Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 171
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-1-4758-2459-9 • Hardback • December 2015 • $82.00 • (£63.00)
978-1-4758-2460-5 • Paperback • December 2015 • $42.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-4758-2461-2 • eBook • December 2015 • $39.50 • (£30.00)
Raleigh Werberger has been teaching history for fifteen years, in the U.S. and internationally. He taught both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes and over time began to question the entire premise of high school education. His interest in creating authentic experiences for students led him to experiment with PBL and design thinking challenges. He co-founded a project-based exploratory program at Mid-Pacific Institute in Hawai’i, and served as a Founding Board Member for the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability in Honolulu in 2012-2013. He moved to New York after spending a year at an Arts Residency in Stuttgart, Germany with his wife, a photographer and filmmaker. He is now Dean of Faculty at Darrow School in the Berkshires in upstate New York.
Acknolwedgments
Introduction
The Purpose of this Book
What This Book Can Do for You
How This Book Is Conceptualized
How This Book Is Organized
Chapter 1: Why the Arts Matter in School
The Argument
What exactly is PBL?
The Aqua-Ponics Project
A Modest Proposal
The Advantages of an Education in the Arts
The Arts in Decline
Creating Art vs. Thinking Art
Art Embraces Accident
Critical Design
What is the Value of Student Work?
Use the Arts as a Fundamental Approach
Chapter 2: How to Set the Stage
How Does One Create the Environment for Learning?
So You Want to Be an Artist
Starting with What You Already Know
Learning Abhors a Vacuum
Demonstrating What You Know
Gauging How Far You’ve Come
Chapter 3: Building a Culture of Learning and Exploration
Infinite Questions
Learning to Take Risks
Learning to See, Learning to Think, Learning to Ask
Learning to Investigate
An Interlude for Feedback Feedback
Chapter 4: Deconstruction
The Importance of the Entry Event
The Event Itself
Unmaking
Unmaking and Remaking
Chapter 5: Deconstruction of Self
Deconstruction is a Path to Self-knowledge
What is the Danger of Teleological Thinking?
The Marriage of the Arts and Sciences
What is Improvisational Thinking?
What Does All This Mean for a High School Teacher?
Chapter 6: Making
The Satisfaction of Making Things by Hand
Design Thinking
The Importance of Having a Guide
The Apprentice and the Mentor
Mentorship for the Project-Based Classroom
Back to the UnHappy Meal: Organization, Production, and Reconstruction
Chapter 7: Bridging Body, Mind and Soul
A Model for Arts-Based Research
First Attempts with Art
Making Art with Meaning
Developing a Personal Vision for Success
Chapter 8: The Exhibit
Curating is Creating
Art and Social Practice
Putting It All Together
The Importance of Showing Work
Chapter 9: Measuring Success
Assessing Progressive Education
Assessing the UnHappy Meal as an Education
Assessing the UnHappy Meal as Art
How About the Audience?
The Aftermath
About the Author
There is much to appreciate in the account of this school project, even to those who are not educators. It is an affirmation of the importance of arts education and encouraging development of twenty-first-century skills.
— VOYA
Raleigh Werberger’s Unhappy Meals Project draws on a clear and powerful idea—deconstruction and recreation of a familiar item—as a thread to follow in an unbounded, cross-disciplinary, and uncertain expedition into the complexity of the modern world. With his Unhappy Meals Project, Raleigh Werberger has turned my Toaster Project into something teachable in a classroom.
I’ve followed Raleigh's project since its inception, and seen how his students followed threads wherever they’ve led (including to rearing and slaughtering their own chickens!). In doing so they gained an appreciation of the complexity (and wonder) in everyday things, but more importantly, they’ve been able to experience what it’s like to feel motivated to learn, in order to try and make something you care about happen.
— Thomas Thwaites, author of “The Toaster Project” and the forthcoming “GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human”
This is an extraordinary account of a year-long 9th grade course where students learn artistic thinking by exploring and recreating components of a McDonald’s “Happy Meal.” It is also a wonderfully wise meditation on the nature of real learning. An exceptional teacher, writer, and thinker, Raleigh Werberger has made a unique contribution to the literature of progressive education.
— Tony Wagner, best-selling author of “The Global Achievement Gap” and “Creating Innovators”
This book is a rare treat—an in-depth investigation into the inner workings of a PBL project from the viewpoint of the teacher and students, who together test out the theories of the experts. How well does PBL work? What are the gaps? Can deep thinking be assessed? How do we hold art in the present day curriculum? And does PBL help us reinvent progressive arts education? These are several of the questions explored in the book as a class of 9th graders guide themselves—and the teacher—through an UnHappy Meal project that turns into a very happy learning experience.
— Thom Markham, founder of PBL Global, formerly of Envision Schools and the Buck Institute for Education, author of “Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for innovation and inquiry for K–12 teachers”
An inspiring tale of pedagogical innovation from the ground-up and a practical guide to engaging students in creative learning.
— Yong Zhao Ph.D., University of Kansas
Art saves lives in transforming the most complex problems and difficulties inaccessible to conventional thinking. It can save schools too by renewing their missions and the necessary partnership between subjective and empirical realms in a world where all things are interconnected and where the intelligence of creative imagination flourishes only by engaging it all. Raleigh Werberger has written an inspiring, transparent, and convincing book grounded in the practice of teaching and the authority of experience. It is just what we need to unleash progressive practice in education in this era of standardized outcomes. Depth of learning and discovery, together with the acquisition of the most rudimentary and lasting skills, can only be achieved by arousing and cultivating the passion and desire for experimentation, understanding, and expression, where artistic and scientific inquiry complement one another. The author models this process perfectly in his reflective journal entries where he makes his “own thinking visible” and then communicates his challenges to students to evoke their responses. My hope is that this book will contribute to easing and maybe even putting an end to the extreme fluctuation of educational trends and ideologies that pervade contemporary life and move us closer to the true basics, the mainstream of teaching and learning grounded in the creative process.
— Shaun McNiff, professor, Lesley University Cambridge, MA and author of many books including “Art-Based Research”(1998), “Art as Research” (2013) and “Imagination in Action” (2015)