exhibit_illustration-by-tadashi-tokieda
In Radcliffe Yard at Harvard (Cambridge, MA), there is an exhibit by Tadashi Tokieda on Toys in Everyday Science.
It looks like fun!
This evening, as part of the Radcliffe Open Yard event, students will be staffing the exhibit.
To help people play with the toys in science.
Tadashi Tokieda is the 2013–2014 William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow, Radcliffe Institute and is spending the year hanging out and helping people understand how science (and mathematics) works.
His learning history is fascinating, and a good example to those outside the academy!
Speaking of the academy, I am saddened to report that this exhibit is not list of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture website.
Nor is there any connection to museum education methodology mentioned on the Radcliffe Institute website.
This is ironic, as what Tokieda essentially is doing the work of museum educators.
For example, look at past and current exhibits developed at museums.
Try the Exploratorium's Geometry Playground, the Acton Discovery Museums' Hands On Science, the Boston Children's Museum Science Interactives, the Museum of Science's Investigation Station, or others....
Museum educators spend a lot of time, creativity, and joy developing hands on demonstrations of scientific and mathematic principals so others can learn by doing.
It's a field of study, as well.
Look at the current issue of the Museum Educators' Roundtable journal, entitled Engaging Visitors to Create Positive Futures. They are offering the editor's review article for all to read here.
Or go to the American Alliance of Museum's EdCom publication on principals and practice.
So when one of the high holies of academia presents something (admittedly, a wonderful something) as revolutionary and new, by virtue of the nature of its presentation and by what is funded and the nature of its funding, the subsequent reification of that approach by what is not said becomes significant.
In other words, ignoring others who are doing essentially the same work and have been doing it for a long time, continues the existing power dynamics of 1) the university as a more important site of learning than any other learning environment (school or museum or other) 2) maintaining traditional educational views of learning as content transference from the expert to the novitiate.
Ok, the Institute may fight me on the 2nd point there -- and with some reason -- but my contention here is that offering a "playful" approach as so unique and isolated as deserving of special recognition only serves to highlight the majority of the institution that isn't that.
And it also demonstrates how, once again, learning is compartmentalized and how we do not communicate with each other, despite our commonalities of subject and approach.
oy.*
The HMSC website is mentioning this Saturday's Day of the Dead event.
Think I'll go to that.
And to the Toys in Science exhibit.
After all this meta-conversation, I could use a little fun!
*Ok, sorry to get all Foucault up in your face! Shouldn't take myself too seriously, either!
