In the spring of 2015, I began working with Manchester High School’s “Exploration in Jewelry” class. I wanted to document the entire process for myself and the teacher. Manchester High School is in Manchester, Connecticut. It is a large high school—1,800 students—in a semi-urban environment (56,000 population). Manchester is a small city, semi-urban, and has a diverse student body. This diversity is reflected in diversity of income, race, ethnicity and languages.

The class is taught by Ms. Kelly Burns and includes 14 students, which just happen to be all female this spring. The class time is from 10:20–11:15 am and meets roughly 4 days a week on a rotating schedule.

I was invited by Ms. Burns to be a scholar-in-residence infusing identity design, digital art, technology and entrepreneurial studies into her class. We discussed what she usually completes in this class and collaborated on how we could push the students in a new directions. You can download the pdf of the class description here.

I was so excited about this invitation! Working with high school students is different than college students. I am very interested in comparing the pace of learning, how much students can absorb in 60 minutes, how adept they are at various technologies, and how creative they will be with building their jewelry portfolio. The dynamic aspect of an all female class is also interesting. I am looking forward to this collaboration with Ms. Burns and all the students. It will be exciting to watch how the students embrace the concept of identity design and embed it into their own jewelry and how they build a “shop” to sell their wares.

Collaborative Session

Tools of the Jewelry Trade