Two Yorkson Creek Teachers Win Prestigious Award for Exhibition of Wonder
June 7, 2023
Charcuterie boards, baseball bats, and virtual assistant programs were some of the passion projects seen at this year’s Exhibition of Wonder at Yorkson Creek Middle School.
The three-month-long applied design skills and technologies (ADST) project took students on an inspirational educational journey and taught them life-long lessons on perseverance and resiliency.
The project enables grade 8 students to use the skills that they have been building over the last two years in exploration classes (or expos), which include Woodwork, Maker Space, Food & Textiles, Art, and Music.
The project also earned two Yorkson teachers, Nadine Keyworth and Jon Fast, a prestigious award from an American-based education association.
Keyworth and Fast were the brains behind the Exhibition of Wonder, which has been running at the school for several years. This year, they were recognized with the Conrad Toepfer Award for the Civic Engagement of Middle School Students by the Association for Middle Level Education. Toepfer is often referred to as one of the “founding fathers” of the middle school movement.
“AMLE is delighted to recognize a project that so solidly centers student voice and is easily replicable in other schools, said AMLE CEO Stephanie Simpson. “It truly embodies what middle school is all about.”
Fast, a woodwork teacher, said he and Keyworth created the Exhibition of Wonder event at the school after he realized that there was no school-wide project that gave students an opportunity to showcase their creative pursuits.
“If explorations are a big part of middle school, how come we don’t have anything that is explorations perspective in terms of a school-wide event,” he said.
“If everyone is taking these courses, we’re teaching the skills, but they never actually get to show us if they’ve learned it or what they’ve learned. So, what if we had an opportunity for them to show us what they’ve learned after being in our spaces for three years?”
As part of the project, the students came up with an idea or product that they were passion about, then formulated plans and prototypes. After several weeks of work, three “build days” followed, and then the project ended with the “finale”, which was a school-wide showcase of all of the projects to students and families.
Keyworth, who is a maker space teacher, said students involved in the Exhibition of Wonder learn to overcome failure and also experience success during those build days.
“For me, the successes are when a kid is like ‘this isn’t working!’ and I go ‘well what are we going to do?’ Then they say, ‘well, I can do this, and I can do that’ and I say ‘let’s try it,’ and they take the whole thing a part and fix it themselves,” she said.
“To me there are no failures in the Exhibition of Wonder. There are only students who pick themselves back up and find the next best way to solve the problem, and to me that’s success,” she added.
After years of success, the Exhibition of Wonder is now spreading to other middle schools in the District, having made its debut this year at H.D. Stafford Middle School.
Keyworth and Fast will be recognized for their innovative program at AMLE:50 – the 50th annual conference for Middle Level Educators in National Harbor, Maryland in November. At the event, they will also present the project to their fellow educators.
“It’s humbling to be represented, to have a couple of Canadians win the inaugural in Conrad Toepfer’s name was beyond our wildest dreams,” said Fast.