Looking Closely

Looking closely is about close, careful, and mindful observation . It often requires sustained time in front of an object or system, to look again and again to notice each intricacy, each nuance, each detail. To look closely is to see what is in front of oneself, to look with focus, to make statements about what something looks like, what it is made of, how it is put together. As Agency by Design researcher Shari Tishman has written elsewhere, looking closely “means taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance. It implies lingering, looking long, being generous, almost lavish, with one's attentional focus, in order to see beyond first impressions.”¹

Looking Closely at Computers with English Language Learners at Oakland International High School

In the previous chapter we offered a snapshot of Melissa Butler's classroom in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in which her kindergarten students looked long and closely at a screw. Meanwhile, across the country Thi Bui, a technology teacher at Oakland International High School, launched into a unit with her class of English Language Learners aimed at building their comfort with computers (Figure 5.2). Thi's objective was to empower students to confidently problem-solve their own computer issues. To do so, Thi designed a lesson that encouraged students to look closely at computers, inside and out. As she explained:

Thi's first step toward encouraging her students to feel more comfortable and confident was to build awareness of the physical workings of computers. She asked students to begin naming or drawing the parts they discovered, and then to note questions as they arose. She asked students to connect and disconnect parts so they could begin to see how computers were put together. As she recalled,

By exposing the parts of the hardware they used, Thi and her students were able to dispel some of the mystery, and some of the fear, around how computers work.

Looking Closely at the Complex Nature of Pencils with Kindergarten Students at Emerson Elementary School

Looking closely can be practiced in many ways: Students might draw, make lists, or name the parts of a particular object; they might verbally describe intricacies or write descriptive observations. Any of these practices also cultivates a habit of slowing down. A great example of the development of this habit can be seen in Carla Aiello's kindergarten classroom at Emerson Elementary School, where she and her students spent almost an entire year closely examining pencils. What began as a simple exercise in naming the parts of this everyday object evolved into an in-depth exploration of each of the component properties of a pencil.

The project was conceived of by Carla in collaboration with Harriet Cohen, a retired educator from nearby Park Day School who began volunteering in Carla's classroom in 2013. Carla and Harriet chose to focus on pencils because they are accessible, everyday objects that reward deep exploration. While the project certainly featured all three of the capacities named earlier—looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity—here we highlight the many steps of this investigation that underscore the practice of looking closely. As Carla and Harriet explained, each student chose a pencil from a variety of styles and formats. They used the following prompts to launch the project: What is a pencil? What is it made of? What can you do with a pencil? Students were asked to think about what pencils are used for and to notice some commonalities and differences among them. They noticed that some pencils had letters and numbers; some had erasers and eraser clamps; some were multicolored and some were plain yellow.

The pencil project engaged students in a wide range of close-looking activities. For example, the students watched a “How Pencils Are Made” video,² they used pencil sharpeners to understand how they worked, they took apart and reassembled mechanical pencils, and they made pencils of their own. Students were also offered blank pencil journals and were invited to see what they could do with sticks of graphite. “They described how it felt to write and draw with graphite,” Harriet explained, “how the graphite came off on their fingers and, in some cases, how easily it broke. When asked why wood was put around the graphite in a pencil, most students quickly agreed that it was to protect the graphite and to keep hands and papers clean.”

As the pencil project evolved, Carla's students experienced many opportunities to explore the properties of pencils and ultimately to collaborate on a giant pencil sculpture that expressed how pencils could be used as powerful tools for communicating messages and that displayed each child's idea for how they could possibly use pencils to make the world a better place.

The unit was playful and engaging—and yielded multiple learning outcomes. Carla noticed her students investigating simple items in depth, developing a sensitivity to their design, and reflecting on their work. Carla watched as her students developed the ability to look closely and critically, hopeful in her anticipation that her students would “transfer their close looking skills to other parts of their life and other curriculum areas.”

