A Peek Inside Our Whittle World: The Me and Us Museums, A Project-Based Learning Approach in Middle School

At Whittle, we believe deeply in a personalized, interdisciplinary, and project-based approach to education. In our Middle School, we recently put those beliefs to action in the 6th and 7th Grades project culmination of the Me and Us Museums.

Led by teachers Lesley Younge and Svetlana Grinshpan, the 6th Grade students created the Me Museum. Drawing on a variety of experiences on previous X-Days, and in Humanities, STEM, Language, Technology, and Creative Arts & Design classes, the Museum was filled with student works of installation art that communicated essential pieces of their identity.

Allowed just one square meter in which to build their works of art, the students were challenged to address question such as “who am I,” “what kind of a learner am I,” “what is a personal identity,” “what masks do we wear,” and “how do we express our voices through writing and art?”

As a complement to the 6th Grade Me Museum, the 7th Grade students created the Us Museum. The Us Museum offers a deep dive into American art. It is a collection of contemporary and historical American artworks curated by students and installed as a mind map proposal for what an inclusive art collection might look like. The selection of images conceptually considers diversity through a variety of carefully selected materials, visual techniques and skill levels, artist backgrounds, subject portrayals, and artwork contexts.

Led by teachers, Shannon Brinkley and Scott Kley Contini, the 7th Graders have spent the last six weeks exploring questions such as, “what connects us,” “what divides us,” “what does diversity mean,” “what does inclusion mean,” "who or what is American,” and “how does art offer windows and mirrors?”