Early Adoption: SENSE. Workshops by PHW Student at Boys’ Day
The Boys’ Day is an annual event held throughout Germany in April that encourages
secondary school boys to experience female-dominated professions. The aim is for
them to explore new career paths and question outdated gender roles. One of those
fields with male underrepresentation is pedagogy – especially in elementary and
primary education. Thus, our consortium partners from the PHW (Weingarten
University of Education) in southern Germany regularly participate in the event by
hosting a day full of insights into the institution that trains teachers and educators of
almost every kind – to show the boys the beauty and versatility of educational
careers.
As SENSE. is particularly appealing due to its interdisciplinary, inclusive, learner
centred and creative nature, the SENSE. PHW team created two different
interactive workshops for the 7 th grade students who were welcomed on
Thursday morning, April 3 rd . They started with an information session about the day,
including talks about their personal interests and expectations. The boys were then
divided into groups of 8-9 and assigned to certain workshops they shall attend. Both
SENSE. workshops were led by a university student (prospective teacher) who
acted as a male role model for the boys and as an early adopter of our unique
SENSE. methodology by implementing learning activities derived from the project!
The first workshop was called “Pendulum Power & Colour Magic – Can physics
create art?”, where the student teacher built three different stations for the boys to
actively engage in interrelated STEAM activities. One station involved recreating,
imagining and inventing pendulum patterns on squares of paper. The highlight for the
students must have been the giant pendulum made from a bucket hanging from the
ceiling. A hole in the bucket and (liquid) acrylic paint allowed them to draw with the
pendulum on canvas placed on a spinnable plate below. At the third station, the
students could examine their drawings through colour-filter glasses, in order to
rethink individual perception and the physics of colour. If they wished, they could
modify their canvas while wearing the glasses – which they all happily did! While the
colour pendulum is a STEAM activity from PHW’s STEAM Labs, the combination with
perception and drawing through the colour glasses is derived from the SENSE.
activity Invisible.
The second workshop focused on sound as something that is “More than
Hearing: see it, feel it, explore it!”. We consider this to be an interpretation of the
SENSE. activity Drawing Sounds, where materials for creating (‘drawing’) and
visualizing (‘drawing’) sounds are scattered around the room and participants are
invited to freely engage with them and depict their experiences. In the Boys’ Day
adaptation, some of the materials were of a more technical nature and the
participants were proactively encouraged to inquire them, such as a vibration
generator connected to a plate with sand – leading to amazing Chladni figures.
Another station had the students explore the effects of putting a bone conduction
speaker on different surfaces, creating rankings based on their individual and
collective perceptions of loudness, sound quality, and resonance.
The workshops were part of the Early Adopter events that recently started across
the SENSE. project. Herein, stakeholders who are (potential) beneficiaries of the
unique methodology and its related pedagogy get trained to implement learning
activities based on the SENSE. approach (and mostly derived from project learning
sequences) and actually conduct such adaptations with participants in order to
promote the project and simultaneously prototype (pre)final activity descriptions!