How Wentworth is Leading the Way with the Idea of the Embedded Classroom
From left: Industrial Design students Kiera VanGulden ’19, Alex Connor ’19, Adam Supino ’18, and Sydney Meyers ’18 lead a design thinking course for sophomores during fall semester 2018.
On a weekday during the spring semester, a group of Wentworth students head to Boston’s Prudential Center. They’re not going to shop, dine, or work—not in the traditional sense anyway.
They’re going to class.
Specifically, they are heading to Industrial Design Studio. The course, which meets twice weekly for three-hour sessions and is offered to juniors and seniors, has been most-recently located at the headquarters of health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where Wentworth faculty member Matthew Templeton has spent the last three years as the organization’s senior director of innovation, strategy, and business solutions.
Students of this class, which focuses on “design thinking,” get the unique opportunity to network with anyone from professional project managers to top executives at Blue Cross, while working on real projects to the benefit of the organization.
Templeton loosely refers to this as the “embedded classroom.” Here, he says, education goes from theoretical to experiential, from abstract to immersive.
“At Wentworth, all the professors are practitioners,” he says. “They actually have boots on the ground. As an educator here, nothing is just theory.”
Read the full story, as well as all other articles from the Summer 2019 edition of WIT magazine.