Doreen Gehry Nelson - Cultivating Curiosity: Teaching and Learning Reimagined

Curiosity is the most important word in education today. Teachers the world over long for ways to cultivate this elusive yet essential path to engagement and authentic learning. After a dreadful year of heroic efforts to engage students in remote learning, Cultivating Curiosity offers a much-needed blueprint for the journey back to face-to-face, hands-on, problem-based teaching and learning. Over a brilliant, pathbreaking career, Doreen Nelson has developed and refined an innovative methodology that nourishes curiosity, stimulates creativity, and scaffolds critical thinking. This is the first important education book of the after-pandemic era that every teacher, every parent, every policy maker and concerned citizen alike should read with gusto and to much profit.

Marcelo Orozco, Chancellor, University of Massachusetts Boston

In the end, Design-Based Learning is all about creating a vehicle for students to connect abstract academic concepts to concrete ideas, and to imagine creative solutions to challenges that they confront along the way. It provides a context for students to perform their thinking and discoveries. Ideas that they learn in one application may well turn out to serve another field or situation equally well. Hence the learning becomes integrated in an important way and, as opposed to a building of requirements, can serve as a frame of curricular design.

Lorne Buchman, President, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California

I frequently look back with gratitude to my experience in Design-Based Learning-focused classrooms during my three years at Walnut High School. Now, I am studying to become a teacher with the hope to pass along the innovative education I am thankful to have received.

Madeleine Skinner, alumna, Walnut(Calif.) High School

Since 1994, I have been championing the Design-Based Learning methodology in classrooms in Japan and in an exchange program we had with Finland. Doreen's methodology was a crucial part of guiding our students to come to terms with the devastating events of the earthquake that hit Japan in 2011. For five years, in cooperation with the Japan UNICEF Association, we used the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning at the Sendai City Shichigo Elementary School as a comprehensive learning template for reconstruction. We have continued implementing the methodology thereafter, and more than 1,200 children have experienced its power. This book will significantly impact many of our teachers and their students.

Dr. Shinya Sato, Professor, Yamagata University, Yamagata, Japan

Doreen Nelson has put pen to paper to share her innovative instructional method of Design-Based Learning, in this brilliantly written and engaging book. Nelson has given us the gift of understanding how education can inspire students to learn and teachers to teach by igniting the curiosity in both. In the spirit of John Dewey and through a hands-on, contextualized approach, students taught using Design-Based Learning acquire knowledge across multiple subjects and develop higher-order thinking while being challenged to consider the milieu of society's most pressing issues and to develop strategies to address them with creativity and care. I can think of no more relevant or important methodology for teaching today.

Christina (Tina) Christie, Wasserman Dean & Professor, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies

it has been astounding what you were able to accomplish in preparing so many students for creative thinking, I tell my granddaughter about how we were exposed to a variety of experiences that helped shape who I am. No doubt my experience in the 5th grade, having you as my teacher, has had a very long-lasting impact on my life.

Portia Stots, student in the first Design-Based Learning class

I want to thank you for your innovative and creative use of the City in your methodology, because it turned me into an urban planner . I became curious about how cities are designed, how decisions are made in cities; so much so that I obtained a master in urban planning (UC Irvine) and a doctorate in geography (USC). And now I teach at CSULB using cities as a framework for understanding policy development.

Rigo Rodriguez Ph.D., Board President, Santa Ana Unified School District; Associate Professor of Latina/o Public Policy, Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, California State University Long Beach

Design-Based Learning started as a grassroots movement in the San Gabriel Unified School District and now has become one of the major initiatives for developing 21st Century Learning Skills in our students. We have seen students flourish in our Design-Based Learning classes, engaged with their learning and excited about creating and collaboratively solving problems. Our teachers have embraced the methodology and have found it to be a refreshing alternative for integrating the core curricular areas into a meaningful and exciting learning experience. We utilized the Design-Based Learning methodology as a district during the pandemic, collaborating as an organization to successfully create Never-Before-Seen-Solutions to problems new to us in public education. Design-Based Learning continues to expand in our district as the benefit of this type of authentic learning takes hold.

Jim Symonds, Superintendent, San Gabriel Valley Unified School District

It's been such an honor and so exciting to be on this never-before-seen journey with Doreen and the Design-Based Learning family she has built. Now, with this book, her methodology can be shared more broadly with teachers, students and the entire educational system. Cultivating Curiosity will have enormous impact.

Jessica Heim, Director of the Design-Based Learning Project, Center X, UCLA

Doreen Gehry Nelson's methodology has changed me fundamentally, and I cannot wait for more people to know about the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning. Doreen is a true inspiration for so many, and her vision is what pushes me and others to become better educators.

Stephanie Na, AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), Advanced Composition, and Special Education English 2 teacher, Workman High School, City of Industry, California

Doreen Gehry Nelson believed in us, and in doing so, she guided us through to a wonderful dream come true.

Angela Gurrola, Spanish teacher, Gabrielino High School, San Gabriel, California

The Design-Based Learning Method has changed my life, and most of the lives of our children.

Natalie Bezdjian, kindergarten teacher, Rose & Alex Pilibos Armenian School, Montebello, California

Doreen has been a true inspiration to me and to so many. She has shown us all how to persevere even when life sends us never-before-seen-challenges. Her words of encouragement and wisdom have stayed with me and now they serve to inspire many others.

Araceli Garcia, English Department Chair, Workman High School, City of Industry, California

Congrats to Doreen on the realization of her dream. Design-Based Learning has been a source of inspiration and joy for me and for my classroom. I know this book will be a new beginning to share her vision with the world.

Georgia Singleton, 4thgrade teacher, Roosevelt Elementary School, San Gabriel, California

Doreen's method has revolutionized my way of teaching. It is the base of creativity and analytical thinking for future generations.