Abstract
This article presents the Pilgrimage Model as a template for educators wishing to lead students on site-specific studies of engaged learning. During the 2015–2016 academic year, a group of Georgetown University students, faculty, and staff pursued the Pilgrimage Project, a year-long pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary education and speculative design. Students researched Georgetown’s historic Old North building from a variety of disciplinary angles and presented the results of their collective research in an on-site multimedia exhibit. The article analyzes the Pilgrimage Project from a practical perspective, as an effective means of delivering robust educational experiences, and from a theoretical perspective, as an example of speculative method in education research. As a model of interdisciplinary education, the Pilgrimage Model effectively merges disciplinary-specific course goals, in-depth student-led research, and student skill development in digital design and multimedia production.
Keywords
Introduction
There is increasing recognition that the world is inundated with complex problems that do not adhere to disciplinary boundaries. Concurrent with these changing priorities, higher education confronts a host of its own complex challenges—including large class sizes, inflated tuition rates, distracted students, and technological disruptions—as it struggles to prepare students for professional life beyond the academy. If university education is to remain viable in the changing 21st century landscape, new educational and curricular models that transcend traditional boundaries are a necessity. We believe that the purpose of education is to create multi-literate, self-sufficient, and capable citizens and that this goal should be the driving force behind new pedagogical models and institutional change. In this article, we report on a year-long research experiment in interdisciplinary pedagogy that proposes one such model—the Pilgrimage Model.
During the 2015–2016 academic year, students, faculty, and staff at Georgetown University embarked on The Pilgrimage Project (http://oldnorth.georgetown.domains), an interdisciplinary educational experiment that freely mixed research methods from the arts and humanities with the social sciences and incorporated multimedia technologies alongside more traditional and disciplinary forms of scholarly production. Our model relies heavily on both active learning (Bonwell and Eison, 1991; Michael, 2006; Prince, 2004) and project-based learning (Barron and Chen, 2008; Mäenpää et al., 2015; Thomas, 2000) methods and demonstrates what we believe to be the most effective educational use of technology.
The Pilgrimage Model treats the learning process as a journey that begins with (1) observation and discovery, (2) proceeds to research and investigation, (3) wanders into creative experimentation, and (4) ends with the articulation of what was learned. The model draws upon the theories of active, project-based, and inquiry-based learning referenced above, as well as the Kolb Model of experiential learning (Kolb, 2015). Building upon these practices, the Pilgrimage Model emphasizes a curricular structure that allows for smooth collaboration across courses in different disciplines, between students with different levels of sophistication, and even between courses that do not overlap in the same semester. Collaboration occurs in both immediate forms, such as student teams working toward a shared outcome, and mediated forms, such as sharing of objects produced in one course with students in another course. This article presents The Pilgrimage Project, the embodiment of The Pilgrimage Model, as a case study in applying Speculative Design (Dunne and Raby, 2013; Lukens and DiSalvo, 2012) and Speculative Method (Ross, 2016) to interdisciplinary education.
The Pilgrimage Project and speculative design
Overview
The Pilgrimage Project transformed a functioning university building, the Old North building on the Georgetown University campus, into a locus of interdisciplinary education for one year. The Project took its name from the reflective journeys of faith traditions and redeployed ‘pilgrimage’ as a metaphor for learning. This year-long journey involved four faculty members, six courses, over 60 students, multiple Georgetown University staff members, and two collaborating museum professionals. It started from the standpoint that any place is a legible object of material culture that can be interpreted through research and design and reimagined as a site of learning and engagement. During the 2015–2016 academic year, participants focused on the common location of Old North with the goal of making visible hidden aspects of Georgetown’s history, heritage, architecture, and environment. The location was explored through both analytic and synthetic methods in order to build an archive of documents reflecting our shared experiences. The archive was then activated for a public audience in a series of artistic and digital projects. In Phase One (Fall Semester 2015), students in four courses amassed the archive through course-specific and disciplinary-specific means. In Phase Two (Spring Semester 2016), students utilized the archive to design and build creative and digital projects that shared our collected knowledge. These projects were then installed for a public exhibition in Old North. Nearly 200 exhibition visitors interacted with student projects in the same space that we had collectively studied all year.
