 Hello. Good afternoon. I'm Shannon Dosmagan. I'm a Berkman fellow this year, and I am going to be going through just a couple of, you know, introductions and introducing you to our speaker today. So before we get started, please be aware that our luncheon is our webcast live and recorded for posterity on the Berkman Center website. If you would like to participate via social media today, the hashtag to use is Berkman. It will be getting watched, so this is, you know, especially for the people that are not with us in the room, but also if you're shy and you don't feel like raising your hand, please feel free to tweet out your questions if you have them for our speaker. Today we will welcome questions at the end of the presentation. So as Dr. Gaskins is talking, please write down your questions and we'll hold them until she's done with her presentation. So I am really happy to introduce Dr. Natrice Gaskins. She is joining us as part of an inclusive innovation speaker series. It will be discussing techno vernacular creativity and steam. So for those of you who are new to the term steam, that's going to be talked about a lot today. It stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. Dr. Gaskins is the Boston Arts Academy steam lab director and notably the Academy is the only public high school in Boston for visual and performing arts. Dr. Gaskins earned a BFA in computer graphics with honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and an MFA in art and technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 94. She worked for several years in K to 12 in post-secondary education, community media, and technology before enrolling at Georgia Institute of Technology where she received a doctorate in digital media in 2014. Dr. Gaskins model for techno vernacular creativity is an area of practice that investigates the characteristics of cultural art and technology made by underrepresented ethnic groups for their own entertainment and creative expression and its application in steam learning. Her essays are included in edited volumes such as Meet Me at the Fair, A World's Fair Reader, Future Text, and Afrofuturism 2.0, The Rise of Astro Blackness, which came out today. So look for it at your local bookstore. All right, so I'm very happy to turn the mic over to Dr. Gaskins. Thank you. So I'm going to get started and just say good afternoon and talk a little bit about how I came to steam and then what kind of work I'm doing currently. So techno vernacular creativity, innovation and learning was kind of the title of my dissertation and I'm going to talk about how it came to that and then how I found steam on the way through that process. And so I'm going to skip some stuff and really focus on, I just want to remind people are familiar with vernacular, as I'm sure you are, people in the audience outside of this room may not be. And it's basically native language or dialect of a specific population as opposed to a wider dominant or mainstream communication. So vernacular could be language, but it can also be language, visual language. You can be spoken language or other types of ways of communication. So in 2011, I was pretty sure that there was a link between graffiti and math. And I don't know how I came to that, maybe actually I was doing some interviews of graffiti artists and listening to interviews of graffiti artists at the beginning of my dissertation studies and realized that a lot of the graffiti artists I was paying attention to were talking a lot about science and math. And it may not, and not being making that connection. And so I, you know, went to some people and said, I think there's a link between graffiti and math and was told, no, no, there isn't. So my advisor said, you're probably right, but you need to find someone who's done the work. So I made a guess and contacted Ron E. Glash over at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And he was like, oh, yeah, we have a, we developed software that's called Graffiti Graffer. It's online. It's free for educators. We had a bunch of other tools that are based on cultural art and basically teaching computer programming in a very basic level and or mathematics or both. So these tools were just there since 2006 or whatever. And one of them was graffiti and math. And then there was a lot of background about how that connected to mathematics, looking at coordinates and things like that. But my interest in graffiti goes way back to when I was a high school student and maybe even before that. So being able to connect it in such a way was a great thing because then that's when I heard about Steve and saying we're on the same, same few months of time. So techno vernacular is the techno part of being technological or technology is sort of looking at cultural art and technology made by underrepresented ethnic groups. So indigenous, African and Latino diasporas for their own entertainment, a creative expression. So it's less about the definition and more about how people find meaning in math or how they find meaning in science. How they found meaning in art and other things and how they sort of communicate the look, the style, the expression that's associated with a particular group, time, place or event. So I was like, let's look at this as a framework. So reappropriation was something I looked at improvisation and conceptual remixing as is related to techno vernacular creativity. And so through reappropriation, you redeploy material. I'll give some examples of that in a second. Improvisation which is huge is sort of reconceiving technology that trying to transgresses the technology's design function and meaning. And then remixing is redesigning or producing new material artifacts after the existing former function has been rejected. So looking at scholars who were sort of in science and technology studies in some in engineering and how they were looking at these groups and how they were engaging with technology in science. So the idea of contextualizing or placing something in a new or different context, synthesizing, seeing relationships between seemingly unrelated areas. And then syncretizing or inventing new things by combining elements nobody sought to put together was something that I found kept coming up when I was looking at some examples. So this is reappropriation and this is low rider cars culture at a Chicano culture. There's a film called Underwater Dreams, which is about a high school group out of Arizona in 2006, I believe, beat MIT at an underwater robotics competition. And