We spent today in a place we know well, the Early College Ag High School in Bertie County, NC. Bertie County has been a second home for us this past year, home to four of our Learning Landscape math playgrounds, three computer labs we designed, and a slew of other design projects within the rural school district. Since we know some of the students and almost all the teachers, we were particularly excited to visit today and pick up some conversations where we had left off last time. On our last visit, we had spoken to the high school students about our work with Project H and primed them for our road show stop.
Our first order of business was to show my Colbert Report clip in class (above), to rev up some excitement around humanitarian design. Stephen Colbert’s humor seems to be universal- we haven’t had an audience that doesn’t end up laughing uncontrollably yet. The 20 or so students in Mr. Guard and Mr. Johnson’s classes were particularly excited to learn that the exact pair of glasses on Mr. Colbert’s face were the ones outside their door in the trailer. So with that we ventured out to the trailer exhibition, where Principal Peele from the adjacent Prep Academy and Superintendent Zullinger were waiting, already checking out the Hippo Roller (below).
As the day progressed, both shenanigans and inspiring discussions ensued. I was reminded how glad I am to have added high schools to our itinerary, as teenagers who have never considered design as a viable career come to the exhibition with open eyes and shrewd questions, seeing things we hadn’t considered.
Particularly here in Bertie, we viewed our visit as a teaser for the program we will be teaching this fall at the very same school. Studio H is a one-year design/build program for high school juniors, in which we’ll be teaching design thinking an construction skills to build one big community project per year. The work shown in the trailer gives some insight to students as to what a design process looks like, and what the impact of community-driven design work can be. To teach hands-on design skills in a place like Bertie, where hands-on agricultural work is legacy but creative problem solving is not taught in schools, is a truly exciting challenge for us.
We’re quite lucky to be working with the Bertie County School District for the long haul, and we can’t wait to get back here at the end of our trip to set up shop (literally) with the students we spent time with today. If you’d like to read more about Studio H, visit the page on the Project H site here, or watch the short video below.
































