Right now we are few, but we’re excited to grow as we open up our space and start our first project, focused on gardening. If you’re interested in getting involved, let us know.
sproutlings
shaunalynn duffy
My name is Shaunalynn Duffy. I want to build more honest, thoughtful
learning communities that operate at the intersection of education,
art, and activism.
I went to school looking for a community like this, but after almost 16 years I still hadn’t found one. I left MIT in 2008 to change my own relationship to learning and build a community of other like-minded, self-educating folks. Now, I’m starting sprout to focus these efforts through the lens of science.
More about me? I love Appalachian mountain music, sea chanteys, and old time banjo. I wish people took themselves less seriously. Sometimes I think the world is irreparably broken, but it’s too beautiful to think that way for long.
michael nagle
I’m Michael Nagle, and I’m fascinated by how people learn, and I want to build environments to help people learn better. Fundamentally, I think people learn best when they trust themselves above all else and are fully in control of their learning environment. I built Camp Kaleidoscope — a place where kids can build, make, and play as they wish — and I’m now working on building similar environments for adults: namely sprout!
If I didn’t think learning was such an important thing to work on, and if our education system wasn’t in such vital need of repair and renewal, I would probably be a hardcore mathematician and a softcore DJ.
alec resnick
My name is Alec Resnick, and a few years ago I got fed up with school and decided to change it. The fundamental problems with education were the first domino for me in a long line of realizations about what was broken in society. I left MIT my last term to start sprout.
What else? I prefer the company of children. Cool Hand Luke is a hero of mine. People can always do more than they think. Everything is going to be OK.
board of directors
bakhtiar mikhak
Bakhtiar was a visiting scientist and lecturer at MIT Media Lab where he founded and directed the Grassroots Invention Group (GIG), served as the technical director for the NSF-funded Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) network of museums, and launched and led the FabLab program as the outreach director for the NSF Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA).
Bakhtiar was a founding Board Member of Community Charter School of Cambridge. Advised on school design, multidisciplinary project-based curriculum design, meaningful technology integration, and development of the Connections program of internship and volunteering opportunities.
Currently, he is working on on MediaMods whose mission is whose mission is to expose and enhance the structure of media to make its full learning and creative potential accessible to all.
john bell
John is a founding and current member of Great Small Works theater company, a collective of artists who keep theater at the heart of social life. Based in New York City, they produce performance works on a wide variety of scales, from outdoor pageants with giant puppets and hundreds of performers from diverse communities, to miniature toy theater spectacles.
He is also a founder and coordinator of the HONK! Festival, to “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Streets!” This is a street festival in Somerville, MA including a parade of activist street bands from around the world and a day of workshops and seminars on topics ranging from democratic organizing, varying levels of musicianship, tools of effective protest in the context of activist street performance and musicianship.
He is currently a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies where he is working on a living newspaper show on the politics of health care in Haiti called Antiretrovirals and Water Refugees and is the director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut.
beth o’sullivan
Beth O’Sullivan is the co-founder of Science Club for Girls: a program that brings hands-on science clubs to 600 girls in the Boston area, working to close the socioeconomic and gender gaps in science.
She is the founder and director of the Mathemagics Workshop which has created a series of games and activities to help children learn math.
She is also a published writer.