they were mostly Hispanic students, first generation and beat them both in the sort of presentation and in the actual robot itself. But in the film, and also when I went to hear one of the people that one talk about it a year and a half ago, he started talking about hitting switches. And that is vernacular use when you're doing low rider car. So they use low rider car culture to sort of get into robotics. And so we talk about vernacular in this case, low rider cars and car culture and then we talk about robotics. And then this is the entry or the way or the way into robotics for a lot of groups through this culture. This is Kelvin Doe. He is from Sierra Leone. He was brought by MIT a few years ago when he was he's also known as DJ Focus. He sort of self taught engineer. So he wanted to be a DJ, have a studio so they didn't have the resources. So he went and found junk and put things together and created his own stuff. So in a place where there aren't any resources, you find young people like Kelvin who are self taught and began to do the kinds of things you might find in the engineering space or hacker space now or maker space. So this idea of improvising or inventing through use of materials is something that is pretty prevalent and underrepresented ethnic groups. So this guy and then Kelvin being a DJ reminded me of this guy. This is Grandmaster Flash who was credited with the invention of the first cross fader or audio mixer. So he reclaimed parts from a junkyard. He began to create something now that is in most DJ's use around the world and is now at the Smithsonian. But once upon a time he was a teenager in the Bronx didn't have any money and in this mother's kitchen invented something now that's at the Smithsonian. So this idea of this is not really, you know, this is years ago, 70s in the 1970s and Kelvin is more recent. But we find that this happens over and over again in groups that aren't part of a lot of discourse around science, technology, engineering and math, but they're doing these things anyway as part of their everyday life or their creative expression. So I want to look at this chart. This is fairly recent in the last couple of years. This is from the National Science Foundation and this kind of gets it. This is looking at scientists and engineers working in science and engineering occupations. The chart kind of speaks for itself. You can take a look at where some of the underrepresented ethnic groups are in terms of percentages. So black men is 3%, black women is 2%, Hispanic men 4%, Hispanic women 2% and other would be indigenous groups and other groups. So you can see that this is their participation in science and engineering just this more recently. And this includes, if you go to the NSF website in the study for this, this includes people from those groups who actually go and major in these areas. They do not go into STEM. So it's not just getting into STEM but also when they actually have the major, they don't go into STEM. So we look at stuff like this and then we see the kind of things that I've been talking about and realize there's a disconnect between the two things happening. So after I started working with Ron, an RPI, I started looking at his model for culturally situated design and so connecting cultural art and standards based STEM principles. Art based learning which stimulates the development of 21st century skills and creativity and inquiry and educational applications of new technologies that can be used as new openings for learning. And I started looking at how to map this into a way to develop curriculum and to make projects. So for science, you can see the culturally situated design tool we were working with that's very similar to MIT Scratch where you are able to stack blocks and sort of create designs or simulations based on cultural art forms. And then math, so that's math and then computer science and then also there's meaning itself in the artwork. So the star, this is a Native American star quilt design, the mathematical star or morning star. We also have artists who sort of look at this as a design in contemporary art and how it relates to engineering and some other and the rest of the STEM areas. So just really trying to find ways to merge the art, show the art kind of on an equal level of with STEM. And also tucked away up there is Afrofuturism because a lot of the artists that I was looking at are in that sort of way of, and I'll define Afrofuturism as a way of combining the past, present and future. And really sort of looking at ways in which people of the African diaspora, how they are in the future as opposed to stereotypical roles or stereotypical things that might, that they're plagued within the present or in the past. And so after thinking about Kelvin Doe, Grandmaster Flash, DJing, VJing, breakdancing, other types of forms that I define as techno vernacular, created taxonomy to sort of contextualize or look at how we would assess learning. So this is my taxonomy for techno vernacular creativity. And what this allowed me to do was begin to look at how this might connect to some of the STEM principles I was talking to Ron about and others about. So diagramming, mapping, repeating, looping, replaying, the patterns, beats, rhythms, measure, things that we can look at that we can say this is a domain that we can look at to assess. And then translating all that into an actual design rubric for assessment. So we're looking at how diagramming, given a sample or script, and I was looking to extend depth and mastery as sort of areas to assess as well. So how much did they master this? One of the things I found out is that the more mastery you have, the more improvisation you have. And I'll talk about that in a second. So Extend is sort of designed to capture participants' understanding of the tool. And breadth is measuring changes in a number of conceptual categories and individual users describe the task. Depth is the conceptual understanding that they have. And mastery gauges where the participant falls along a continuum from novice to expert. So after I did all that, I did some workshops in Atlanta because I was a Georgia tech. And discovered by bringing in cultural art and bringing in technology, this was a way to engage them and young people, in this case middle school students, mostly African American in STEM. So I assessed it and assessed basically the, but I'll get into all that, which I don't have time to do. It did show that there was an increase in engagement and interest and motivation in STEM