Do We Want To Design Rides, or Do We Want to Create Imagineers?

Had a check in call with my friends in the Compose Our World project recently. That’s the 9th grade curriculum project I’m working on, and not writing about enough. After our first year of exploring PBL and SEL as concepts to guide and shape 9th grade language arts curriculum, we’re beginning to decide what we want our curriculum for students and teachers to maybe look like. ((Before we iterate through another round and change most everything. That’s how design works.))

As we’re struggling with how to put the pieces together, we’re also slogging through some really big questions about what we want for the learners and the teachers in this project.

Do we want to create really incredible learning experiences, ones that teachers can bring their students to year after year and find success with? At some level, yes, it’s great to make things that are powerful learning tools or experiences, and that can be used more than once by teachers in their classrooms. But maybe creating better tools for learners to rely on isn’t the best thing we could do in this work.

Maybe instead we should be helping people to build their own really powerful learning experiences.

Because Antero is involved in this work, and he’s always thinking about games, and he’s always sending me really interesting resources on how gamers design experiences, Imagineers got brought into the conversation.

When designing curriculum, do we want to be Imagineers, or do we want to be developing Imagineers? That’s the question. And it’s never as simple as either, or ((Nor are rides always the best metaphor for learning experiences – because frequently the best learning happens on detours, or when we take the experience off the tracks.)) , but I suspect long time readers of this blog will know which way I want things to lean towards.

How about you?