"Art of Bridge Construction" In Action
Science teacher, Duane Stilwell, and math teacher, Jonathan Katz, teamed up to teach an 8-week course entitled The Art of Bridge Construction. They taught physics and math to twenty-nine 9th through 12th graders from International High School in Queens, New York, through a study of bridges. They based this course on the work of educator Mario Salvadori. What follows are excerpts from several interviews covering their experiences developing and implementing this study in their classrooms.
Duane Stilwell (right) and Jonathan Katz discuss their eight-week course, "The Art of Bridge Construction."
Planning The Project
Jonathan: I had worked with the Salvadori Center at that point about three years, so I had done many projects dealing with bridges and dream houses and architecture and some engineering and I loved it. It changed something in me. It energized me as a teacher. I love art. I love architecture. I love seeing these things, but I am not myself an artistic person. One does not have to be an artist or architect to do this type of teaching. What you have to be is willing to just take risks a little. When I started doing these types of projects in middle school, I'd say: "Well, I'm not going to know what to do and I'm going to be lost, and kids will ask me how to do it and I'll say I don't know." But you'll find that there are kids who can do it and they show you how. There will always be kids who can help others do things. So when I came to International High School I brought this experience with me.
Duane: We had also worked together before on a genetics and probability course.
J: Yeah. We had worked together. We'd done team teaching in math and science. But Duane and I decided to do something quite different. We were going to create a real applied learning class. Bridges is what we decided to focus on. We were working with seventy-five students within our cluster who had to choose what special class they wanted. Ours was very popular for certain kids: kids who saw themselves as artistic or kids interested in engineering. Also, kids who wanted to try something different. We couldn't even take all the ones who asked, but we took a really large class, twenty-nine students. We used a science lab that could handle that size group. We started to plan the curriculum and we used Mario Salvadori's writings, including, "Architecture & Engineering", and "The Art of Construction". We used other books too, but those were really essential. We used those as guides to what we were going to do.
D: I have to say though, I think this is interesting from a different perspective. Jonathan told me, "Duane we're going to do this and you're gonna like it. I can guarantee you're gonna like it." But, thinking back on it, I don't think I had a sense of just how satisfying the whole thing was going to be and how exciting. Ten days into the thing, we were running. We were thinking, where are we going to get stuff? And what are we going to do next? I mean it was just a very exciting creative process.
J: Right. So we asked ourselves, how do we start? Where are we going to start? And it seems that tension and compression are always good places to start when you're thinking bridges and so, that's where we started. We did different activities with tension and compression so that the students really got a feel for what those two terms meant and how they related to structures in general. Then we began to look at beams and columns and different --
D: Structural elements --
J: Structural elements, so students could really understand: why do bridges stand up and what's happening? So we used the different activities that are on the internet, that you can look at, and that you can try with your own students. Also, you don't have to focus on bridges. You can look at buildings. You can look --
D: At architecture in general --
J: Anything within the built environment.
Time For Learning