Eery semester, we hold workshops planned and managed by seminar students.
On January 12, nine members of the 3rd year seminar divided into three teams and conducted a workshop for children (a report on the workshop can be found on the department blog here).
When designing my own workshops, I am conscious of low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls.
This is a concept for tool development held by Scratch developer Professor Mitchel Resnick and his colleagues, but it is also helpful when considering workshops as places for learning (see also this blog post in Japanese).
We are currently trying to see if these three principles of low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls can be applied to the creation of environments for students designing workshops (see also this blog post on workshop design).
I previously worked on the Doshisha Rohm Memorial Hall project and a project subject at Doshisha University that involved getting students to design workshops for children. I did the project with Prof. Nobuyuki Ueda and Ms. Ryoko Matsumoto (now exploratorium) in the CAMP project I was working on at the time (it has been 20 years since then).
At that time, we worked on the project with an awareness of orthodox peripheral participation, starting with watching the workshop, then participating in the workshop as a facilitator, and then gradually becoming involved as if we were designing the workshop ourselves.
This method is very effective in conveying a certain mold of workshop design.
On the other hand, however, it may require more time, experience, and knowledge to break that mold and create a new mold of one’s own (mold-breaking).
In the workshop conducted by the seminar students this time, instead of having the students gradually learn about the workshop through orthodox peripheral participation, we asked them to design the workshop freely (as I mentioned, the students themselves were busy with other classes, activities, and practical training, etc., and it was difficult for them to take the time to design their own workshop). (Although I write this, the students themselves were busy with other classes, activities, practical training, etc., and did not have much time to spare.)
How to design workshops for students to design workshops?
I am trying to find a way to use the three principles of low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls in workshop design that I utilize myself here as well.