Make Up Work

This is Part 2 of a Design Story from Katie Robertson and Diane Tamblyn. You can start with Part 1 here.

Part 2: Make Up Work

Katie:              

I have this other example, which was just yesterday. One of my students in my Tuesday arts class sent me an email. She said, “I feel really terrible about this. I accepted a job working with a child with special needs. I thought it was on Thursdays, but it’s on Tuesdays during class time. We have three classes left.” And so at first, I’m like, really? But then I realized, her intent was honest and she was really stuck. So I decided, this isn’t a question of giving her permission to miss class or do make-up work. I didn’t want to have to design make-up work. It’s a studio situation. So I said to her, “You know what? We now have a design challenge and we’re going to do a little discovery. Here are my needs. I need to feel like my course has integrity. I need to feel that you’re walking out with the richest experience that you can have. I need to feel accountable to the university but I’m willing to let go of a certain structure, and not stick to it just because it’s always existed.”

Then she said what she needed, and we thought about what the child needed. What started happening as we were doing this discovery is we redesigned her work. We came up with some readings that could help her, like articles about how children with autism tend to be highly visual, and we discussed the number of hours she would spend. She’s also going to use some of the things that she’s learned in class, like collage, to help him. She’s going to document the work that he’s doing and frankly, I think she’s going to work harder, and she’s actually going to be applying her learning in a new way.

It was that switch in my mind, like, I can get frustrated and try and make this work in the rigid structures of class hours, or we can invent a new structure.

Diane:   

It’s a human-centered approach to solving the problem.

Katie:         

Yes, and it was with the intent that she was truly working on an authentic challenge. I just felt so much better being able to think about meeting needs through design than simply giving permission or giving her make-up work.

Diane:         

Here again, it’s not linear. You did a kind of whipstitch, circling back into her particular needs not just in completing the course but moving forward with her learning. It will be interesting to see if that gives you feedback and the ability to further adapt your course for other students’ needs. When you’re using human-centered design to guide your teaching, the level of engagement goes up because you’ve asked for a different kind of input from your students, don’t you think?

Jeff:      

I think it’s a real breakthrough to have a student come to you with a problem and for you to talk about your needs as a teacher in light of that problem. So often, teachers just say to students, “This is what you need.” It’s pretty rare for a teacher to talk with students in terms of, “Here’s what I need from this interaction.”

Katie:              

We had a conversation about the role of the arts, and I asked her to share with me how she’s seeing the role of the arts and learning. This gets to something I care deeply about, something I want to leave in this world, which is that the arts have value beyond their decorative aspect. I want to help my students see that. So as we were engaged in this conversation, I was assessing my student’s understanding as she talked about the things that I had hoped she had already learned.

Next: The Whirlpool and the River