The Wonder Cabinet
How Can A Classroom Cabinet Ignite Curiosity, Culture, and Sustainability?
What strategies help students become genuinely curious and aware of the world in its many dimensions? Envision a cabinet that collects stories, traditions, and other lived experiences. What if it transformed into a living archive where students brought objects from their lives and the world around them, sparking curiosity, conversation, and deeper learning? A Wonder Cabinet is a collaborative classroom project where students fill a designated space over the course of a school year, a semester, or a couple of weeks. Providing contributions tied to course themes, concepts, or texts fuels the cabinet and keeps it lively and interactive. Think of it as providing an opportunity for students to observe and reflect on each other’s perspectives, seek patterns, connections, and stories hidden in ordinary objects. Students build familiarity and confidence by first attending to what an object is (its material, form, qualities, textures, etc.). Starting with close observation makes the overall project less intimidating and opens a natural path toward deeper questions about why it matters and how it connects to broader ideas. The evolving collection will spark critical thinking and creativity while bridging students’ personal experiences, outlooks, and visions with an eco-conscious perspective.
Sustaining the How and the Why In Eco-Consciousness
The Wonder Cabinet is not a performative display. The cabinet is a living gallery of the diverse natural and cultural worlds each student inhabits. As the course progresses, students revisit the collection to layer on more items tied to various themes. Students can contribute objects grounded in three broad themes: natural items that evoke curiosity (such as pinecones, unusual leaves, or rocks with stories), cultural artifacts that carry family or tradition narratives (pieces of fabric, handmade tools), and sustainability connections, like reusable containers or repaired items that showcase care for the planet.
Every object acts as a prompt, a pathway to another, or an invitation for students to explore “why” and “how” rather than just “what.” Soon, students will realize that their relationships to and awareness of cultural, natural, or social worlds extend beyond objects as “things;” they are living experiences. Eco-consciousness is a mindset and practice that fosters awareness of the interconnectedness between humans and the environment, promoting our emotional, creative, and ethical engagement with all that surrounds us. Eco-consciousness suggests that while each student perceives and interacts with their surroundings in unique ways, there are common threads or patterns to identity—whether across themes, locations, personal interests, creative visions, or cultural backgrounds.
Learning Goals Are Like a Dialogue Garden
Through various assignments or exercises that springboard from the cabinet, students master inquiry beyond objectification. For discussions, students can prepare unique questions about their peers’ objects for a show-and-tell. Students realize that their peers are not defined or limited by any single object; instead, these objects serve as seeds for growth. These seeds are avenues that open up larger and richer modes of thinking and connection. Large or small group discussions nurture curiosity and respectful listening—a foundation of lifelong learning. Teachers can also curate an assignment where students reflect on or craft a story about a peer’s object. In a comparative reflection, students can reflect on their own object with their peers, identifying similarities, differences, and what each reveals about both the student and their partner’s unique experiences or perspectives. Students can reflect on their objects by creating a dialogue journal or written conversation between themselves and a peer. The assignment signals to students that understanding can come through assorted forms of sensory interaction.
Each object is a springboard for storytelling, poetry, personal reflection, or art projects. The items can fuel imagination and cultivate sustainability literacy. The hope is that students will begin to recognize and articulate the subtle ways in which humans impact and interact with their environment daily. Alternatively, students can gain a deeper understanding of the complex ways in which objects shape human relationships with the non-human world. Not only does the wonder cabinet decenter the teacher as the sole provider of objects and frameworks, but as it centers on students, the students also see that there are many other forces besides “us.” The wonder cabinet dissolves the barrier between “academic” learning and lived experience.
Guiding Principles for Contributions
Consider an open framework that encourages ownership and diverse perspectives while intentionally promoting inclusivity and engagement, by telling students to “Bring something from the natural world that surprises or fascinates you,” “Share an item that tells a story about your family or a tradition you care about,” or “Find something that shows how people reuse, repair, or respect the environment.
Pedagogical Ecology of Curiosity
One classroom model that exemplifies the Wonder Cabinet’s spirit of observation and pattern-making is Joshua Korenblat’s design lesson, “Small Multiples, Part 2: Stamp Your Homegrown National Park.” In this project for a college Information Design course, students act as both naturalists and designers by transforming local landscapes into postage stamp campaigns that visualize “wee little things” or the often-overlooked textures, species, and patterns of their environment. Korenblat’s approach aligns with the Wonder Cabinet’s aim to sustain curiosity through iterative seeing: students show, compare, understand, and repeat. Each stamp becomes a miniature act of ecological noticing, where abstraction and pattern replace passive representation. Similar to the Wonder Cabinet, Korenblat’s framework cultivates eco-conscious literacy. Students learn that close observation of small details can reveal larger systems of interdependence and beauty. The process is much like assembling a cabinet of curiosities, but with graphics.
