ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2014, Aaron Knochel developed and facilitated a teacher professional development workshop called STEAM It Up. The workshop was designed to build teacher’s understanding of concepts such as design thinking, interdisciplinary curriculum, and 3D printing. The part-dialogic, part-training structure was intended for area teachers in the science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) subject areas. These workshops demonstrated the potential for interdisciplinary peer support networks and the importance of design pedagogy as an access point for experiential curriculum utilizing 3D printing. Interdisciplinarity, in this sense, refers to pedagogy and curriculum that goes on between disciplines, sharing degrees of epistemology and application, and in some cases generating new disciplines (Nicolescu, 1999; Russell, 2005). However, part of the experience in the workshops was that the boundaries of disciplines became indeterminate the more the teachers explored this new set of tools and methods together. As a professional development workshop, participants were given a crash course in 3D modeling, 3D printing, and thinking about the transdisciplinary potential of opportunities for teachers from different disciplines to share in design practices that can impact their use of innovative technologies. Transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline” (Nicolescu, 1999, p. 2), and the introduction of 3D printing seemed to compel this group of teachers to think curriculum anew. The workshops highlighted the need for greater understanding of learning environments in relation to making, and for and sustained implementation of innovative curricular change.