Speculative method
The Pilgrimage Project imagines an interdisciplinary future pedagogy that both maintains and blurs boundaries: between disciplines; between formal and informal learning; between courses and curricula; between instructors and students; between experts and novices; and between the university and the rest of the social world. As such, it is a research experiment in line with the speculative method approach to digital education outlined by Ross (2016: 2) who notes that these methods ‘blur boundaries between research, design and teaching.’ In particular, Ross emphasizes the ‘not-yetness’ of speculative method, a trait in which the emergent discoveries of applied design and digital technologies are not known in advance (Ross, 2016: 3–5). One question to which the Pilgrimage Project applied the not-yetness of speculative method was how technological, artistic, and creative projects can inspire and maintain student engagement when directed toward a topic of shared concern.
The Pilgrimage Project taught students how to deeply research a site from multiple epistemological viewpoints using archival and technological tools and how to communicate their discoveries through the creation of informative and artistic works—works that at once make historical and cultural meanings apparent while also actively adding to those meanings and the history of the site itself. We agree with Chao and Litvin’s (2015) notion that, ‘speculative design occurs when the open-minded, imaginative approaches of the liberal arts meet intervention-focused design methodologies,’ and The Pilgrimage Model attempts to formally encapsulate this principle. Lury and Wakeford (2012) similarly stress ‘investigation of the open-endedness of the social world’ though inventive (speculative) methods that both investigate and engage that social world. These investigations, moreover, are adapted to the ‘ongoingness, relationality, contingency and sensuousness’ (Lury and Wakeford, 2012: 2) of specific contexts with the aim of making a social difference. In this sense, speculative method shares much in common with Action Research in education (Lewin, 1946; Seago and Dunne, 1999), as both share the goals of bringing about practical improvement, blend research and practice, and privilege ecological validity. However, whereas Action Research embraces traditional social science research methodologies that aim to prove or disprove a hypothesis, speculative method employs more open-ended design methodologies that provide a space for ongoing adjustment and adaptation.
Pilgrimage Project details
The focus of the Pilgrimage Project was the location known as Old North on the Georgetown University campus (Figure 1). Founded in 1789, Georgetown is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the United States. Old North is the university’s second oldest academic building and it remains a functioning and vital part of campus life. And despite its age, it houses Georgetown’s newest school: the McCourt School of Public Policy founded in 2013. First erected in 1797, the Old North building materializes Georgetown’s changing history. Its porch has hosted speeches by 14 U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, and the interior is decorated with significant pieces of Georgetown University’s art collection, including a series of historical paintings by Henry Mosler (1841–1920). The rich and widely unknown history of Old North (including its construction by slaves), as well as its centrality in campus life, made it an excellent context for exploring the use of physical and cultural history as educational tools in the service of sharing disciplinary, ethical, and technological knowledge.
Old North is the oldest functioning academic building on the Georgetown University campus. The Pilgrimage Project chose Old North as our shared research focus (e.g the destination of our collective “pilgrimage”) during the 2015–2016 academic year. Photo by Jiaxin Yang.
The Pilgrimage Project began its journey in Fall 2015 with four courses: Museum Studies Foundations from the Art and Museum Studies Department, Methods of Media Production and Remix Practices offered by the Communication, Culture and Technology Program (CCT), and Introduction to Creative Writing from the English department. Two additional courses were offered by CCT in the Spring: Interactive Technologies for Cultural Heritage and Installation and Exhibit Design. The core team consisted of four faculty, two library staff members, and two museum professionals. Course instructors worked with students in their individual classes in discipline-specific ways, while also fostering collaborations across classes to provide an interdisciplinary perspective that added to the complexity of the learning and more closely approximated professional work-environments. Students were encouraged to follow their own interests in response to course-specific assignments in an attempt to provoke creativity and maximum engagement and ownership over their projects. The rule was that students could contribute in ways they felt inspired, and they were not forced into roles that did not align with the educational objectives of their chosen courses.
Following Biesta (2007), and in keeping with speculative method, we did not have a specific idea of “what works” in interdisciplinary education. Rather than sharing a specific narrative or theme, we asked students to explore the “problems that might be” (Biesta, 2007: 16) in an open-ended way and to find ways to communicate those problems for visitors. We proposed that research into Old North would provide an “understanding of possibilities” for a public installation (Biesta, 2007: 16). Projects wrestled with a wide range of questions, including the design and sharing of aesthetic and architectural information, the ways in which official university archives contrast with popular and collective campus memory, the legacy and reconciliation of slavery on Georgetown’s campus (Swarns, 2016), and the ways in which visitor interaction with a space alters the contours of that space in real time. The following sections describe the courses that contributed to the building of the research archive during Fall semester 2015 (Phase One) and the activation of the archive for an interactive public installation event during Spring semester 2016 (Phase Two). (Figure 2). We see both phases as critical to the success of the Pilgrimage Model: the first phase produced a rich research archive that the second phase activated through critical design (Raby, 2008; Bardzell et al., 2012; Bardzell J and Bardzell S, 2013).
