Repair Mindset Toolkit
After two years of work, the Repair Mindset Toolkit is now live! This culminating project has been a collaboration between Agency by Design Oakland, Maker Ed, and The Culture of Repair Project.
Repair offers a multidimensional lens through which to view and experience making. The Repair Mindset Toolkit includes teaching and learning strategies, tactics and classroom materials designed to develop in students the distinctive characteristics associated with a Repair Mindset.
A team of educators with experience working with the Agency by Design research project based at Project Zero, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explored what repair is, what was distinctive about a repair mindset, and how Agency by Design tools could be productively adapted to support repair. Grounded in that research, the team created The Toolkit, and tested and further developed it in their learning environments.
In addition to presenting new approaches to thinking routines, Toolkit materials also invite and complement discussions of the environment (e.g., Circular Economy), economics (e.g., extractive capitalism), politics (Right to Repair), ethics (e.g., social inequities, income gap), and more.
This project was made possible with support from The Culture of Repair Project.
Our working group is a collective of six educators with different backgrounds, contents, and contexts, all connected to the Agency by Design Oakland Teacher Fellowship and research project.
We are, from left to right:
Nga Nguyen, Teacher (Technology Art & Design, Math, Japanese) Wood Middle School, Alameda Unified School District
Brooke Toczylowski, Co-Director, Agency by Design Oakland
Susan Wolf, Artist & Arts Integration Specialist, Agency by Design Oakland
Paula Mitchell, Teacher on Special Assignment, Grass Valley Elementary School, OUSD & Co-Director, Agency by Design Oakland
Reina Cabezas, Science Teacher, Sustainable Urban Design Academy, Castlemont High School, OUSD
Aaron Vanderwerff, former Director of Learning, Maker Ed
