createCanvas

Processing Foundation

The Processing Foundation Education Portal is a collection of free education materials that can be used to teach our software in a variety of classroom settings. Rather than endorse a specific curriculum, we’ve engaged with educators from our community, ranging from K12 teachers to folks who lead workshops at hackerspaces, and asked them to share their teaching materials here, which anyone can use. To hear more about their approaches and practices, check out CreateCanvas, our new education podcast, which focuses on teaching at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Check back for future podcast episodes for in-depth interviews with these innovative educators.

Episodes

  1. S02E03 CreateCanvas Sara Hendren

    11/30/2020

    S02E03 CreateCanvas Sara Hendren

    Episode 3 features an in-depth interview with Sara Hendren. Sara is an artist, design researcher, and write who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in permanent collection of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt museum; her writing and design work has been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company and on NPR. Hendren has been a fellow at New America and Carey Institute for Global Good. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children https://sarahendren.com/about/. In this episode, Sara discusses how to shift thinking, and teaching, around disability from assistive design to adaptive design. Her book asks the question: “What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation — rather than a rigid insistence on ‘normalcy’ — look like?” In the classroom, Sara resists the approach of tech-savior-ism and rehab engineering, to instead reframe all technology as adaptive: “take a look at your smartphone, the utensils with which you ate your lunch, the glasses or the contacts that you wear every day, the orthotic shoe on one side that’s helping you with a more comfortable gait — and call that all technology, find yourself in that big plane of existence, which is just an extended body with stuff that has needs.” The syllabus for the course “Investigating Normal” can be found here - http://aplusa.org/courses/investigating-normal/ The syllabus for the course “Critical Designer/Activist Engineer” can be found here - http://aplusa.org/courses/critical-designer-slash-activist-engineer/ Both courses are part of the Adaptation and Ability Group, a technical and social lab for creative engineering and design on the subjects of disability, which Sara directs. http://aplusa.org/ Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication here - https://medium.com/processing-foundation/createcanvas-season-2-interview-with-sara-hendren-2b51a5adcc44

    43 min
  2. S02E02 CreateCanvas Ari Melenciano

    10/30/2020

    S02E02 CreateCanvas Ari Melenciano

    Episode 2 features an in-depth interview with Ari Melenciano, a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, creative technologist, researcher, and educator. In 2017, Ari founded Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism through collaborative research and practice. She currently teaches creative technology and design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU’s Dept. of Digital Photography and Imaging, Pratt Institute’s Communications Design school, and Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program. In this episode, Ari speaks about her experience teaching everything from AP Computer Science, to kindergarten and middle school, to now at the university undergrad and graduate level. Growing up an artist, she explains her approach to art-making within a context of education and activism, as well as a way to move through life. She discusses Afrotectopia’s origins, and what she’s learned about community building and organizing over the years, as it has expanded to include a festival, fellowship program, summer camp, and, in January 2020, The School of Afrotectopia, a program that offered 10 free courses to over 250 students. Ari's work is presented on her website - https://www.ariciano.com/. You can learn more about Afrotectopia here - https://www.afrotectopia.org/ and about the Imagineer Fellowship - https://medium.com/afrotectopia-imagineer-fellowship-2020/afrotectopia-imagineer-fellowship-2020-27a07a2a1ebb. The The syllabus from the Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellowship can be found here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yMrCSUtj_8Nh5jxXZegSYt1NtJ9NhVqssKxyA_Z8QIE/edit Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication - https://medium.com/processing-foundation/createcanvas-season-2-interview-with-ari-melenciano-f84972d9e1cb

    44 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

The Processing Foundation Education Portal is a collection of free education materials that can be used to teach our software in a variety of classroom settings. Rather than endorse a specific curriculum, we’ve engaged with educators from our community, ranging from K12 teachers to folks who lead workshops at hackerspaces, and asked them to share their teaching materials here, which anyone can use. To hear more about their approaches and practices, check out CreateCanvas, our new education podcast, which focuses on teaching at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Check back for future podcast episodes for in-depth interviews with these innovative educators.