The Pilgrimage Project Installation Event. Right: Old North’s Historic Stairwell, which was converted into the primary gallery space for media and interactive projects during the installation. Center: The Heartwood project installed in the Old North courtyard from which visitors entered the installation. Left: A group shot of the students who converted Old North into an interactive and multimedia gallery space.
Project implementation
Phase One
Our Pilgrimage Model begins with active exploration of a site aimed at provoking observation and discovery, and the first phase of the Pilgrimage Project collected a deeply-layered archive of personal and objective discoveries related to Old North. A shared digital and material archive served as a repository for documenting those discoveries and making them available for future iterations. It is vital in inquiry-based learning that students ask their own questions, as it makes them more engaged in the processes of answering them and more likely to value those answers. Phase One assignments asked students to actively explore Old North through disciplinary methods and collect their questions as well as their findings. These assignments were course-aligned and related to disciplinary knowledge and skills; each assignment played a specific pedagogical role within the wider goals of its host course.
Contributions included art historical and archival research, architectural analyses, creative writing, photographic studies, and documentary video shorts. It is an important feature of our model that The Pilgrimage Project did not force instructors to sacrifice disciplinary learning goals. Rather, the project simulated an authentic real-world context for student work, and we used the frame of a multi-course collaborative project to elevate student engagement with traditional course-specific assignments. This proved to be an effective strategy as students in all the courses commented that they felt their coursework was serving a larger purpose, both on campus and within the community. Similarly, Phase One assignments incorporated technology in discipline-relevant ways, and the introduction of media and digital tools benefited from their association with a real-world focus. Student engagement with the Phase One assignments was higher than with other course assignments, as evidenced by the large number of students who elected to focus on Old North for individual projects without being required to do so, and the equally large number of students who chose to continue their participation during the Spring semester. Phase One assignments were also designed to be handed-off from one course to another at scheduled points during the semester in a process that we describe below as mediated collaboration—recasting products from one course as prompts in another course. This provided course instructors the freedom to meet the goals of their individual courses and disciplinary curricula while still contributing to the larger project.
Phase One ended with a small reception and presentations from students in all participating courses. The reception allowed students to engage with each other around their common focus while drawing upon discipline-specific language and expertise—effectively learning how to communicate across academic disciplines. Students were particularly excited to see how other courses built upon their contributions and the diverse ways that various courses approached a shared space. They also received a better understanding of how large-scale projects with multiple parts are organized and managed. This interdisciplinary approach introduced students to the value of collaborative research and the ways that multiple research methods deepen and expand the conversation surrounding a common focus. The following sections describe the discipline-specific assignments and goals of each course, and the ways in which they contributed to the larger project.
Introduction to Creative Writing
(English, 19 students). Introduction to creative writing fulfills the introductory requirement for English majors on the creative writing track. For The Pilgrimage Project, the course asked students to adapt Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (Matsuo and Yuasa, 1966) for a writing project entitled ‘Narrow Road to Old North.’ Over 10 weeks, each student returned weekly to a selected spot in the courtyard abutting Old North and verbally responded to the space in the vein of Basho’s Haibun style of prosimetric haiku. After starting with a sensory tour by a consulting museum professional, repeated visits to a consistent spot encouraged students to observe subtle changes in the location and surroundings as the semester progressed and to work on articulating those observations. The use of the sensory tour, in which students were prompted to close their eyes and ‘tune-in’ to the other sensory aspects of the space, effectively defamiliarized (Bell, 2005) their experience and invited new discoveries through less common modes of observation.