based on the activities in these workshops that were also arts based. So then I got out for this job in Boston Arts Academy and I wrapped up my dissertation successfully and I started doing work here locally at Boston Arts Academy. And after a year, so a year and a half I've been here, been back, I started to think about how STEAM, now we're looking at STEAM very broadly, how this would happen within an arts academy but also within a traditional core, common core or standards based curriculum. So conducting workshops based on these kinds of modules would get us to a point where we could assess whether or not the students are more engaged or more motivated or more interested. And Boston Arts Academy is largely 40% African American, 40% Latino and then the rest white and Asian and so on. So 80% African American and Latino from all different neighborhoods of Boston. So I thought about this in an eight week situation when we talk about fundamentals, we're talking about electricity or visual communication or some sort of fundamental vocabulary that young people will need to know, students will need to know. Then we talk about designing, we're talking about fabricating, prototyping, and then programming and so on. These are artists, these are students who a lot of them are going to go into the arts, but they can also bring with them a lot of the skills that they're learning in their STEM classes as well. So the idea of immersing them in a sort of STEAM experience is a way to sort of help them build skills they need for their jobs or for school. And doing that in a way that doesn't, isn't separate from art at all, but that helps them work in different modalities in terms of what they're doing. And I'll give some examples. So this is a dance student and her and two other students were in science class. They were given an extra credit project and they came to me and said, oh, we like this kind of touch board thing you showed us, this kind of small computer you showed us that makes music. So we want to know is there a way we can make a dance floor that when we dance on it makes music. So what you see her doing here, and this is a STEAM fair at Boston Arts Academy, is her and her peers use conductive paint on paper to create a circuit that when she dances on it makes music. So you can see the laptop and then there's a touch board on it and when she dances there's music there. So the idea of combining art, in this case performance, dance performance, and then electrical or electronics and engineering and a little bit of coding is something that was early on in a STEAM lab when we built it and we made it for the students. This is using conductive paint again in touch boards, but this is a communications technology unit part of engineering class and these are, I believe, 10th graders. And that's Hank Shockley, who was one of the architects for a public enemy and who just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who came up to meet with the students presented their instruments that they made with conductive paint and paper. And electronics to Hank, who was very much into instruments and music, and this happened spring of last year. This is this past fall, where we started looking at a concept called Tensegrity, Tension Integrity, which is Buckminster Fuller's concept, and how using, in this case, chopsticks and latex piping, they could actually, tubing, they could create structures that were based on, based on graphic and linear functions and math. So they also tie this into robotics because NASA is using a lot of this type of technology to create robots. They can drop on Mars that sort of are in the center of these structures. So here we have a math, sculpture type of mix here happening. You can see the science teacher in the back and the students sort of doing a hands-on thing in the steam lab. This is last week. This is in the Black Box Theater at Boston Arts Academy, and this is a student who is learning how to do video projection mapping. And the video projection mapping is basically mapping multiple projections on different surfaces at the same time. This was for theater production that happened this past week. That was basically a play that 23 high schools have been selected to do in the next six months. And we're one of the few high schools using, the only high school using video projection mapping, which is a computational thinking skill. We're also using leap motion controllers, which are sensors that are based on hand movement. And using other types of technologies that we map graphically onto walls. So the student is theater for the students theater plus technology plus programming plus and so on. So this idea of combining or working in different modalities through the arts, through science, technology, engineering and math is something that we're really looking to make practical for students as opposed to just within a classroom but also the world. So, and then I could talk to other projects, but I know that people might have some questions. There's some terms maybe you've never heard before. Maybe some questions about steam, but I want to open it up and maybe throw it back to the moderator as well. Yes, thank you for this fascinating talk. It's very inspiring to see the work that you are doing with youth, especially like minority and diverse youth. I wonder if you can talk more about the pathways and the trajectories that these young creative workers and learners are doing after being engaged in the steam lab, right? Because they're developing all these kind of skills, making the connections between their own culture and engineering. But how do they navigate the world after the lab or the world after high school and how they can connect with job opportunities or like communities in their cities or in their states? So the lab is only a year old. So the students have only had access to it for a very short period of time. And one of the things that is very interesting and anecdote I give about this particular student is very interesting because the student wasn't doing well academically. But he's very good at video games and very passionate about video games. And it turns out video projection mapping is very similar to video games. The kind of games he plays on PlayStation 4 where he has multiple images up, screens up at the same time with other players. So the idea of working within that kind of modality is something for this particular student he's already doing every day or would like to do every day. The idea that you can tie in programming or tie