From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking

Book excerpt: This book follows the course of a year-long experiment in which the students were tasked with recreating a McDonald’s Happy Meal by making all the components - from food to packaging - by hand from local ingredients. It was meant to test a hypothesis that a very well-designed project in the arts can teach high school students academic skills and habits of mind while increasing motivation, emotional intelligence, creativity and holistic thinking skills. This book is an antidote to other books that purport to show teachers an exact formula to follow to get amazing results in the classroom. It will help to create a classroom that is more like play, with much more freedom and less scripting in order to engage students at a deeper level, and still get excellent results. By teaching a project-based history class like an arts studio and having the students redesign an archetypal American product in a very natural, improvisational way Werberger was able to have an energizing effect on their academic learning. This book will serve as a guide for teachers to learn more about the adaptive, creative, and epistemologically fascinating concept of arts-based research.