Summer 2019 - Georgia

Abigail Edwards and Meg Slatterly, D-Lab Involvement: Research Assistants

Description: 

D-Lab research assistants Abigail Edwards and Meg Slatterly worked with in-country professors Nina Andriadze and Shota Murtskhvaladze and the Georgian Ministry of Education. The group facilitated a two-day workshop equipping teachers from vocational educational training (VET) institutions across the country with the materials and techniques to teach a project-based, client-focused course.  Meg and Abigail then traveled to three VET institutions to lead workshops with students to introduce the D-Lab design-think methodology.

Kurt Kornbluth, Director of the UC Davis D-Lab, and Greg Miller, Ph.D. Student in the Energy Graduate Group at UC Davis, traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia to work with in-country clients. They worked to continue ongoing collaboration to develop local capacity to integrate client-focused, project-based curricula, modeled after the approach used by the UC Davis D-Lab, into the Georgian educational systems. Over the past few months, local partners had successfully piloted this project-based approach, training teachers in several schools how to apply this curriculum in their classrooms.

The timing of this visit was centered around the concluding ceremony for the pilot where Kurt was invited to speak. Attendees were stakeholders from across the country, including several Deputy Ministers of Education and the Cultural Attache from the U.S. Embassy. The rest of the trip was spent brainstorming the next steps for scaling the pilot and meet with partners who are willing to support this vision.

Read the Feasibility Study Powerpoint

Read the Project Based Learning Powerpoint

Photos