From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking: Lessons Learned from Creating an Unhappy Meal

Table of Contents:
Acknolwedgments Introduction The Purpose of this Book What This Book Can Do for You How This Book Is Conceptualized How This Book Is Organized Chapter 1: Why the Arts Matter in School The Argument What exactly is PBL? The Aqua-Ponics Project A Modest Proposal The Advantages of an Education in the Arts The Arts in Decline Creating Art vs. Thinking Art Art Embraces Accident Critical Design What is the Value of Student Work? Use the Arts as a Fundamental Approach Chapter 2: How to Set the Stage How Does One Create the Environment for Learning? So You Want to Be an Artist Starting with What You Already Know Learning Abhors a Vacuum Demonstrating What You Know Gauging How Far You’ve Come Chapter 3: Building a Culture of Learning and Exploration Infinite Questions Learning to Take Risks Learning to See, Learning to Think, Learning to Ask Learning to Investigate An Interlude for Feedback Feedback Chapter 4: Deconstruction The Importance of the Entry Event The Event Itself Unmaking Unmaking and Remaking Chapter 5: Deconstruction of Self Deconstruction is a Path to Self-knowledge What is the Danger of Teleological Thinking? The Marriage of the Arts and Sciences What is Improvisational Thinking? What Does All This Mean for a High School Teacher? Chapter 6: Making The Satisfaction of Making Things by Hand Design Thinking The Importance of Having a Guide The Apprentice and the Mentor Mentorship for the Project-Based Classroom Back to the UnHappy Meal: Organization, Production, and Reconstruction Chapter 7: Bridging Body, Mind and Soul A Model for Arts-Based Research First Attempts with Art Making Art with Meaning Developing a Personal Vision for Success Chapter 8: The Exhibit Curating is Creating Art and Social Practice Putting It All Together The Importance of Showing Work Chapter 9: Measuring Success Assessing Progressive Education Assessing the UnHappy Meal as an Education Assessing the UnHappy Meal as Art How About the Audience? The Aftermath About the Author

About the Author :
Raleigh Werberger has been teaching history for fifteen years, in the U.S. and internationally. He taught both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes and over time began to question the entire premise of high school education. His interest in creating authentic experiences for students led him to experiment with PBL and design thinking challenges. He co-founded a project-based exploratory program at Mid-Pacific Institute in Hawai’i, and served as a Founding Board Member for the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability in Honolulu in 2012-2013. He moved to New York after spending a year at an Arts Residency in Stuttgart, Germany with his wife, a photographer and filmmaker. He is now Dean of Faculty at Darrow School in the Berkshires in upstate New York.

Review :
There is much to appreciate in the account of this school project, even to those who are not educators. It is an affirmation of the importance of arts education and encouraging development of twenty-first-century skills. Raleigh Werberger’s Unhappy Meals Project draws on a clear and powerful idea—deconstruction and recreation of a familiar item—as a thread to follow in an unbounded, cross-disciplinary, and uncertain expedition into the complexity of the modern world. With his Unhappy Meals Project, Raleigh Werberger has turned my Toaster Project into something teachable in a classroom. I’ve followed Raleigh's project since its inception, and seen how his students followed threads wherever they’ve led (including to rearing and slaughtering their own chickens!). In doing so they gained an appreciation of the complexity (and wonder) in everyday things, but more importantly, they’ve been able to experience what it’s like to feel motivated to learn, in order to try and make something you care about happen. This is an extraordinary account of a year-long 9th grade course where students learn artistic thinking by exploring and recreating components of a McDonald’s “Happy Meal.” It is also a wonderfully wise meditation on the nature of real learning. An exceptional teacher, writer, and thinker, Raleigh Werberger has made a unique contribution to the literature of progressive education. This book is a rare treat—an in-depth investigation into the inner workings of a PBL project from the viewpoint of the teacher and students, who together test out the theories of the experts. How well does PBL work? What are the gaps? Can deep thinking be assessed? How do we hold art in the present day curriculum? And does PBL help us reinvent progressive arts education? These are several of the questions explored in the book as a class of 9th graders guide themselves—and the teacher—through an UnHappy Meal project that turns into a very happy learning experience. An inspiring tale of pedagogical innovation from the ground-up and a practical guide to engaging students in creative learning. Art saves lives in transforming the most complex problems and difficulties inaccessible to conventional thinking. It can save schools too by renewing their missions and the necessary partnership between subjective and empirical realms in a world where all things are interconnected and where the intelligence of creative imagination flourishes only by engaging it all. Raleigh Werberger has written an inspiring, transparent, and convincing book grounded in the practice of teaching and the authority of experience. It is just what we need to unleash progressive practice in education in this era of standardized outcomes. Depth of learning and discovery, together with the acquisition of the most rudimentary and lasting skills, can only be achieved by arousing and cultivating the passion and desire for experimentation, understanding, and expression, where artistic and scientific inquiry complement one another. The author models this process perfectly in his reflective journal entries where he makes his “own thinking visible” and then communicates his challenges to students to evoke their responses. My hope is that this book will contribute to easing and maybe even putting an end to the extreme fluctuation of educational trends and ideologies that pervade contemporary life and move us closer to the true basics, the mainstream of teaching and learning grounded in the creative process.