By isolating different parts of nature (or reworking them through shifts in color and texture), students invite themselves and viewers to see familiar forms anew. The goal is to forge patterns and insights from the world’s diversity and to bring sustainability into a creative and tangible focus. Most importantly, students are required to justify their decisions and their motivations behind their work.
Small Wonders, Large Questions
Jigen Wagnac’s postcard series brings together various natural elements into a small constellation of noticing. Each image zooms in on the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary. Each image captures what the naked eye often misses, the quiet architecture of wonder. Each natural fragment (rock, flower, leaf, bird, moon, water droplet, and snowflake) is isolated yet connected. Jigen’s work is an invitation to ask what happens when we pause, isolate, and see anew.
Jigen Wagnac (2025)
The varied textures become a study in attention itself—an ecology of looking closely.
Keep Wonder in Motion
The cabinet comes alive through rotating activities that invite curiosity and connection. Teachers can model curiosity by contributing open-ended prompts on cards alongside objects, sparking reflections such as “What patterns do you see?” or “Why might your peer have chosen this?” To keep the collection a dynamic and interactive source of learning and inspiration, cabinets can rotate by showcasing things that grow, patterns in nature, or local history. These focal points can ultimately diffuse with the required units or standards students need to meet for a particular district, course, or grade level.
The Wonder Cabinet can fit into nearly any discipline. For English courses, students can compile objects that relate to a specific text, novel, or motif. Their selections can make visible how different readers interpret and connect with a text. For math, everyday objects like receipts or measuring tools become gateways into percentages, geometry, and scale. Students explore how mathematics brings depth and beauty to problem-solving. Objects can bring abstract math to life, besides solving word problems. Hands-on exploration reveals how much math is embedded in daily life, from measuring ingredients for their family’s favorite meal to recognizing shapes and patterns in their surroundings. For Social Studies, artifacts from family, community, or local history can create entry points into heritage and culture.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer posits, educators, learners, and community members should see the world as a composite of communicative subjects, not just a collection of “things” (Kimmerer 56).
Students can meaningfully integrate their items into a project where they can explain the different choices and justify their decision-making based on specific intentions. When objects are removed from their ‘typical’ or ‘usual’ settings, students can see them in a different light. This process begins by bringing personal items into an academic setting, and then builds as they work on assignments related to their objects. By having students think critically about items that are important to themselves and their classmates, they begin to think more deeply about the composites of their “familiar” spaces or environments. Teachers can anchor their lessons around a core theme—seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary—to allow students to express their curiosity and creativity, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of themselves as learners, observers, and creators. Creativity has a place across subjects and fields.
Warblers and the Art of Observation
Lee Beatty’s warbler series began with research and sketching, then unfolded into a study of pattern, gender, and seasonal rhythm. Lee researched about the warbler’s habitat, migration patterns to New York, and diet. His initial stamp sketches and final stamps showcase the power of students building upon early stages and receiving feedback. Lee says he changed the color pattern and design between the birds because their patterns vary between genders. They used a curved pen tool to make it look “natural yet stylized.” The varied-colored backgrounds depict the season, but the different-colored birds reveal which specific species of warbler would be found in New York. The finished product portrays a mesh of his thoughtful research, his deliberate choice to have all the birds face in the same direction, and his understanding of color and form. Lee’s work is digestible to viewers, yet creative in its composition.
Their stamps reveal how comparison across species, structure, and color can be a form of environmental care.
A Change in Climate: What Happens When Students Reorient Themselves?
The Wonder Cabinet is a space where students’ unique stories, visions, perspectives, and interests intersect with the broader worlds of sustainability, science, and culture. Every student becomes a curious explorer and a storyteller, deepening connections not only with one another but also with the planet we share. When teachers create an academic climate that fosters imagination in cohesive and tangible ways, students can see themselves as agents of change, curiosity, and possibility, both in their words and in the world around them. When students ‘extract’ an object from its familiar place, one could argue that by isolating it, they are stripping the item of its ‘original’ state. The point here is that students can both see how they must fill in the “blanks” or “gaps” in understanding what an object is or its function, while also learning how to reposition themselves meaningfully in relation to their object. Students must actively construct the meaning of the object by asking, “What belongs to it? What function does it serve now? What is missing that makes it less whole?” Students begin to see themselves as makers of meaning. By encountering the object outside its usual system, students are “forced” to reposition themselves. They learn that their perspective, history, and imagination play a role in reshaping meaning. Thus, the exercise is less about the singular object than the relationship between observer and object.
