Beyond Classrooms
2019 was the year a lighter teaching load taught me to doubt the classroom.
With less to deliver, I had room to teach the way I had been wanting to. I ran three courses, including a new one, Making with algorithms, about what it means for designers to work with algorithm-driven design. Delivered differently from anything I had done before, it became one of the most fulfilling courses I have ever taught.
The real change was in the gaps. The free time let me work with students informally, in open-ended conversations that pushed them toward their actual curiosities instead of an assignment brief. Those talks connected me to what they genuinely needed in a way a scheduled class never had. Alongside this I was reading Piaget and Papert, constructivism and constructionism, and finding language for what I was watching happen, especially in maths and computer science.
By the end of the year the informal setting had clearly produced more engagement and more curiosity than the structured one. Which left me with a question I have not let go of since. A classroom gives you structure, but it can also quietly smother the free flow of ideas. So do we even need classrooms at all?