Looking Closely and Exploring the Complexity of Electricity and Circuits with Third Grade Students at Park Day School

While Thi and her high school students were looking closely at computers and exploring their complexity, around the corner at Park Day School, third-grade teacher Renee Miller was embarking on her annual electricity and circuits unit. Having taught the unit before, Renee's typical curricular trajectory included first explaining to students how light bulbs work. But during her first year of working with Agency by Design, she changed her plan and instead began by asking her students to do some close looking (Figure 5.3). One student noticed that a piece of wire was soldered to the base of the bulb. Upon further examination, the student's friend noticed that in fact there were two places where the wire was soldered to the base of the bulb. The pair of students then tried to trace the wires inside the bulb to understand what they were connected to, which led to conjectures about why the wires were there. “Frustrated that they couldn't see all the parts,” Renee explained, “they finally asked to break it open. I hadn't offered this as an option, but I knew it was where we were headed.”

Driven by that initial observation, the students' curiosity led them to go deeper than their first look, to look again, and to look critically. Building on that curiosity—admittedly a bit nervously—Renee provided teams of students with a light bulb, a paper bag, a plastic bag, a smashing tool, gloves, and goggles. As students began to open their bulbs, Renee quickly saw the opportunities for learning. Students were making observations about a white powder coating, connections between wires and springs, electric coils, and putty. They began to question why the various parts of the light bulb were there and what function each had. The experience was illuminating for Renee as well: “The light bulb lesson always required a great deal of telling as teaching, and many students never really understood as I tried to explain what was happening on the inside of a light bulb,” she said. But this time, “students constructed an understanding of the workings of an incandescent light bulb, and came away with one mental model of an electrical system.”

This picture of practice illustrating how Renee's students explored the complexity of a light bulb offers a provocative glimpse into how looking closely at an object can provide an entry point into the nontransparent concept of electricity while inspiring students to make predictions and test hypotheses based on their observations.

Looking Closely and Exploring the Complexity of Telephones, Manufacturing, and Communication Systems with Eighth-Grade Students at East Bay School for Boys

Not far from Renee's third-grade classroom at the Park Day School, Kyle Metzner and Corrina Hui's eighth-grade students at East Bay School for Boys in Berkeley, California, were likewise engaged in the process of looking closely and exploring complexity. Kyle and Corrina's students were participating in a unit of cross-curricular inquiry on cellular phones: In math class they gained statistical skills by examining and comparing the true cost of phone plans; in history class they explored the external costs of cell phone production and consumption, including the human impact of labor practices and the environmental impact of electronic waste disposal; and in a class called “Work” they took analog and cell phones fully apart to consider how planned obsolescence manifests itself in phone design and choice of materials. The activity of deconstructing and looking closely at various phones provided an entry point into a quite sophisticated inquiry in which students were able to investigate issues of resource procurement, identify important manufacturing shifts (e.g., old phones are made to have replaceable parts; new phones are not), and notice trends in telephone design over the years.

For Kyle and Corrina's students, investigating the materials-to-waste life span of cell phones began with close looking and migrated beyond classroom walls. They created a public art piece about waste related to cell phone consumption. They interviewed people across generations to understand the history and evolution of telephones and technology, and they examined the many systems within which cell phone use can be situated. Students explored their own complex habits and relationships to their personal cell phone devices; they had an opportunity to meaningfully connect their learning experiences to their own lives by examining their personal decisions about cell phone plans and carriers. As Corrina explained:

Parts, Purposes, Complexities

If there is a core Agency by Design thinking routine—a routine that cultivates the slow looking that is so fundamental to developing a sensitivity to design—it is Parts, Purposes, Complexities. This is the first thinking routine our teacher partners used with their students, and, at this writing, it is still the most widely used of all the Agency by Design thinking routines.