it into a theater context is adding a layer of meaning and a layer and skills that the student may never have anticipated until last week. And as a result of this aha moment he will now be able along with other students to be able to incorporate this into what they're doing in theater production. And then of course he's sort of in the same modality that he usually is in video game playing. Now later on, since he's a sophomore he can begin looking at more specific skills that will help him advance this type of interest. So if he wanted to go into more of a computer programming aspect of theater production he could do that. If he wanted to more on this idea of multiple screens and sort of working with a programmer he would be able to do that and have that skill set already. But it really is kind of now we see where these kids are coming in and where they connect. Then we can begin to make this more real and more practical for them as we go along. So the dancer who wants to use conductive paint and use electronics to enhance their dance performance. They may not do that every single time or they may do this in particular ways. But the idea that they have now have these tools enables them to be able to take it to the next level when they're ready. So I don't know if I can answer your question but for now, yeah. Thank you. Is this on? Yeah. I'm just curious to facilitate these kids transition to tertiary education and to jobs which is the question that was just posed. Have you considered a program of internships where they could develop these skills supported by creative people, older creative people in the arts? A lot of there's already internships in place, programs in place, there's summer programming as well. And so I think we have a lot of video game design companies in Cambridge. So I'm sure there's opportunities to engage on that level as well. And one of the things I wanted to say is not that these young people aren't interested in these types of these activities. But they don't see themselves or see people like them doing it. The reason why I'm comfortable programming is because my mother was a computer programmer. I didn't like computer programming until my senior year of high school. So I actually didn't do any programming until much later in my teen years. Partly because my art teacher decided to teach computer graphics. And convinced me after several attempts to get me to take a first computer graphics class which then led to majoring in computer graphics in college. It's a very short period of time, of turnaround time when you think about it. So I'm a junior in high school to individual arts and then majoring in computer graphics a year and a half later. It's a portfolio you have to make so there's a lot of work the teacher and students have to go through. The opportunities that the teacher hoped would happen, she wasn't entirely sure what would happen when we began. So competitions began to happen and the National Science Foundation actually had a competition for art and science back then. And my computer graphics work won a prize. These were all incentives to continue to continue in that direction. I did not anticipate that I would do any computer programming until I got to Pratt and then I felt like they had kind of snuck that in on me. So this is the stuff my mother does, not me, I'm an artist, but then I have to do this as part of the requirement for the major. So a lot of this is building a blueprint as you go along. You have to first figure out what it is, what modalities young people are comfortable in, and what they feel like they're passionate about. What is not just culturally relevant and responsive, but what is personally relevant and responsive. What makes sense to them and what they do in their day to day. Then you connect that to the world that's foreign to them that's outside that's mainstream and dominant where they're not reflected. And I think then you begin to sort of hash out the kinds of activities outside of school that they can get involved in. They might be entrepreneurial or they might be within sort of an existing business or company. I don't have a question, but I have a recommendation. I know you're interested in Afrofuturism and space and science fiction. There's a program at MIT for students. It's part of the AeroAstro department. It's called Zero Robotics where the kids have to learn how to program. And they upload their code to the International Space Station. And we watch during the finals the astronauts while they're not flipping around and having fun. They have to use these actual artistic spheres. That's the acronym to have competitions. And there are like nine states and I think they're doing it overseas as well. And it's great to see Texas versus Florida, DC, Maryland versus Massachusetts. But it's an artistic representation of their code. So if you might want to get your kids involved in that, I'd be happy to let you know. And thanks for reminding me. We actually met with the new deputy director at NASA about a month ago. We had lunch. Me and one of my students had lunch with her and her assistant. We talked about some of the things in terms of their journey to Mars project. So Obama, earlier this year, decided that by 2036, humans met. People will actually be on Mars as opposed to driving by Mars. Or getting close to Mars or dropping robots on Mars. So this is a new initiative. And Dava Newman was here and she did her lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts. And then we had this lunch. And I started talking about ideas that I was having or kinds of things. And then I found out, as it relates to the arts part, that the Voyager 1 space probe has a plasma wave sort of gathers data on plasma waves. And then they've been converting that to music or to sounds. So we have students who compose music. So what happens when we begin layering in data from the plasma wave probe that could actually get them involved with this journey to Mars project? And then my student has his own vision of an interface that's not based on touch, but based on proximity and projection. That he was able to pitch to the deputy director of NASA and folks. So this idea of an art student, a visual art student, being able to do that was a great opportunity for him and for us as well. Hi. Yes. The stories are really interesting. I like seeing the connections. How do we scale this? Are there programs that you can drop into a school or to train a teacher? What do we do to have this reach more people? Or not just the best, but