In keeping with the notion of discovery and observation cycle of the Pilgrimage Model, the haiku were framed, not as deliverables, but as a process to excavate multiple perspectives and to hone the art of attention through writing, editing, research, and multi-sensory awareness. Each week, students received a ‘Field Guide to Getting Lost’ (a small workbook inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost) (Solnit, 2006) that included questions and prompts to help them increase their awareness. Students used the Field Guides to inspire their writing and they recorded poetic and narrative observations, alongside metadata, including: Date, Time, Weather, Mood In (the student’s mood before writing), Mood Out (the student’s mood after writing), and sensory observations of their chosen spot (Figure 3). The Creative Writing students also spent several sessions in Special Collections with the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts and the University Archivist to learn about the history of Old North and the surrounding terrain. At the end of the semester, students uploaded their writings and collected metadata to Omeka (https://omeka.org), an open source content management platform for archives and museum collections. Using Omeka was a way to introduce a new technology, commonly used in Museum Studies, and added an interdisciplinary element to the more traditional creative writing assignments.
Haiku Visualized: Posters designed to display haiku written by students enrolled in Introduction to Creative Writing. The Haiku Visualized project designed nineteen posters for the final installation event. These haiku were written by Evelyn Pacheco (left; Pacheco, 2015) and Amanda Weise (right; Weise, 2015). Posters designed by Shimeng Tong, Jiaxin Yang, and Mengya Zhou.
Museum Studies Foundations
(Art and Museum Studies, 16 students). Museum Studies Foundations serves as a required core course for Georgetown’s Museum Studies Master’s Program. In keeping with disciplinary practices, the course asked students to research the works of American painter Henry Mosler on display in Old North. In 1962, W.H. Walters donated four Mosler paintings to Georgetown University. All four works represented themes related to the American Revolution: The Ringing of the Liberty Bell (c. 1909); George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1911); Victory of the Bonhomme Richard (1911); and The Birth of the Flag (1912). The latter three paintings hang in Old North as part of the Georgetown University Art Collection. The fourth painting, The Ringing of the Liberty Bell, was lost (presumed burned) in 1971, likely during May Day protests against the Vietnam War and only its frame remains.
Working in small groups, Museum Studies students created an object biography for each painting, including the missing fourth painting. The object biography contained information about the painting’s history, including provenance, exhibitions, and references. The students worked closely with staff from Special Collections to develop the object biographies with material from the University Archives. Students uploaded the archival documents they discovered in their research and any interpretative work they created, in the form of notes and reports, to the Omeka archive, thus familiarizing them with the tools and practices of their discipline.
To support our interdisciplinary objectives, the students were also paired with teams from the Methods of Media Production class to produce short documentary films. One film was made for each of the four paintings. We refer to these cross-course team assignments as immediate collaborations, which are simply cross-course team projects. The Art and Museum Studies students acted as museum educators who advised on content, drafted scripts, and consulted with the production teams. In some cases, they were interviewed for, acted in, or narrated, the films, and provided feedback on the film rough cuts. In this way, the Art and Museum Studies students learned not only how to properly research and document artifacts but also how to communicate those results to media professionals and engage in the creative process of producing exhibition-quality videos.
Methods of Media Production
(CCT, 12 students). Methods of Media Production is a skills-development elective focusing on techniques of audio and video production in Georgetown’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) Master’s Program. As stated above, the course modeled a professional collaboration between a production team and expert clients by working in immediate collaboration with students from Museum Studies Foundations to produce short documentaries on the four Mosler paintings. Students were tasked with translating the Museum Studies research into engaging visual narratives with quality audio recording, lighting, and supporting imagery. Final products included a 3–4 minute informative documentary suitable for a museum website or kiosk and a 15-second teaser geared toward enticing audiences to learn more. By editing both a documentary short and a teaser, production students learned how to repurpose footage for different audiences and formats.
Over two-thirds of the media production students opted to focus on Old North in at least one additional course assignments, which again is evidence of prolonged engagement. An early photographic composition assignment (in which students were tasked with documenting the same object from at least three photographic perspectives) produced a large archive of 100+ photographs of Old North. In addition, Old North’s historic staircase inspired two short films, and two students created a stop-motion video entitled “Destination Old North,” which won the Fall 2015 Viewer’s Choice Award in the Gelardin New Media Showcase, a campus-wide event promoting student work. The Media Production students’ photographs and videos were later used in a variety of Phase Two projects, as advertisements for the final installation event, and as illustrations for the project website and hard-copy catalog. Such cross-semester sharing comprised another medicated collaboration.
Remix Practices
(CCT, 11 students). Remix Practices is an elective in the CCT Program. This studio course explores remixing as both an analytic framework and a speculative method for asking ‘inventive and provocative questions (Wilkie and Plummer-Fernandez, 2015). Course participants debate the meanings of remix as a cultural form and conduct a variety of remix experiments across different media. As with the other Phase One courses, students were encouraged to engage Old North in individual assignments and research projects. They were also required to interface with the projects and assignments from other Phase One courses in mediated collaborations.
