Friday, December 22, 2017
What's so great about a CSW?
The mission of this platform is to promote the proliferation of dedicated physical spaces known as Community Science Workshops. With multiple perspectives, we hope to articulate what motivates a CSW, what it looks like in action, how it feels, and importantly--how it differs from other STEM spaces and programs.
If all goes well, the contributions to the online discussion will ultimately be distilled into a "how-to" guide...fast forward a couple years...millions of copies, in various languages, will be loaded onto a B57 and dropped, airborne leaflet propaganda style, over inhabited areas around the world.
This first post is intended to cut to the heart of the matter. What, to you personally, is the #1 thing that a CSW provides, especially for kids, that isn't adequately provided by any other aspect of most neighborhoods today ?
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I struggled in school. I had to do 3rd grade twice. My 5th grade teacher, Ms Pasqualoni, must’ve looked at my file because on the first day she told me “You’re my goal for the year.” Looking back, it’s obvious to me that she really tried everything. I truly appreciated her effort (and still do). But I was (and still am) a daydreamer. The classroom, for me, was a polite version of a jail cell. I couldn’t wait to get home to tinker around with an old moped. I’d do this after school and, importantly, before my dad got home. He knew how mopeds worked and he would dutifully turn moped reconditioning into a lesson if he witnessed my interest. I was lucky to have a dad who would gladly stop everything to educate me. But I didn’t want someone to proctor my personal relationship to the nature of things. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a ton of stuff from my dad, but Dad himself got hooked on science the way I got hooked on it—by having a space to tinker and explore on his own time. For me personally CSW’s provide a refuge from adult agendas, schedules, objectives, and provide an otherwise missing safe space and time to just be free with things.
When I first walked into the Mission Science Workshop in San Francisco, 1992, I looked around for a few minutes at the crude workbenches, piles of interesting junk, sparse assortment of basic tools and handful of different sized kids engaged in exactly what they had chosen to be engaged in, with one or two staff members overseeing and encouraging them, and said to myself, “Yes, this is it. This is right. This is how it should be. Of course.”
What I saw was a public version of the farm machine shop I had available to me as a kid, a magical place where anything was possible with a bit of work and creativity, scabbing things on here and there with scrap bits of junk, exploring the byways of the material universe, tinkering toward a solution to whatever problem or pondering I brought in with me that day. Over the next few years working with Community Science Workshops I realized that actually it was even better than I had initially glimpsed that day, because whereas I was mostly alone in that shop of my childhood, there in the Workshop you can learn and be inspired and tinker shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other kids, each with a project different from yours.
Furthermore, whereas my dad had been around, ready to assist and answer questions with enough badgering, here were paid staff ready to help the kids with whatever they wanted! Heaven, I now know, is not far off from this sublime setting.
Twenty-five years on I remain puzzled by one thing only: Why haven’t these things taken off like I always assumed they would? Why can’t the educators of the world see that, #1 this learning environment is an absolute requirement for producing any sort of useful engineer, scientist, technician, architect, or artist, and #2, millions of families can’t afford to create one in their own garages, thus #3, our democratic institutions of education should be providing for each and every kid to have access to one, just like a library, a sports field, or a classroom with a teacher. And #4 - perhaps the most universal benefit benefit that goes far beyond STEM or any sort of nationalistic competitive endeavor - that Community Science Workshops feed the very souls of kids, especially kids who are in the greatest need.
I continue to ponder this, and continue to believe in the CSW as a critical and fundamental paradigm for effective, full-spectrum education. I still have hope that educrats holding the purse strings of our nation’s institutions of learning may see the essential role of this sort of space, so that all kids can access it.
I have an idea about our effort to communicate what is special about the community science workshop approach to science, making, etc. I think that Curt is very correct in using the word soulless to describe what we don't like about the buzzword laden approach of those who are trolling for money and recognition.. But then, we should think about why we feel, which we do, that our approach is soulful. So my feeling about this is that when we approach objects and processes without pretensions, on their own terms, and seek to do all the work and patient experimentation that we love to do, we are, arguably, probing for and occasionally getting in touch with the deeper meaning of things. I would say that there is something spiritual in all this that I must say is really so much behind why I am so devoted to what we do...maybe something like a religion without depending upon a belief in any god.
To me, this is an important realization to communicate, because we know that human life is a gift, and the things we study and do are bound to fall short of our goals as human beings if they do not speak to our need for understanding, meaning, inspiration, and love. And the buzzword, and keyboarding approach is really shallow and bereft of this spiritual component which should be well embedded in science education.
Being aware that I have not really thought this out, here it is for you guys to chew on.
What I am going to try to do is to think of some of the activities where there is that kind of semi-epiphany that happens, you know those moments. Like when I extracted a radio speaker magnet from its setting around the voice coil and then approached the denuded, radio connected voice coil with the magnet and the sound started to come back as I got the magnet closer and closer to the coil. Or when I hooked up a DC motor to a 6VAC power supply and it simply vibrated the motor shaft back and forth rather than turning it.
I think that this connection is so important in education, but it is rarely acknowledged -- instead we have the mind-numbing, soul-crushing experience so many people have with academic science(did I get that right, Curt?)! So why does education need to be that way, if we all know that life is so much about being connected to each other and the world in an emotional way, in a feeling way, that makes us care about understanding and about each other. It is almost like education got hijacked by a group of zombies in suits and ties.
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