the average who have these interests are making these connections? I think that in addition to initiatives like Journey to Mars, there needs to be more of a focus on computational thinking and teacher training. Prior to them hitting the classroom and also as professional development, I think it's a modality. It's a way of engaging with material. And I think it also helps at least to computer programming, of course, but it also leads into some of these other things such as conductive paint and touch boards and whatever and coding and that way. But I think it also is a way of thinking about how you kind of structure activities as well. And I think so. That's some of the steam programs I've been reading about have really focused on computational thinking. And I think we need to just sort of stay what that is and then create something that is able to go into a educational place and train teachers on. But it doesn't exist yet in a lot of programs for preparing teachers for schools. I think that's a first step. I also think the cultural piece is missing. So I think the part that engages students that are from underrepresented ethnic groups is missing. I think they don't see themselves reflected, don't see their interests or their cultures reflected. So they stay outside of it even if it's free or even if it's something that is in their neighborhood. It's a harder sell for a lot of young people who just can't see themselves in STEM or steam. So beginning to incorporate those types of modalities and experiences and making it responsive to culture or responsive to interest is another step that needs to happen more in a broader fashion. So sort of as a follow-up to that question, can you talk a little bit more about how the program sort of animates across the curriculum at Boston Arts Academy? Is it a discrete course that students are taking or a sort of drop-in lab? Is it a resource for teachers or is it sort of all of the above? All of the above. So you may have a sense that you had the 10-security situation with math classes. So math classes came down, 10th graders, and did a 10-security activity with an artist. But obviously you take that into different directions if you like, including science. Also, the idea of thinking and working with different modalities for people who don't do that is a challenge. If you're a science teacher and science is your expertise and you've never made art and art is not your expertise, it's really hard when you're planning to figure out how to incorporate that or how to incorporate computational thinking and coding and programming and same for math or same for art. If you're an art person and haven't really thought about deep engagement in science, so we do have art science activities happening at Boston Arts Academy where scientists are working with artists and they're working with young people in the classroom. So sometimes that one person, it may be multiple people. So you have an artist and a scientist willing to work together or work across disciplines in order for that to happen. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for the talk. I guess I was curious about, well, first of all, I thank you for the fact that you're giving language to things that are already going on in communities, right? So like with the hidden switches that are going on in Latino communities or whatever the case may be. And so I was curious, did you run into roadblocks as you developed your taxonomy, as you were thinking about, you know, how did some of the vernacular, how does that translate into what academia already accepts or says is the terminology for technological innovation or in that space? I found one of the things that I noticed being African American and female and a predominantly white institution at Georgia Tech in terms of faculty is I noticed that the curriculum or the canon didn't have anyone of color in it for digital media. I had a few women, but maybe three or four or five, for a two-year span of time of reading and then no one of color. So for someone who really wanted to do something that was culturally responsive, that presented a problem. I had to find a Ronnie Glesh to really kick that off. Someone who was a national mathematician, who studies cultures and who connects it to math. But I also had this knowledge of being an artist and working with graffiti artists, working with regular contemporary artists or making art myself. And my interest in science or my interest in technology obviously was something that really pushed me to think about how I would describe the types of projects and works that people in these communities were doing that made sense in a STEM or STEAM capacity. So one of the things, creating a taxonomy, a domain, saying this is a domain was my first and then how do you create a framework around that conceptually and theoretically was the other piece. So before I get to the actual STEAM lab, I had to create this framework in which to work from because it didn't exist. And so that was problematic. But then once you do that, it starts moving and you start realizing there's this whole world of innovation happening that is not often making it to this course, academic discourse, but when it does, it's this aha moment or we bring the kid in from Sierra Leone and we study that, realizing that this happens a lot just in many other neighborhoods around the world including in the United States where people don't have resources and because of that are innovating and creating in their communities. So the taxonomy framework was the basis, but then getting into it and making and doing was the next step. Hi, thank you so much. Your earlier slides with your taxonomy really got me bubbling about sort of the cultural bricolage you describe and I think you may have just answered this a little bit now, but most of your examples have been students who have an artistic bent by nature and they're by virtue of this program's efforts being opening their minds to the possibilities that the science, technology, engineering aspect of STEAM represents but I'm very much hearing you say that you and your program sort of occupy this bridge building middle ground and I'm wondering how much either of an effort you're making or examples you might have of someone who's a science technologist engineer by bent is saying oh and having their mind open to the artistic possibilities of the other stuff they're doing and I ask because I have some friends working on doing that same kind of bridge building with respect to empathy and ethics and