The process of removing an item from its “original” location opens up a generative process, where students begin to notice qualities that may have been invisible when the object was locked in its everyday function. The act of repositioning objects sparks discoveries, such as identifying unexpected relationships across categories. Students can test out new frameworks for interpretation or explore how far meanings can be stretched. This “estrangement” encourages them not only to analyze but to invent new ways of categorizing the world. They can also invent original insights into how relationships between “things” structure knowledge.
Water and Pattern: Seeing Seasons through Texture
Jigen Magnac turned their attention to water, its movement, texture, and quiet refusal to stay still. Jigen wanted the water as her focal subject. Each image traces the shifting surfaces of the surrounding land across four seasons. Each season is noticeable based on the surrounding land—whether that be blossoming flowers, snow, or leaves. She also altered the water color to signify the changing seasons. Drawing inspiration from Nihonga art, she layered image tracing and digital textures to mirror the rhythmic and tactical expression of water.
What emerges is not four seasons, but one continuous surface of change. The water becomes a representation of time itself.
Hands, Flowers, and the Touch of Learning
Adam Lopez approached the natural world through touch. Adam’s series pairs human hands with flowers to merge gesture and growth. The hands do not only grasp, but also offer. Adam reflected on how, through nature journaling and working with his own style, he learned more about color and composition in design. Through this act of holding, Adam began to see how form, color, and care are intertwined. Adam also revealed how design and art can be both tactile and reflective.
“I decided to make different wildlife held by hands, mainly because I enjoy drawing those things,” Adam Lopez explains—merging his own personal artistic interests with the project’s ecological theme.
The hands remind us that learning begins with touch, or the willingness to hold something gently enough to see it clearly. Learning activates multiple senses, which is why it is particularly beneficial to utilize sensory experiences as tools for learning. Students unearth how material encounters and inner awareness co-produce learning.
Adam also focused on trees. In his drawing, four trees gradually recede in size. His attention to scale transforms the familiar act of observing nature into a study of perspective and relationality. The shift in scale between hands holding (or reaching for) plants and distant renderings of trees creates an argument: that our relationship to nature changes with proximity. What appears small and graspable at one level reveals vastly interconnected systems at another.
Patterns and Possibilities: Rethinking Order in Nature
Adrian Bibik’s stamp series explores organization as a tool for envisioning and re-envisioning natural elements. Adrian’s design can be reordered by relationship (color, species, texture, or form), and new narratives emerge with each rearrangement. Meaning arises from comparison, juxtapositions, and connections between stamps.
Adrian’s stamps are still a collection. His stamps can be reordered by color, size, or classification without fundamentally breaking the system itself. The relationships shift visually, but the logic of separation (each as an isolated “unit”) remains intact. However, Adrian’s work sits at the edge between two modes of thinking: aesthetic arrangement (objects organized by human logic of color, size, and type) and ecological interdependence. Adrian’s work reminds us that arrangement is never neutral because how we choose to group and compare things changes how we imagine relationships. When/how does a design diverge from being a “set” (compositional) to being a system of interdependence (structural)? Or, how can it be both? Adrian’s stamps raise a tension between order and interdependence, and remind us that how we arrange ‘things’ (through categories or other methods) shapes our understanding of nature itself.
Furthering the Wonder: Earthrise and Creative Sustainability
For educators and community members seeking to expand eco-conscious learning in the classroom, Earthrise Commons is in the process of offering a wide variety of lesson plans, community projects, and artist spotlights that integrate art, ecology, and critical thinking. It is a space for teachers across grade levels to explore how sustainability can live within both creative practices and the curriculum.
The Wonder Cabinet encourages us to see objects and themselves as part of interconnected systems of meaning. This ethos extends environmental awareness into the realm of identity and narrative. For instance, Sarah Wyman’s Earthrise lesson plan, Artists of the Self: Reading Women’s Short Fiction, invites students to reflect on how both literary characters and narratives challenge social ‘norms’ around gender/gender expression, motherhood, and mental health. Students examine how storytelling becomes an act of reimagining the self. Sarah’s project nurtures curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. Her lesson promotes diverse perspectives and creative expression as essential tools for cultural and ecological transformation. Sarah Wyman teaches twentieth and twenty-first-century comparative literature, with an emphasis on poetry, the visual arts, and drama, in the U.S. and Europe.
To extend your journey through the arts, listen to Libby Roderick’s “Low to the Ground,” a music video that roots sustainability in sound and storytelling. Roderick’s work reminds us that environmental awareness begins with learning to listen deeply to the world and to one another.
Together, projects like Earthrise remind us that sustainability is not a single act or object. Sustainability is a practice of attention, collaboration, and continual wonder.
References
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Grammar of Animacy.” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Korenblat, Joshua. “Small Multiples Part 2: Stamp Your Homegrown National Park.” DES 220 Information Design, SUNY New Paltz, Fall 2025.