Part 3:  Sprout & Co.

By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Some of the newcomers who invest themselves in community life are bringing with them new ideas. Sprout & Co. and Parts and Crafts, two organizations founded by Somerville immigrants who make their living as professionals are challenging assumptions about how we learn.

To a significant degree, America’s schools continue a 19th Century model of education that emerged at a time when work and social life changed slowly. Students learned skills that prepared them for a lifetime in the same occupation.

Today’s students will work in occupations that do not yet exist. They will change jobs a dozen or more times before they retire. Their success will be based not so much on what they know, but on how they think.

The knowledge required to effectively negotiate new occupational, social, political, and economic realities will continually change. What will remain constant is the need to recognize and define problems, gather information, interpret it, generate alternative solutions, test them against pragmatic criteria, and make decisions.

Somerville Schools’ administrators, teachers, and involved parents are well aware of this. Two years ago I wrote a series of columns about how they are quietly making our K-12 system one of the most innovative in the nation. (see  http://somervillenews.typepad.com/the_somerville_news/2010/03/preparing-kids-for-the-21st-century.html and http://somervillenews.1upprelaunch.com/main.asp?SectionID=3&SubSectionID=3&ArticleID=2257&TM=28237.32) But they must work within constraints that include credentialing requirements, MCAS, limited budgets, and multiple stakeholders’ expectations.

The founders of Sprout & Co. and Parts and Crafts applaud this ongoing improvement in our schools. Their aim is not to bash schools, but to explore new ways of nurturing curiosity, fostering initiative, facilitating learning, empowering the learner, and making the process fun.

There is a lot worth knowing about both organizations. So this week, I’m just going to focus on Sprout.

It was founded by three former MIT students – Alec Resnick, Shaunalynn Duffy, and Michael Nagle – who shared a mutual dissatisfaction with their own educational experiences and a fascination with exploring new approaches to learning.

They believe that kids start off intensely curious and naturally creative. Then we obligate them to passively absorb a lot of information that they aren’t interested in and will never need. They retain it only long enough to pass the tests and get the grades, unless it is relevant to their interests.

This undermines the initiative and active questioning that drive real learning. Alec tells me, “People talk about education as if it’s something that they submit to instead of what they can take delight in.”

Sprout advocates an approach they call “community-driven investigations.”  We learn best when we have a reason to do so, when we are sufficiently curious about something to investigate it. Driven by such curiosity, we not only learn the facts and principles associated with what we are investigating, we learn how to think about it most effectively. And we retain much more of what we learn because we have something meaningful to connect it to.

If Sprout participants want to build a wind turbine, they don’t just learn how to weld. They learn the physics of wind, the engineering of turbines, how to optimize their design, and how to build and test it. They learn these things by doing them.

Some of Sprout’s other investigate-by-doing programs include learning math by exploring games and puzzles, picking locks, planning events, rapidly prototyping and manufacturing products, engineering musical instruments, developing and implementing community projects, strategizing board games, creating multimedia animation, and many others. About 700 people have participated in Sprout’s programs and studios, a third of who are school-aged.

Sprout also operates a workshop and lab space at 339R Summer Street that is outfitted with light manufacturing equipment, a wet lab, electronics gear, and crafts materials and equipment. It’s where they conduct their studios, but it’s also open to pretty much anyone to come in and do their own investigations.

Sprout’s leaders call their learning approach “community-driven investigations” because community provides “rich and plentiful opportunities for deep learning experiences,” along with the resources to pursue them.

Which is why they located their enterprise in Somerville. Our city’s combination of density, diversity, and human scale make it a microcosm of the broader world. It is home to plenty of people with PhDs and, at the same time, plenty of kids who eat subsidized lunches.

It is close to traditional academic and corporate resources. It nurtures deep pockets of community. And it produces dozens of volunteers who have an extensive understanding of particular subjects and can provide the equipment required to investigate them.

Alec says that he’s looking to discover what education and research could look like in fifty years. I asked him, “How will kids get a well-rounded education if they only pursue what interests them?”

He says that society is investing a lot of money to teach kids things that they don’t want or need to know, and won’t remember.  Certain jobs or advanced educational programs will require credentials. When the need arises, people can learn what they need to satisfy credential requirements. In college, he says, nobody cares where you went to high school. And after your first substantial job, there little concern for where you went to college.

I think about what I was taught in primary and high school. I remember maybe 20% of it, and use less.

I didn’t go to college until I was 22 and had done some living. I went with real-world questions that I wanted answers to. It’s those answers, how I got them, and how I applied them that stay with me.

If you’re my age, do remember which countries export flax? Do you care?