This summer and fall Handshouse Studio has been exploring ways to bring our unique project-based pedagogy to more learners. In July, Art Education faculty, Adriana Katzew, invited Handshouse to be a case subject for her intensive Creating Curriculum summer course at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In the absence of a live-action immersive, the Art Education students observed Handshouse in-action through film. They watched Raise the Roof-the documentary about the Gwozdziec Synagogue Project, Handshouse Studio co-founder Rick Brown’s TED Talk about his teaching philosophies, and interviewed Handshouse Co-Founders Rick Brown and Laura Brown, Handshouse Director, Marie Brown, and long-time Handshouse participant and high school art teacher, Krista Lima, to get a sense of the fundamental principles guiding any Handshouse project. They then worked in groups to design Handhouse-inspired curricula for elementary, middle, and high schools, community centers, and professional development workshops for teachers. 

Out of the course came an amazing range of curricula prototypes and a whole new depth of understanding of the Handshouse pedagogy itself. It became apparent to us that this vital new insight could help guide our next steps. We were particularly inspired to continue exploring the ideas of the Professional Development workshop curriculum. Grad students, Sarah Scherini and Niels Burger  proposed Handshouse develop 5-day summer workshops designed to serve K-12 teachers from a range of disciplines. The central design of the workshop would invite educators to participate in any one of the many existing Handshouse projects in order to learn the Handshouse pedagogy hands-on. Short morning and evening activities would then focus on exploring how teachers could bring this project and the inquiry-based process back into their classrooms. Workshops would have a follow-up virtual retreat with Handhouse staff focused on further developing their own Handshouse curricula, cross-curriculum collaboration with fellow teachers. 

Niels Burger then joined Handshouse through the rest of the summer to continue to explore the idea he and Sarah had helped articulate. In typical Handshouse fashion, we began by doing more research, and asking lots of questions. We reached out to speak directly to teachers to find out how we could best tailor our Professional Development workshops to meet their needs and interests. Niels and Marie organized focus groups with 10 educators from public schools in Boston and Holyoke, and private schools in New York and Boston. The educators came from a range of disciplines including art, history, science, computer science, carpentry, literacy, and Jewish Studies. These conversations have begun providing critical information about the needs and desires of educators, and have reinforced our understanding of how excited teachers are to incorporate the authentically multi-disciplinary, project-based Handshouse approach into their classrooms.

We also gained an appreciation of the incredible uncertainty educators are navigating in the current moment. As we write, teachers throughout the country are still unclear about whether they will be teaching in their classrooms, remotely, or following a hybrid system this fall. And no one knows how long any of these arrangements will continue. 

In response to these challenges we asked teachers about ways Handshouse could also use its capacity as an agile, innovative, educational organization to help meet the challenges they currently face in creating curriculum. Teachers were excited about the possibilities we offered to adapt the The Gourd Banjo Project, Trojan: 1000 Horse Project, and the Toys for Monkeys projects into physically-distanced workshops or remote-learning collaborations.

We found the focus groups with educators so helpful that we will be continuing to host them. If you are an educator or administrator interested in participating in an online discussion about how Handshouse Studio can best develop programs to benefit broader audiences, please let us know.

We all are facing a moment of immense uncertainty and change at just about every level of our systems, daily practices, and lives. As author Octavia Butler invites in her novel
Parable of the Sower we must “shape change.” What better moment to imagine ground-breaking innovation, than in a moment when the ground beneath our feet has already broken.