Screened Dreams & Temporary Seams

D.B / 2021 / ORIENTATION AP

Introduction

    What makes a student at GCE? How about a teacher? Along with other required strange questions to answer on an action project for orientation. Welcome to GCE's expectation guide for students and teachers, compiled by students and only students. Keep in mind this isn't too essential to the primary piece of this action project, as it is actually just re-sorting a room and detailing its blueprints onto why we decided to go and organize a room in that particular manner. We will once again get to that later.

Our Expectations

As students, our expectations from teachers are often peculiar and never truly written in stone for all to follow. Nor are the expectations for students the same for teachers. Everyone's approach on a piece is different, and it will forever remain that way as long as we're not all bundled up nice and cozy together living the same lives. There are of course general rules that we all morally should feel obligated to follow, be it teacher or student.

After a short discussion, we rounded up a general idea of what we wanted our school environment to be, particularly what we wanted our two roles in the school to be. Teachers and students. Below you'll find two lists compiled of expectations set for both by students. 

Students are expected to be: Kind, motivated, focused, interested, does work, cares, participates, mutual respect, curious, works timely, and last but not least not a distraction to their fellow peers.

Once again, it is very vague onto its ruling but is one nonetheless. There isn't too much to say on this as I have agreed to this "contract" of student behavior, so I'm bound to it in a way. Maybe not legally. Who knows.

Teachers are expected to be: Empathetic, caring, organized, interested, entertaining, understanding, flexible, patient, open to doing one on one's with students, and lastly excited to teach. 

My primary takeaway from this is mostly the "excited to teach" portion. Teachers at GCE are quite fascinated with what they teach, very passionate about the topics taught and the results that come from it. As stubborn as I can be, not a single teacher here has lacked a passion to teach their topic. 

The Actual Action Project

Now that we're finally here, let's get a little more into the action project. If you had read my orientation field experience reflection, you would know that I am assigned to a theatrical room of sorts for this action project and I had originally designed the room to fit the general theme of that trip over to Millennium park. To summarize what this action project is quite simply the teachers wanting us to fix up the rooms for them with what little we have to work with and a very unspecified budget. At this point in time, we are in the old building by the North/Clybourn stop on the red line. They still do not have the new building and they've also moved out quite a lot of the stuff we used to have in this building over to the new one. 

Now that you know what situation us students are in, I shall now finally present to you what we had in mind for the theatre room we have here. There's probably an official name for it, but considering I can't remember it and theatre room fits a lot better, we are settling on that. Firstly let's go over what is in the room currently. There are 8 pews (yes pews, as in the church benches) each currently able to fit two students each due to COVID restrictions (via duct tape restricting the middle to sit on). Luckily for us, that doesn't require any extra seats as our biggest class is about fourteen students. We have a total of 5 outlets, so the room is pretty useful utility-wise and nobody usually is fighting over an outlet to charge their devices. Other than that, it's all we have.

We decided to list off the cons of this room to figure out what we needed in it based on the classes that were going to be taught in here during our 2 months here, which would be a journalism class, a stories class, and a math class.

CONS LIST: 

- The pews are horrible to write on, it is one of the worst rooms for note-taking.

SOLUTION: Large clipboards that we're ordering cheap from somewhere, original plan was to buy little TV tray desks for students since they're cheap and temporary. Sadly they're $10, and that'd be $140 just for two classes to be able to write notes, so we worked around it with something significantly cheaper and cut it down to something like $30 in total with the large clipboards.

- There is absolutely nowhere to write mathematics in this room.

SOLUTION: Big, big, whiteboard on the wall. 

- No projector or projector screen

SOLUTION: Arguing with another class why the theatre room needs a projector more than a room that has a flat screen TV already in it, and unscrewing a projector screen from another room.

- No sound pads? 

SOLUTION: We're hopefully buying sound pads for the space?

Finally, here's the blueprint and some pictures of what our space is supposed to look like, along with some sources for where we'll be buying the two things we need.

