STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden

I am excited about having participated in a wonderful STEAMplant project headed up by Art and Design Education graduate student Ana Codorean. The project focused on how to get local public school students thinking about interdependence and the ways in which natural dyes can be used in creative work. Encompassing an impressive breadth of scientific topics, the project got students thinking about sustainability, chemistry, and coding. My main role was to think about how to teach students about interdependence, which led to the creation of this fun video:

After watching this video and doing some background reading, the students visited the garden in October, and were asked to identify parts of the flowers growing in the garden, linking them to what they had learned about the interdependence between plants and their pollinators.

In addition to making and recording their observations, students also got a chance to experiment with a bundle-dyeing technique, creating yarn with dye patterns unique to their selection and arrangement of different plant species.

As a person who started his teaching career in the New York City public schools, it was really fun for me to get to work with local students again. There’s so much important work to be done in the primary and secondary schools around sustainability education, and Ana’s STEAMplant project was an amazing transdisciplinary way of engaging students.

Want to learn more about the project and its pedagogical trajectory? Ana put together a great summary, which you can access here.

Update: You can check out an article about this project on Pratt News.