The first mediated collaboration was a textual remix, in which students remixed the Old North haiku of the Creative Writing students with textual materials related to the history and architecture of Old North. The textual remixes were then handed back to the Creative Writing students, who responded in turn with another haiku. This opened a cross-course discussion on authorship, originality, and the value and challenges of remix. In another mediated collaboration, a museum professional guided remix students on their own sensory tour of Old North (Kadish, 2015). Exercises included closed-eye explorations of the ‘spots’ where the Creative Writing students wrote their haiku, and a sensory translation of the Mosler paintings into lexicons of smell and sound (Figure 4). This gave Remix Practices students an overlapping point of engagement into the work of the other courses and maintained the sense that the students were engaged in a project that expanded beyond the scope and boundaries of a single course. Because of this, many Remix Practices students sought out students from the other courses to engage in immediate collaborative projects, or they incorporated archival materials from the Creative Writing, Museum Studies, and Media Production classes into their audio and video remix experiments as mediated collaborations. Over half, the remix students also chose to focus on Old North for their final ‘research remixes.’ These speculative design projects combine original research and multimedia production with the goal of reframing academic debates and/or sharing academic knowledge with wider audiences. The student-initiated research for these projects expanded the Old North archive to include architectural floor plans, photographic studies, historical and biographical data, and student rumors about the building.
Testing Smells: For the final installation event, the Multi-Sensory Painting project translated Old North’s historic Mosler paintings into a lexicon of smell. This project was inspired by a sensory translation exercise in the Remix Practices courses.
Phase Two
Whereas the Phase One courses emphasized discovery and investigation of our shared research site, Phase Two courses shifted emphasis to creative experimentation, communication, and articulation of our shared findings. In this phase, students enacted the archive collected during Phase One as a series of creative, multimedia, interactive, and speculative projects. Phase Two consisted of two studio-based electives in Georgetown’s CCT Masters Program: Interactive Technologies for Cultural Heritage (ITCH, 12 students) and Installation and Exhibit Design (IED, 15 students). ITCH was an advanced studio in interaction design, in which students prototyped electronic artifacts that demonstrated competency with technical materials. All the ITCH projects entailed some combination of computer programming, electronics, digital animation, and physical media. IED, in contrast, emphasized visual communication practices such as graphic design, sculpture, and audio-video production. IED stressed curatorial familiarity with, and public presentation of, an exhibition archive. Unlike the Phase One courses, the Pilgrimage Project was the sole focus of these courses, and 10 of the 21 spring semester students had already participated in at least one of the earlier courses.
The semester introduced the project with an ‘Old North Symposium’ in which students shared their Phase One research and discoveries. The courses then followed a studio model in which projects were developed through multiple iterations. CCT’s Technology Design Studio served as the classroom for both courses, which were scheduled back-to-back to create an 8-hour block. Working individually or in small groups, students used this time to develop their projects, consult with faculty, research Old North, and meet with external experts. Students were free to come and go during this time and were encouraged to share skills and collaborate across both courses and projects. Students rose to the task, often exceeding the 2.5-hour official class sessions, and pursuing self-directed research activities in multimedia skill development, all of which are indicators of deep and sustained engagement.
Phase Two culminated in a public installation and exhibition. Students transformed the Old North building from an office space into an exhibition space. Working within and across groups, students identified exhibition needs and created suitable materials to address those needs. This entailed the design and communication of publicity materials, the construction of a website (Pilgrimage Project, 2016b), lighting design and way-finding within the installation, and the development of consistent language for catalog copy in a hardcopy exhibition guidebook (Figure 5; Pilgrimage Project, 2016a). The team altered the space by adding material artifacts, projecting on walls, directing traffic to certain spaces, and manipulating the overall atmosphere—substituting light bulbs, adding colored gels, and covering windows with black-wrap created ambient lighting, while speakers playing a Mosler-inspired soundtrack set the soundscape. The building’s historic four-story staircase acted as the main conduit (see Figure 2), leading visitors from the courtyard to the three floors of exhibitions. The grand Mosler paintings, which hang in the staircase and were a primary focus of Phase One research, were also featured in the exhibition (Figure 6). In addition, 12 student projects were exhibited in adjacent ‘galleries’ (converted conference rooms and hallways) on various levels. Over 200 visitors attended the event with positive reviews and feedback.