Inspired by the ideas presented in David Perkins's book, Knowledge as Design,⁵ this thinking routine was originally developed as a part of the Artful Thinking initiative at Project Zero.⁶ Adopted for the maker-centered classroom, the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine is designed to help students slow down and look closely at an object or system, as in Figure 5.6. As Agency by Design researcher Shari Tishman has noted in the past, engaging in the process of slow looking has the potential to support the maker capacities of looking closely and exploring complexity:

To help illustrate what the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine looks like in action, picture an apple pie. That's right. Apple pie. Not the popular Raspberry Pi microprocessor. Apple pie—the iconic dessert served in roadside diners across the United States. Now an apple pie may not seem like a typical built object, but of course apple pies are carefully crafted, designed, and redesigned by people in an intentional way. Apple pies are systems, made up of subsystems, which are situated within broader supersystems. In this way, baking an apple pie can be—and should be—considered just as much of a maker endeavor as building a quad-copter, engineering a robot—or programming a Raspberry Pi. As it happens, our teacher partners in Oakland feel the same way, and we have enjoyed watching them use an apple pie as a focal point for the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine. What follows is an example of how this exercise might play out.

The first question in the routine asks, What are its parts? By looking closely at an apple pie, students begin by naming all the parts they initially see. At first glance, they may just notice two parts: the crust on the outside, and the apples on the inside. But on closer inspection, more details emerge. They may notice, for example, that there are slits cut into the top of the piecrust and that the crust is bumpy around the edges of the pie. If students cut a slice of the pie and look yet more closely, they may notice that there is a bottom crust and an upper crust—and a gooey middle. Taking a bite, they will notice even more. Certainly, they will taste apples, but they may also taste cinnamon and the tang of lemon as well. Of course, if the students were to watch someone make an apple pie, they would see the dough that forms the crust is made of many parts, including flour, sugar, salt, and butter. The filling of the apple pie is made of even more parts. Yes, there are the apples and the cinnamon and lemon that they tasted on first bite, but there are also, butter, sugar, and nutmeg in the mix as well.

Having noticed the many parts of an apple pie, students address the second question of the thinking routine, What are the purposes?, by considering the purposes of the parts they noticed. For example, they may focus on the slits in the piecrust and come to understand that they are there to allow steam to be released from the inside of the pie as it cooks in the oven. They may come to understand that the bumpy bits around the edges of the piecrust are there to give the apple pie its classic crenulated look but also to pinch the bottom crust and the upper crust together through a process called fluting.

Now that students have considered the parts and purposes of the various elements of the apple pie, they turn to the third question in the routine, What are its complexities?, and think about how the various parts of the pie come together in ways that are complex. Although students may not use the language of systems thinking, right away they may notice that an apple pie is a system composed of two primary subsystems: the outer crusts and the inner filling. Each of these subsystems is composed of parts that all have specific purposes and which all come together in ways that are complex. Taking a closer look at the filling of an apple pie, students may come to understand that apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice, sugar, and salt may just seem like a heap of stuff on their own, but when combined in particular amounts and prepared in a particular way each of these parts come together in a complex—and yummy—way.

By using the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine, young people learn that something as seemingly simple as an apple pie is actually a complex system. They also learn, as we suggested earlier, that the closer they look at something the more there is to see, and the more they see, the more interesting the thing becomes. This happens not just with apple pies, of course. The Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine can be used with a wide variety of objects and systems. In fact, we have seen this thinking routine used fruitfully on all manner of things, from mechanical tools, small appliances, and light electronics to poems, lunch lines, and pencils.

Parts, People, Interactions

A second Agency by Design thinking routine is called Parts, People, Interactions. Like Parts, Purposes, Complexities , this routine is designed to support the maker capacities of looking closely and exploring complexity. The Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine can be used on its own, or as a follow-up to Parts, Purposes, Complexities. Either way, it encourages students to explore the complexity of systems and, in particular, the multiple and complex ways people participate in systems.