Photos taken by me.

Conclusion

Our priority as a group was established, which was to hone in on the weaknesses of the space that didn't appeal to the classes that would be taught in this room. Did we establish that? I feel as though we did and if we didn't, then I believe time will only tell. Thank you for reading.

It's Been A Millennium

 It's Been A Millennium

D.B 

GCE Lab School, 2021

About what feels to be forever, we're finally back in-person at GCE, which we have started off with orientation week. During this orientation week, we as a school all went to Millennium park to go enjoy a little soundscape of musical pieces performed by Kioto Aoki that played on the speakers, taking notes on what we enjoyed about a piece we heard, along with other requirements such as illustrating what we heard or what we imagined while listening. With this orientation action project, we are simply asked to reflect on what we've learned from this experience. Below you'll find my reflection of the experience.

An Observational Challenge

The first thing I noticed was the connection between our internal and external investigations. Originally for our internal, we had to figure out what a classroom is and what we'd want our specifically designed room to look like in order to maximize its utility and space. Imagine a classroom designed as if only for watching videos or theatrical displays. An upward slope leading up the back of the room with pews for seating, and a flat flooring on the front for the audience in the pews to be pointed towards to observe. 

We'll get back to that later, but it'll come back up soon.

As we entered the soundscape space at Millennium park, I finally decided to take a look at the sheet we were all handed out. Everything looked pretty standard, describing what we've heard, illustrating, writing our likes and dislikes. Only one thing stood out like a sore thumb on the sheet was the question on the back: "How did this learning experience compare to an indoor classroom?" 

Our original look at what classrooms could be never spanned quite literally outside the box that students are placed in, according to the examples shown. Only now was it brought to my attention that it had been left out until now. My initial response to that question was noting it as superior. The wind was perfect, sun was clouded out so nobody was cooking alive in the summer heat, and really to even sell this whole frolicking in the flowers idea even more, we had a whole grass field to lay down and relax in. 

There are of course the downsides to being outside that at the time were not experienced, but in the given moment it was essentially perfect. 

Once we all got back to school the next day, we had to reflect on what we enjoyed about the experience and what overall moods it gave to us. Our group's primary recognition was that it was peaceful, relaxing, on one occasion stressful. I began to think about how I would incorporate that into our assigned classroom's design. 

Here's a quick sketch of what I'd imagine the layout to be. 

I'll explain what everything is really quickly: 

Striped lines: Cushions, primarily around the stairs as they'd be comfortable to occupy with their additional but convenient back support, along with cushioning around the open walls and where I felt fits. I specifically left the area in the front open for a teacher to still have a stage of some sort to teach. This was incorporated into the design due to one of the students enjoying sitting on the floor/under a desk, and to also fit our position while at the park, where we only could sit in the grass.

Big circle in the front: Where a computer and desk has space to be and the primary source for the audio on the speakers.

Shaded in circles by the corners: Speaker placement.

Tiny circles: Lights that only use non-invasive (as I describe it) colors, colors that resonate with the music being played and aren't too blinding if you look straight at them. Primarily dark colors.

Rectangle boxes near center/back: Pews. One of the students in my group didn't enjoy the church-like seating as that environment discomforted her, so one of the reasons behind the cushioning on the floor is so the pews could easily be covered up with black covers or something similar in order to rid them from the space mentally to some capacity. 

On the speakers, the teacher would be allowed to play whatever they like through their computer around the room. The lighting allows them to set the tone they want their students to feel while listening to the music. This gives them the ability to hone in on what they want students to take away from the song a little better. 

Would I recommend this set up for the classroom? Maybe for particular settings or lessons, but not all. It does not set into the theatrical potential of this room, more of the musical side and immersion, which not all lessons are attuned to do. Nonetheless, still an experience I would imagine sets the same tone of voice that our Millennium park experience had given us along with those that hadn't been there.