The Pilgrimage Project Guidebook: The cover of the Pilgrimage Project Guidebook, a student-produced catalog which was shared with all visitors. The Guide contains historical information on Old North and descriptions of all projects exhibited in the culminating installation event. The Guidebook cover was designed by Tong Li; the Guidebook layout was conceived and designed by Linda Huber. The Pilgrimage Project Exhibit: Left: The multi-video project Old North Ark installed in the Old North stairwell. Right: Exhibition visitors discuss one of the historic Mosler paintings displayed in a lower landing of the same stairwell.
Phase Two student projects were incredibly diverse, ranging from digital touch-screen interfaces to virtual and augmented reality experiences, poster design, video installations, sound compositions, multi-sensory installations, and woodworking. (See Appendix 1) This complicated grading, as we could not evaluate students on how well they ‘learned the course material.’ Instead, we offered the following learning goals, which were assessed formatively by the core project faculty and professional collaborators:
Grasp of the iterative design process: Every three weeks, students presented project updates for group critiques from colleagues, instructors, and consulting museum professionals. They responded to critiques in written reflections, and they were expected to incorporate critique feedback into the next project iteration. Students also met weekly with instructors during the class period to discuss their progress and get informal feedback in the form of ‘desk critique’. These helped students stay on track and avoid any large and unforeseen issues as the projects developed. They also served as touchpoints for formative assessment as instructors took notes on students’ progress and their ability to discuss projects and adapt to feedback. As the exhibition drew closer, the students were also assessed on how well they adapted to constraints imposed by the physical and social structure of Old North. Professionalization: The courses emphasized professionalism in regard to the quality of the end products, documentation of the design process, and interpersonal interactions. The public exhibition modeled a pseudo-professional ‘high-stakes’ environment that encouraged students to produce their best work. Students were continually reminded to consider the ‘polish’ of their pieces and to think about producing ‘finished projects’ rather than simply ‘finishing their project.’ This emphasis stressed the difference between classroom and professional environments. Communication: Students were expected to be able to communicate the intent and vision of their projects in a variety of formats (e.g. formal presentation, written copy, live demos, etc.) and to show improvement as the course progressed. Students needed to describe what their project was doing, how it was doing it, and why it was doing it from theoretical and technical perspectives. They were evaluated on the conciseness and clarity of their answers regarding the technical components of their projects, rhetorical choices, and the project’s relationship to both other student projects and the larger themes of The Pilgrimage Project.
Since students entered the courses with varying levels of experience and sophistication, we evaluated ‘improvement in technical proficiency’ at an individually appropriate level. The criteria for demonstrated proficiency fell upon a sliding scale, with stress falling on improvement and growth rather than an externally-defined level of expertise. Students with little technical background were expected to show a grasp of technical tools and materials along with the ability to describe any technical issues they encountered. More skilled students were expected to aid beginners when possible, to develop more polished pieces, and to work more independently. This resulted in a high degree of skill-exchange among students and once again modeled a professional environment, in which individuals of diverse talents apply themselves to a shared focus.
Reflections
The Pilgrimage Project offers a successful instantiation of the Pilgrimage Model that effectively integrated in-depth academic research, intellectual engagement, technological skill-building, and creative production. With a year-long timeline, engaged students, and openness to a variety of technologies (digital and otherwise), students uncovered an enormous amount of data about Old North and developed the technical and professional skills needed to reimagine and share that data in compelling ways. The overarching hypothesis, that an inquiry-based approach to learning with a high-stakes public showing would improve student engagement and the quality of work, appears validated based on student feedback, self-assessment, and the overall quality of the event and projects.
In a final focus group, students assessed the Pilgrimage Project as a success. They reported that the experience broadened both their critical and technical skillsets, while deepening their knowledge of campus and social history. The depth of student-initiated research was especially impressive; particularly since students’ feedback indicated that few would have chosen to study Old North through personal choice. Participating students ranged from first-semester freshmen to final-term Master’s Degree candidates, and we therefore believe that the Pilgrimage Model can transfer to a wide variety of educational levels and settings—undergraduate, graduate, or both. The model, in short, entails:
Discovery – choosing a common focus that is experienced and analyzed through a variety of techniques and building a shared research archive through targeted coursework; Investigation—analyzing the archive using disciplinary methods. The archive serves as a repository of past discoveries, a resource for ongoing research, and a source for new interpretations; Experimentation—developing technical skills that activate the archive using speculative, experimental, and critical design methods; Articulation—communicating the archive, research findings, and interpretations to public and scholarly audiences through multimedia and digital projects.