To get a feel for the kind of thinking this routine is meant to encourage, let's return again to the example of an apple pie. In the foregoing section, we saw how students were able to look closely at an apple pie to understand it as a complex system composed of subsystems. We also hinted that an apple pie can be situated within greater supersystems. At Emerson Elementary School in Oakland, California, Carla Aiello and her kindergarten students did just that. Starting with the basic concept of an apple pie, Carla and her students developed systems maps that placed apple pies within various systems. In one systems map, Carla's students sketched out an apple's journey from its origins in an orchard to its end state as an apple pie, as shown in Figure 5.7. Along the way, her students noted the various parts of the system: apples, apple trees, ladders, baskets, produce trucks, grocery stores, ovens, and houses. They also considered the various people who participate in this system: apple growers, apple pickers, families who visit apple orchards to go apple picking, truck drivers who deliver apples to grocery stores, produce clerks, cashiers, and then the people who bake apple pies—including the young people themselves (with the help of their parents, of course). Using multidirectional arrows and other drawing techniques, the students further indicated how the various people within this system interact with one another and with the various parts of the system.

In this particular example, Carla's young students did not explicitly use the Parts, People, and Interactions thinking routine. In fact, we had not developed it yet! Instead, the systems maps generated by Carla's kindergarten students—as well as those developed by students in her colleagues' classrooms—helped us understand how focusing on parts, people, and interactions can help learners discover and explore the complexity of systems. Thus, building on the work of Carla and her colleagues, the Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine was developed. Since then, it has been used in many settings to help students understand the various—and sometimes conflicting—perspectives of the many people who participate in a particular system.

A particularly interesting recent example comes from Aaron Vanderwerff at Lighthouse Community Charter School. Following a Black Lives Matter protest that stopped traffic on the Bay Bridge (which connects Oakland to San Francisco) on Martin Luther King Day, Aaron and his students used this thinking routine to explore the protest as a system, including the various parts of the protest, the multiple people involved and affected by the protest, and the ways the different people interacted with one another and each part of the system.

In its focus on people, the Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine shares some similarities with the popular concept of user-centered design associated with various protocols for design thinking,⁸ which imagines a designed system from the perspective of a user at the center of it. But some limitations to a user-centered design perspective are worth pointing out. For example, as Kevin Slavin noted in a recent article titled “Design as Participation,” a user-centered approach to design limits the degree to which designers (or makers) can understand their roles in a given system—or to even understand the greater complexity of the system itself. As Slavin commented, “When designers center around the user, where do the needs and desires of the other actors in the system go? The lens of the user obscures the view of the ecosystems it affects.”⁹ Moving away from the user–designer approach, Slavin advocates instead for a more participatory approach to making and design. “Designing for participation is different than designing for use,”¹⁰ he argued. From this perspective, the maker or designer becomes an engaged participant in the built environment, as opposed to a removed agent wielding his or her external power upon that environment. “Some contemporary work suggests that we are not only designing for participation,” Slavin has argued, “but that design is a fundamentally participatory act… . This is design as an activity that doesn't place the designer or the user in the center.”¹¹

In the spirit of Slavin's remarks, the Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine attempts to stretch beyond placing the user solely at the center of a system, and instead considers the multiple roles various people might play within a system. For example, we have seen the Parts, People, and Interactions thinking routine applied to topics such as product design, traffic patterns, school lunch lines, local bike paths, and even the practice of trick or treating.

Think, Feel, Care

A third Agency by Design thinking routine is called Think, Feel, Care. The purpose of this thinking routine is to encourage students to imaginatively envision the roles various stakeholders play within a system. Here, once again, it is helpful to think about the example of apple pie. Recall the systems maps Carla's kindergarteners made that showed the parts, people, and interactions they associated with an apple-pie-making system. Using the Think, Feel, Care thinking routine , Carla's students might try to imagine the perspective of the truck driver who delivers the apples to the bakery. They might try to envision the thoughts and concerns of the apple farmers and their families. Perhaps they may try to imagine the experience of the person purchasing the pie, or the perspective of the bakery workers who do the cleaning up. Imaginatively envisioning any of these perspectives will likely deepen their understanding on the larger pie-making system.

