It began with my August update about our summer family pilgrimage to the Franconia Sculpture Park. A friend and teaching colleague, Carrie Clark, saw the post and left this comment:
“Andrew, can’t we take the eighth grade there?”
I put Franconia on the agenda at one of our planning meetings in August and the 8th grade team was excited about the concept. Large scale sculptures provide an awesome array of interdisciplinary connections, fusing the social commentary and communication skills of  social studies and English with the engineering of math and science. (Indeed, right after the trip I sent an email to the entire grade resolving a lively debate at the park about the density of cement and thus how much a sculpture weighed). Moreover, the park ties into our newly hatched 8th grade design thinking program, with each sculpture representing the latest of a series of prototypes that the artists experimented with along the way. The playful and interactive nature of the park dovetails with our design focus on recreational spaces with our cardboard arcade and playground design projects.
Fitting the trip into our packed fall calendar was no mean feat, and our first try fell apart in September. Fortunately, however, we were able to get out  there on November 4, a beautiful, blustery fall day. (An arctic blast of snow and freezing wind arrived less than a week later, so we were lucky!)
The trip was a hit with both teachers and students. The artist-guides were engaging and knowledgeable.  There was a good mix of time spent on the official tour and free time to explore and climb and think. We didn’t bog things down with faux academic worksheets or other artificial baloney. (Despite this, multiple students, independently and unprompted, asked me for paper and a pencil so that they could jot down some design ideas for their work at school.) It felt, to me, exactly like what a field trip should be: students and teachers sharing an authentic experience of the world.
See below for a few pictures of the trip, taken by either me or my colleagues (some on phones, some on better cameras). Click on any image to see a larger slideshow.