The culminating exhibition—a key stage of the Pilgrimage Model in which the discovery, investigation, and experimentation of earlier stages are concretized and articulated—activated the ‘interactive and performative properties’ of speculative method to communicate with and engage the public (Ross, 2016: 8). Drawing upon Auger (2013), Ross lists a series of techniques for engaging audiences, including consideration of context, provocation, verisimilitude, familiarity, specificity, attention to detail and going to extremes (Ross, 2016: 8). Many of these techniques were demonstrated in the articulation stage of the Pilgrimage Project. In framing the exhibit for a public audience, students considered the architectural and social context of the installation; they provoked visitors through creative and interactive means; and their collected projects expressed a verisimilitude of research on the history of Old North. Individual projects shaped the specifics of that research into concrete and digital artifacts. Attention to detail was evidenced in the polish of those artifacts, and students pushed their skillsets to improve and actualize the final product. The effective application and elaboration of these techniques created a “conceptual bridge” that connected our in-depth research and speculative concepts with “audiences’ perception of their world” (Auger, 2013: 12).
Collaboration
Collaboration, both within and across courses, was a featured focus of The Pilgrimage Project. Throughout the project, we emphasized that all courses and all collaborators were working together toward a shared event. All projects, whether team projects or independent, benefitted from the group critique built into the iterative design process. Ideas and techniques were whittled down and honed, while materials and techniques were shared freely between all students—no one worked in a vacuum. To reflect differences in the space and time of these collaborations, we categorize them as either immediate or mediated. Immediate collaboration refers to the more common practice in which students work together in teams. Immediate collaboration occurred with the Museum Studies and Media Production students in the production of the Mosler videos. Immediate collaboration also characterized the majority of the projects during Phase Two, and all the Phase Two students collaborated on the final exhibition. In contrast, mediated collaborations do not involve direct collaboration during the creation of content. Instead, mediated collaborations cross-pollinate courses at structured starting and stopping points; collaboration is mediated by boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Bowker and Star, 1999: 292–297) that are handed back-and-forth among classes. For example, students from Creative Writing and Remix Practices formed mediated collaborations in the sharing of haiku and textual remixes. Mediated collaborations also occurred between Fall and Spring semesters. Materials generated by students in the Fall semester were utilized by students in the Spring semester as sources of inspiration, research, and content.
Collaborations allowed a sense of continuity and thematic organization to emerge in the culminating exhibition. Data and research questions were shared back-and-forth across student projects, resulting in similar themes being woven into the fabric of the exhibition experience. As audience members traversed the exhibition, elements of a one project would recall or reinforce elements of another. For example, three projects analyzed and represented the historical Mosler paintings, three projects explicitly addressed the architectural history of Old North, four projects wrestled with the legacy of slavery on the Georgetown campus, and the physical staircase which housed the paintings was remediated in virtual reality.
Technology
The Pilgrimage Project encouraged digital technology as a means of investigating and communicating our research and findings. The technical skills developed by students were incredibly diverse, including: audio and video recording, media editing, computer programming in a variety of languages, 3D modeling, digital mapping, graphic design for print and web, electronics, content management, project management, and user experience. Most importantly, students learned these skills in a contextualized way and as a method for deeply engaging a shared research focus. Rather than using Old North as a platform upon which we layered pre-determined technological learning objectives, students applied technologies of their choosing to learn about and appreciate a previously under-appreciated location and to realize their own interpretations of that place.
At the heart of speculative design is the belief that there are better ways of doing things, better futures that could exist if we only knew how to bring them about. We believe that digitally and technologically enhanced learning does not need to accept the easy and obvious solutions proposed by online platforms, distance learning, or tablets in the classroom. On the contrary, we’ve found that refocusing our gaze away from specific technologies opens up new spaces for the creative application of technology more broadly: ‘contemplation on speculative design is not only to encourage the technological future but can also provide a system for analyzing, critiquing and re-thinking contemporary technology’ (Auger, 2013: 12). The Pilgrimage Project encouraged students to explore technology in new and novel ways and to build novel experiences that inspired visitor reflection on our shared material and social worlds. Students learned technology skills in context rather than in artificially structured course assignments. More importantly, they developed technical skills alongside, and hand-in-hand with, traditional research skills such as archival research, historical and architectural studies, and the critical analysis of space. These new technological applications foster greater understanding of and mastery over the technologies themselves (Disalvo and Lukens, 2009), and also bring about the kinds of deep learning, critical thinking, and sustained engagement that liberal arts education has always sought to cultivate.
