Reimagining Teacher Education through Design Thinking Principles: Curriculum in the Key of Life

Inspired by Arendt’s (2009) “task of renewing a common world” (p. 193), a team of ten instructors took on the challenge of reimagining a teacher preparation course entitled Curriculum II - Arts & Humanities. Through the dominant discourses of management, accountability and technique-driven preparation, the act of teaching is interpreted as a “service rendered” (Pinar, 2012, p. 36), measured “objectively” by demonstrable deliverables and pre-determined outcomes. Our team provoked these discourses by asserting that human beings are inherently attuned to deeper learning through wonderment, interpretation, ideation and experimentation (Whitehead, 1929). The principles of design thinking – a problem-based process which, through curiosity, empathy and interdisciplinary thinking, generates playful and collaborative creative experimentation – offered a space within which to open up deeper educational conversations with pre-service teachers. Invoking the metaphor of a choral performance, this series of miniature musical movements “in the key of life” express the challenging, enlivening and multivocal nature of curriculum and pedagogy enacted through Design Thinking principles. From contemplating the power of self-reflection and collective action, to meeting challenges and resistance with courage, to listening with heart to people and places, and to responding with joy and hope in the face of our place and circumstances, each individual movement gives voice to the echoes that linger long after the official coursework is complete. Together, these voices join together in a chorus of authentic and responsive curriculum renewal

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead