Making Calvin's Learning Transformative

A famous scientist once said of science books, “They’ve actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller, much more wonderful, much more awesome place than I ever realized it was.” At its very best, education enriches our experiencing of the world; making it a more exciting and awesome place to be. Sadly, Calvin’s education makes little difference in his life. He could care less about his schoolbooks and he finds the curriculum useless, meaningless, uninspiring, and irrelevant to his life. Thus far, Calvin’s educational experience is distinctly non-transformative.

Perhaps the greatest contribution you can make as a SUSIE agent is to help make Calvin’s education just a bit more transformative. This is a tall order given the current state of Calvin and Ms. Wormwood, but we want you to try. Your mission is to choose a single topic or idea and describe how it could be taught in a transformative way. Specifically, we want you to do the following:

  1. Describe how you could frame the content in terms of its experiential value. Experiential value refers to the value the content potentially has in students’ immediate, everyday experience. How could you help Calvin to appreciate the experiential value of your topic or idea? Is there a compelling metaphor Ms. Wormwood could use? Is there a way she could create anticipation or inspire Calvin to want to engage with the content?
  2. Describe how you could model and scaffold re-seeing. Re-seeing refers to perceiving everyday objects, events, or issues through the lens of a new idea. What objects, events, or issues does you topic or idea illuminate? How could Ms. Wormwood support and inspire Calvin to see these parts of his world through the lens of your topic or idea?

Details on this assignment will be sent from SUSIE to your Blackboard interface. If you have any questions, contact Agent Pugh.

Links to your mission reports:

Calvin Project Homepage