policymaking saying there's this whole other stuff you need to think about and it'll make you better at what you do. Yeah, I mean I think so on I think the legislation just passed two months ago for STEAM so that means more support from the federal sort of level but also a lot of, when I talk to artists about science they're interested. Oh, I do that all the time. Or math. Oh, I create choreography based on fractals. Happens. Artists are very open to those types of connections but if you talk to a just not an ethnic mathematician, just a mathematician, they may not get it. They may not even see it. Ron will tell you I like, I appreciate love art, not an artist. I refer to people who know that to work with when I do these projects but at the same time every once in a while you'll find a physicist or some sort of scientist who has some arts background or has some sort of appreciation for the arts. That's the person you start to work with. Then at some point colleagues begin to appreciate the connection but I think that has to happen more often. It's very difficult. It can take years just for that bridge to, just for that to actually happen. We do have an art science type of program spearheaded by Turk at Boston Arts Academy. Right now the focus is the microbiome. Teachers and artists are working with scientists from the Broad Institute on how to bridge art and science. It's a three-year funded project and they're going into third year now but they've had some understandings about how difficult the process is to bring people from different disciplines, different areas and fields of study together and how do you get everyone on the same page in order for them to begin to work on things that then benefit young people or benefit students and communities. It's a process is what I'm saying. It's not something that may happen right away. Hi, thank you for this talk. The ringing bell just confused me. This program has been up and running for a year. Where do you hope it will be in five years and what sort of steps do you see in the future and we both to scale it and to make it broader and deeper? I think creating structures within formal settings that enable interdisciplinary collaboration is a step. I think it's a big step. So we're not just in a science or math team. We're working in our team across with other members of other teams and we're working on projects where it makes sense. So it's not forced, it's something that comes natural and people have buy-in and are committed to it and it's a struggle because a lot of our teachers don't have to face standardized testing, for example, the way a science or math teacher would. So the kinds of pressures that are on science and math teachers in schools will help create a challenge for them to be able to say, okay, I'm going to work on this piece for the arts unless they understand how the arts benefits the scientific piece, which I think it does. But it takes someone who understands both of those modalities to make it very explicit and clear. So finding people who understand that is a challenge as well and those are the people that can help guide folks who may not understand how to connect to the arts, who are in science or math or technology to art or art or the other way around. So I think in five years I would hope to see because of all these team initiatives and I also want to point out that someone had another educator in a half-day workshop on STEAM had asked the two science teachers who were talking about makerspaces where the art was. And it was interesting because they saw makerspaces as an engineering and the kinds of fundamentals that you're getting out of makerspaces primarily don't happen in the art studio, it's different. It's a different habit of mine. So what happens when you mix these habits of mine and working in practices together but not to assume that just because you have a fab lab or a makerspace that you're doing art but you have to think about what is artistic about what we do in a makerspace that we can make more explicit to people who are really interested in the arts. So there's lots of different conversations that need to be had and ways in which we can collaborate that need to happen in three to five years in order for us to begin to make some inroads in this field or domain. Hi, thanks for your talk. It's very inspiring. And I was wondering if you could say a bit more about how this could be scaled up and how you see yourself potentially participating in that beyond the school that you're at and if you could also just throw in a little information about that legislation that was passed a couple of months ago. Yeah, I forget the name of the congressperson but it's been on the books for a minute but if you do steam legislation should pop right up in the Google search because it just happened. Does it have funding attached to it? It will because what happens is when you say that this is an actual thing we are interested in funding on a federal level then you begin to create a line item for it as opposed to not having it there because usually people know about STEM but they don't know about steam. Now there's this knowledge about that. So one of the things I do is I create things in modules. So the taxonomies and modules, I don't know where it is. This is based on modules. When you talk about scaling things up you have to modularize it and then you have to put just like a scratch or a Tetris or you have to be able to plug it in in places where it makes sense but you have to make those modules and you have to make them be able to connect to other things. So I kind of take a scratch or a sort of computer science approach to even our curriculum development because I feel like there's a lot of room for development in how we create these and how we put it together, how we build it. They change according to the different environments we're in. So what I do at Boston Arts Academy is something different than what a Philly school does or different from NADIC or some other school or program but there are elements that everyone can sort of agree upon that need to be part of the program, part of the planning. So are you able to connect with like-minded colleagues across the state administration? I came into Boston with those connections already. So as part of my Ph.D. work and being sponsored by the National Science Foundation I was connected to networks that are already kind of STEAM based. So I did some work with the Smithsonian. I advocated on Capitol Hill for an NSF and learned how to be a lobbyist in