Interdisciplinary learning
With regard to student learning, we found that the Pilgrimage Model balances analytic and creative modes of engagement to produce a deep connection to historical data and material culture that goes beyond what discipline-specific approaches are likely to achieve. This aligns nicely with Ross’s insight that ‘speculative approaches bring new practices and ideas into being while maintaining space for curiosity, critique, doubt, unintended consequences and emergent properties of technology in use’ (Ross, 2016: 2). Students learned to shift in and out of critical and creative frames of mind by taking multiple perspectives on the subject matter and thinking holistically about how to integrate these perspectives in the communication and sharing of knowledge with a wider audience. In this way, our speculative approach meets many of the goals of liberal arts education and it offers a reproducible model for interdisciplinary project-based learning. Incorporating technologies in support of specific student-led endeavors provides what we believe to be the most effective way of deploying educational technologies—digital technologies become a means of discovery and investigation, as students learn to use them proficiently, as well as tools for articulating and communicating research findings. This approach combines mastery over known techniques with skill in developing new applications of technology, and it is at the heart of what technology-enhanced learning strives to accomplish (CNDLS, 2013). According to one student who participated in the project:
The Old North classes … gave [students] room to explore interdisciplinary ideas in material form and actively required this as part of the curriculum. Moreover, they were held in the context of population-based freedom wherein each member of the class was allowed/encouraged to explore his or her own research question and method, but with the knowledge that the entire class was working toward a shared end: the exhibition. This constraint both allowed us to dive deeply into our own inclinations and nagging questions while also ensuring that, as a whole, we were working towards a common goal. It was a design that promoted interdisciplinarity at its core.
Conclusions
Collaborating across semesters, classes, and projects, students built appreciations beyond the present moment. By contributing to a larger community project involving cross-disciplinary dialogue, they became engaged as co-authors of the shared event. For students participating in The Pilgrimage Project, benefits included participating in a collaborative project, sharing cross-disciplinary expertise, being exposed to ‘hidden’ university collections and communities, pursuing research practices that emphasize the journey over the destination, developing deeper sensory awareness, increased appreciation of their surroundings and Georgetown history, and practicing a wide range of technical and professional skills in context.
The speculative future explored by The Pilgrimage Project materialized an educational environment that accepts the interconnectedness of theory and practice by demonstrating how the blurring of boundaries affords new and productive pedagogical approaches. The Pilgrimage Model, and speculative method more generally, suggests a futurology in which enacting and imagining technological futures generate useful effects in the present (Gonzatto et al., 2013; Ross, 2016: 7). When those speculations also tackle the material past, such as the historical presence of Old North, we might suggest a “retrofuturology,” in which the rigorous study of history (e.g. the history of Old North) inspires future possibilities of digital knowledge and action (Osborn, 2017: 200). Thanks to a small grant, the Pilgrimage Project was able to experiment with a speculative and futurological model that questioned institutional and disciplinary constraints. Student, instructor, and public visitor responses to the exhibit exceeded what we have come to expect from formal education. But this is only one model, one potential future, for an enhanced pedagogy, and there need to be explorations of others. Further change and additional pilgrimages are needed if we seek to replace the existing industrial model of education with sustainable interdisciplinary models. The more examples that demonstrate what is possible in education, through speculative or other methods, the more likely we are to see the limits and drawbacks of the current educational enterprise, and the more likely we are to look upon these speculative experiments as signposts pointing toward a type of education that will make students and universities successful in the 21st century.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We recognize our institutional collaborators in the Georgetown University Library: Art Curator LuLen Walker, Curator of Rare Books Ethan Henderson, and University Archivist Lynn Conway with the Booth Family Center for Special Collections; Beth Marhanka with the Gelardin New Media Center; and Don Undeen with the Georgetown MakerHub. Finally, we recognize all the students who participated, either through course projects or as volunteers, as co-authors and formal research collaborators.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) under the Initiative for Technology Enhanced Learning (ITEL) grant program. The ITEL application was developed during CNDLS Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute (TLISI) in 2015.