A Campus Connected to the City: Spotlight on Community Partnership with The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP)
By Mari O’Meara
The idea of our campus being connected to the city goes beyond traditional field trips. The Downtown School fosters partnerships with numerous community organizations in order to provide students with authentic and hands-on learning experiences. Located across Seattle Center from campus is a place where art, culture, and education converge to offer our students a truly immersive learning experience--The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP).
Popular culture is a ubiquitous and transcendent concept--everyone, no matter age, race, gender, identity has some sort of connection to pop culture. This is particularly pertinent in the classroom. While students may not feel a connection to a specific historical event, for example, they can relate to a video game or a piece of music or film that shares similar themes and ideas. The museum’s education department offers a variety of learning opportunities that incorporate popular culture, museum exhibits, and a connection to various curricula. When introducing my World History students to the concepts of societal survival and why and how societies thrive, we visited MoPOP and engaged in a workshop based on the video game, MineCraft. MineCraft offers players the experience of establishing a community and encourages building relationships for survival. During the workshop, MoPOP educators provided students with fun materials to build their own societies from the bottom up-- from natural resources and basic survival needs to the sharing of surpluses and natural progress societies encounter through the support of one another. MoPOP offered The Downtown School students the opportunity to investigate how communities form, develop, and grow using simulated habitats in an interactive, real-life game environment. Students were engaged in critical thinking, creativity, construction, and role play to ensure the survival of fictional communities they created. The accessibility of the material made for a comfortable, effective learning experience, and students were easily able to transfer the concepts to our classroom, enriching their experience with course material in World History class. This is just one example of the learning experiences Downtown School students have participated in with MoPOP.
I have personally experienced the excitement that comes with learning through MoPOP offerings, and it has inspired the development of creative lessons for my students at The Downtown School. MoPOP schedules professional development (PD) opportunities for educators. A recent PD experience aided in the development and restructuring of the sophomores’ Arts Intensive. In partnership with the stop motion animation studio, Laika (known for movies like Coraline and ParaNorman), the PD workshop invited educators to develop and create their own short stop motion animations. This experience proved valuable as it allowed me the inspiration to adapt the lesson for the sophomores, which included adding an extra element-- digitally animating their own “studio” logos. Check out their final project here!
Through their visits to MoPOP, students are not only gaining knowledge but also developing essential skills and a deep appreciation for the arts and sciences. They are being inspired to think outside the box, dream big, and pursue their passions, ultimately preparing them for a world that thrives on innovation and creativity.