a sense and understand how funding works in Capitol Hill and how to talk to someone about STEAM who may not have that knowledge or appreciation and also there are networks of academics and folks in education who are doing papers and academic papers and things like that who are sort of the decision makers in some of these programs that get funded and so being part of those convenings has been something that's been a part of my work as well. So how does your thinking and your approach relate to the Emilia Romagna approach to early education? Basically, this is Northern Italy. They teach the three-hours to very young kids, preschoolers, early schoolers where they teach the three-hours through building projects and art projects. I can't make a distinction between the two. There was even a school, I don't know if it's still the King's School in Cambridge used that approach where my kids were primary school age. I know because I visited the classroom at one point. So have you looked into that? I don't know how much theory there is around the Emilia Romagna approach. I've seen it in action, but I don't know theory myself. But it's basically what you're doing, but it starts with very young kids. And it's not an option, it's just the way they teach. Actually, I think that the idea of us figuring out within where we're going or where we are in education and where we could go and what other people are doing successfully is something that needs to happen as well. But I also think what happens within a particular community or group can happen differently in another community or group. So it's really based on the interests or the everyday practices of the groups and where they are. You probably said that I didn't catch how young kids are when they come into the school. At Boston Arts Academy, they are ninth graders, so 13-year-old. And there can be argument for things like computational thinking and programming. It should happen younger so that they have time to be in that modality before they get to high school. And I would agree with that, but also when they don't, then we have to sort of meet them where they are. So I think the idea of working elementary and middle school, much younger ages I think really prepares them. My exposure to computer graphics and computer programming came from my mother. Even though I didn't engage that skill or get into that until much later in my youth. But having that exposure, I knew that my mother could be a computer programmer, meant that I knew I could do that too. So I saw some way. It was reflected in someone I knew that was close to me. A lot of these kids don't have that at all. So I think the exposure, access, opportunity, but also exposure to people who are from people from the community or from their neighborhood or whatever community doing this type of work is also a motivator to stay with these types of dominant mainstream types of things that they're not involved in. Hi. This may sound like heresy, but I believe that if a lot more math and science teaching took place in this sort of context where it's actually connected to the things that you use it for, that we would have a much more educated population. At the time they finish whatever study or in fact they would never finish because currently the math and science that we teach is often so detached from where it came from and what it's used for. That this is one of the reasons why so many people walking around who have been turned off by their school education. Comments? I mean in my case I always knew I was going to be an artist. That was actually my mother's doing. I knew from a very young age that art was going to be it, but I like science and I did really well with technology. So there are things that were also fostered and pushed forward, but my mother's not an artist. She doesn't understand the arts, maybe has an appreciation for it. And I think that her training, her education was devoid of that. And I think a lot of folks today are also devoid of that in their education. So the appreciation may be there or maybe not at all. And so that needs to be cultivated in the educational process, meaning academia. So as an undergraduate or graduate, you actually have some interdisciplinary connections. Otherwise you're not going to have, you're going to really not know where to connect or how to connect without professional development. And I think that it creates a challenge, but I think it's a challenge that we can meet because we do have this idea of esteem education that is now legislation and all this kind of interest in it. It's also international. So people coming from Colombia and from other countries who are doing esteem initiatives as well. So I think in terms of where in a moment, I think if we look at, I talk about Afrofuturism a lot. And when I talk about Afrofuturism, I talk about it from the standpoint of someone who's used to virtual digital spaces who not just works in visual art, but also works in coding and programming. And how do I create different types of artwork that are Afrofuturistic using code? That kind of language isn't talked about a lot. We talk about speculative fiction. We talk about writing. But I see writing also as coding. But that's me and my interests. So the more we have exposure of folks, we have writers and we have folks who are artists who are doing coding for creative expression, for example. Then we are able to sort of bridge that and then get it to a point where we can give access and opportunity to young people who need it the most. So I have just a couple of comments and stuff and then a question. But I love that we're just starting off the conversation as esteem and not how to get the A back into STEM, which is where in the arts education space, that's been a lot of what the conversation, I feel like, has been focused around for the past several years. So I just love that that's just initially where we're just starting the conversation. I also love that you're bringing in things like the tensegrity sculptures and stuff and bringing in Buck, Mr. Fuller, who's a great example of just kind of this blending of art and technology and design and all this sort of stuff. And came out of the Black Mountain School, which also spawned a number of other of this sort of thinking and stuff. My question though is, are we just talking about something else other than just the traditional academy of departments, there's the mathematics department there, there's the arts department, there is the science department. And how do we actually get past