From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking: Lessons Learned from Creating An UnHappy Meal

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This book follows the course of a year-long experiment in which the students were tasked with recreating a McDonalds 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.

Reviews

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 Werbergers Unhappy Meals Project draws on a clear and powerful ideadeconstruction and recreation of a familiar itemas 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.
Ive followed Raleigh's project since its inception, and seen how his students followed threads wherever theyve 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, theyve been able to experience what its 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 McDonalds 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 treatan 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 themselvesand the teacherthrough 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 K12 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)

Author Bio

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 Hawaii, 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.