The Michigan Daily covers the Spark Festival of Learning 

On Friday, March 28, the Marsal School’s Eileen Lappin Weiser Center for the Learning Sciences hosted the Spark Festival of Learning. A crowd of about 200 Michigan students and community members gathered to partake in activities and presentations that were positioned to inspire curiosity, reports The Michigan Daily.

The festival featured a variety of hands-on activities, including making shadow puppets with Music, Theatre & Dance professor Christianne Myers and a photo opportunity with Clifford the Big Red Dog from the Michigan Learning Channel. Visitors were encouraged to participate in workshops including toolmaking and a virtual reality experience of manoomin harvesting led by doctoral candidate Jared Ten Brink.

Natalie Davis, an assistant professor at the Marsal School and a member of the steering committee for the Eileen Lappin Weiser Center for the Learning Sciences, said in her opening remarks that the festival was organized to encourage attendee’s love for learning.

“I had the wild and maybe crazy idea of bringing people together to show some of the vastness and richness around what they know,” Davis said. “So in keeping with the center’s focus on learning as a lifelong human endeavor, one that can be transformative, communal and also nourishing things that I think we need in this time and in this moment — we wondered about whether we could curate an inclusive space and incite a spark for learning that encourages flourishing and connection.”