that sort of rigor that's already been established within education to bring in this more interdisciplinary thing? Is it that the easier wins are injecting more art into math or injecting more math into art? Which direction do you see like the bigger wins and the easier ways to make this more successful in creating an interdisciplinary structure? My fear about STEAM is the arts were not on the same level. That they were just in addition, as opposed to actual deep engagement in the arts. I also think that deep engagement in the arts means that you have someone who's used to being in that sort of space as part of the conversation. So if you're not planning with someone who is an artist who has used to that experience, then you're going to be missing out. And also I find that sometimes when you're talking about STEAM and you're talking about math, for example, you're really talking about fun math, not art, but math. It's great, I think it's great, but it's not deep engagement in the arts. So I think some people, science or math teachers, may say, oh, this is art when it's not. It's fun. And I think the association between math and art and fun, sure, but now we're talking about something that's not really STEAM. So I think we have an opportunity to begin to look at the kinds of ways we can. I'm sure we can bring in humanities and bring in other areas of writing. We can bring those things in. But I think it still is the same challenge. It's how do we work? How do we find a common language? So when I did get funded by the National Science Foundation, I brought a national physicist with a mathematician and an artist and Native American artists, African American artists into the room to talk about what's our common language? How do we begin to work together and understand each other, different ways of working, ways of creating? And I think that's the first step. And I think the more we do that and the more convenience we have to do that, then we start getting to where what you were talking about in terms of it's not just art added or we're talking about more of a sort of interdisciplinary space or experimental space for learning this kind of stuff. But right now we have to create those spaces and we have to create those opportunities to come together where they feel like they belong or feel like they have a voice. I'm just kind of showing my ignorance. I was just curious if a student loves your program and they graduate. Are there higher education programs that would be prepared to engage them and let them continue? If you and far between. I think higher ed, there are a lot of other challenges beside that such as finances I think are a real prohibited for students who don't have those resources are able to. So I think once you're into a program I think you might find some pockets of that kind of work happening but first you got to have the money or the resources to be able to get there. And a lot of young people are going to be faced with a lot of debt and a lot of problems in terms of even getting to that point which is getting worse by the day. But at the same time I think having an entrepreneurial spirit helps to boost motivation to go in that direction but now you build the blueprint you build the resources as you go along and you have what you didn't have before going into the program so maybe you don't have as much debt and maybe you do have a little side business so maybe you are collaborating in a little production company with your friends and you're doing this kind of interdisciplinary work and you have your own game company or things like that and you can do that and that's how they get through but a lot of the young people that I'm talking about don't do that yet and I think that is something that needs to happen more where we provide the spaces but also provide the opportunities for these type of collaborations and incubators where they are actually creating the blueprint and then the financial structure to be able to do these kinds of things that are a little more harder to do like school after 12th grade I do want to be conscious of time are there others in the room who have questions before I ask one so some of us are in a working group at Berkman the inclusive innovation working group so we talk a lot about different technology projects for civic engagement and civic participation and I'm wondering from what you have here around program design if you have thoughts on the underpinnings or the underlying ideas that really help students work through the process so one might be holding up failures and talking about failures openly rather than kind of pushing them aside so I would love to hear if you have thoughts on that just from the last year that you've been working on this yeah, Saturday we did five performances in the theater using the video projection mapping we had one particular student who was very good at it and then the program glitched doing a performance so I'm pulled from the audience when the student is panicking because it's not a full failure but for him it was because it's not doing what it's supposed to do so I said well it's working so some degree so let it roll to intermission and then I'll come up and fix the issue and it's kind of how it is that's what happens when you work with new technology my behavior I didn't panic the student was panicking but we have to get used to the fact that it doesn't always work and we have to make it work in the best way we can and then keep moving and I think this idea has to be modeled by the adults who are in the person's life the teachers, the folks doing the artist and I think that with failure the more it's not that you fail all the time you fail and learn but you have to fail because you can't really succeed until you've realized areas that you don't go into but I think that a lot of kids have been sort of indoctrinated in this idea that if you fail your failure and I think that has to change I think these types of projects will require students to get used to the idea that it's not always going to work and the behavior of just tossing the project and saying I can't do it or it's not going to happen it's not how you get to completion and so I think seeing folks, adults, artists who are doing that, who are failing getting up and figuring out going in and fixing it and rolling with it I think is a good lesson and I think helps young people understand it as part of the process Alright, do we have last questions? Alright then, thank you very much Dr. Gaskins I think it's been a wonderful session