

Will was deeply inspired by the hackerspace and maker movements. He says, “I’ve always been involved in technology, yet also troubled by the tech industry.” This idea of community-based, technology-focused spaces based on education, autonomy, and accessibility resonated with Will. He and a friend decided to merge their passion for technology and tinkering with their philosophy of noncoercive, self-directed education. “We wanted to create open spaces where technical tools are available and people can use them.” They started with a summer camp for kids. Camp Kaleidoscope ran for several summers with a simple premise: let young people make their own decisions. As Will says, “It’s such a simple idea but it’s so different from what we’re used to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.