The Think, Feel, Care thinking routine leverages the natural human capacity for empathy by encouraging students to imagine the experience of people other than themselves. But it is important to remember that empathy is a powerful cognitive tool that has its perils and must be exercised carefully. First of all, as a matter of respect, none of us can truly claim to know how another person feels: Empathy can illuminate the kinds of thoughts and feelings and concerns someone else might have, but one must always regard these insights as suggestions only, and resist being overly certain. Further, as generous as students' imaginations can sometimes be, they are shaped (and often limited) by their own experiences. One simply cannot know the thoughts or feelings of people whose experiences are hugely different from his or her own, and to assume one can is a mark of disrespect. Moreover, lack of information about someone else's viewpoint can lead to overgeneralization and stereotype, no matter how well-intentioned the effort. As a poignant example of this, recall the story we told earlier about the students at East Bay School for Boys who wanted to make something to help the homeless residents of their neighborhood. They began to design hooks for the homeless that they thought would be helpful, but it was not until they actually interviewed some homeless people and learned firsthand about their needs that they were able to envision the kind of functionality the hooks truly needed—specifically to hold items and keep clothes dry in the shower area at the local shelter—not to hook bags onto shopping carts as the young students had initially thought.

Imagine If …

The fourth Agency by Design thinking routine is Imagine if … . This routine was designed to specifically target the maker capacity of finding opportunity. Its purpose is to encourage students to consider how objects and systems might be designed—or redesigned—in positive ways. But it is not merely an open-ended brainstorming activity. Rather, it offers concrete criteria for envisioning improvement. Specifically, it encourages young people to consider how the designed dimensions of their worlds can be made more effective, more efficient, more ethical, or more beautiful.

To share a sense of what it is like to use this thinking routine, we return one final time to Carla's kindergarten students. As part of their discussion with Carla, students considered the implications of using apples from a grocery store versus using apples hand-picked from a local orchard. If they were to use the Imagine if … thinking routine, perhaps they would expand on their reflections and envision making an apple pie more beautiful, for example by changing the way it looks, tastes, or smells. Perhaps the kindergarteners would focus on equity and would imagine how to make the pie easier to share, for example by marking the crust before baking so the pie can be more easily cut into eight equal pieces once it is done. Eventually, the kindergartners may broaden their thinking and use the Imagine if … routine to think about pie making at the systems level. For example, perhaps the students want to make apple farming more organic and therefore envision changes in the process of growing apples. Perhaps they want to make the apple-picking system more efficient, and therefore consider how to make better apple-picking devices. Maybe they want to make the system more fun, and therefore consider how to bring a carnival atmosphere to the apple-picking process. Whatever they do, the hope is that by using the routine regularly—on apples pies and beyond—they build their capacity to become alert to opportunities to shape—or reshape—their worlds.

These four thinking routines have been designed to be nonsequential yet synergistic. Each routine can be used solo, or in combination with the others, and all four thinking routines have been designed to support the development of the maker capacities described earlier in this chapter—looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity, as in Figure 5.8. It is also important to remember that this suite of thinking routines is not meant to exist as a set of stand-alone activities but rather as a means to develop habits of mind by routinizing particular ways of thinking. In other words, these thinking routines—like all thinking routines—are meant to be repeated over and over again until they become a way of seeing the world.

Zooming back to the big picture, this chapter has presented a framework for instructional practice that is a capstone to the story of maker-centered learning that this book has endeavored to tell. In essence, the story is this: We believe that one of the fundamental goals of maker-centered learning is what the Agency by Design team has termed maker empowerment. We have defined maker empowerment as a dispositional outcome and have argued that one of the most effective ways to cultivate this way of seeing and being in the world is by helping students develop a sensitivity to design. Students will feel empowered to bring about change in the world through making by first coming to notice that many of the objects and systems they encounter are designs—designs that can be hacked, tweaked, reenvisioned, and reinvented. This sensitivity to design is supported by three maker capacities: the capacity to look closely at objects and systems, the capacity to explore the ways in which they are complex, and the capacity to find opportunities to change them. We offer this framework as a contribution to the emergent domain of maker-centered learning, and we hope it will be a useful addition to any maker educators' already well-stocked instructional toolkit.