Innovation from Below: Equity, Infrastructure, and Iterative Design in a High School Humanities Makerspace

• In Event: Alternative Pedagogies at the Crux of Interdisciplinarity: Promises and Pitfalls of “Innovating” Education - II

Abstract

This paper explores the expansion of “innovative” pedagogies – e.g. making and design-thinking – into K-12 school reform and, specifically, the teaching and learning of the humanities at the high school level. The study draws on three years of ethnographic research in The Innovation School, a new, non-selective public high school in a large northeastern city. Part of a larger “innovation initiative” in the district, the school is organized around principles of making, and serves students from non-dominant and low-income communities. This paper focuses on the school’s humanities program, exploring both how humanities teachers worked to integrate STEM-adjacent practices, like making and design, into their classes; and how the contours of the humanities curriculum was reshaped by these innovations’ assumptions and ideals. Findings center on two such transformations: (1) the process associated with learning, as iterative design became the guiding metaphor for knowledge production and classroom work; and (2) the infrastructures necessary and available for navigating the production-oriented curriculum. While these shifts were often expressed and experienced by stakeholders as openings for meaningful education, they also produced contradictory demands for teachers and students – a tension whose impacts were unevenly distributed. Examining such frictions and their unfolding through practice helps elucidate the possibilities and perils that surface as humanities education is refashioned in the image of STEM-oriented innovations – and its implications for educational equity, in K-12 schools and beyond.

Author

• Phil Nichols, Baylor University