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Out of Eden Learn produces “Glimpses from the Classroom” videos (here’s one of a 5th grade class in Marblehead, Massachusetts, USA, and another of a kindergarten class in Piraeus, Greece) to provide our community with windows into what Out of Eden Learn looks like and means for participants. Naturally, we planned for the next video in the series to feature older students. Rather than produce another “Glimpses” video, we wanted to support youth to document and share their own experiences. To do so, we developed a collaborative and experiential visual storytelling workshop for two groups of high school youth participating in Out of Eden Learn’s specialized curriculum, Stories of Human Migration. Watch the film they produced here or at the bottom of this post.

Keeping with Out of Eden Learn’s core values, the workshop emphasized the necessity of building bridges between and among cultures, that youth voice and story-sharing are integral to building these bridges, and that we must approach digesting and producing media with a certain critical awareness. A mix of visual storytelling techniques, Project Zero thinking routines, and critical media pedagogy, the workshop provided students tools to film and share their experiences as they participate together in Out of Eden Learn.

I had the honor of traveling to Beaverton, Oregon and Singapore to visit these two high school classes and lead the workshop. My colleague, Emi Kane, Director of Programs at the Abundance Foundation, joined me in Singapore to support and document the workshop. Emi ran a session connecting youth via Skype to an artist whose work focuses on migrant experiences and stories and will share a blog post about this session in the coming weeks.

The visual storytelling workshop was executed similarly at each site. Below I’ll share some highlights from the two weeks along with the film students co-produced, Traversing Worlds.

As a result of two generative brainstorms, one at each location, three major themes bubbled up to help shape the direction youth would take the video:

1. storytelling: sharing stories because it “feels good” and exchanging stories to build understanding, connect and relate
2. shifts in perspective: learning about cultures different from your own and being surprised and moved by both similarities and differences
3. “safe space”: Out of Eden Learn as a safe place to share your story and provides a “safety net” that regular social media does not

Students split into groups and decided who would be interviewed and who would do the interviewing, who was in charge of choosing/producing the music, and what shots they needed to help share their story.

The students planned and led the interviews and did most of the filming.

We gave students time to reflect on what they were learning and enjoying from the process throughout the week.

Youth filmed an Everyday Borders walk, capturing one of the activities from the Stories of Human Migration curriculum.  

They filmed one another exploring and posting to the Out of Eden Learn platform.

They came up with their own ways to capture interesting angles/panning shots.

They captured footage both in and out of the classroom.

At the end of the workshop, students shared what they hoped people would get out of their video:

“I hope people can see that we all have a different story besides the single story that the media portrays.”

“I want them to see stories of migration from a different perspective.”

“There is more to someone than their color or beliefs.”

“To see the world as connected and not in fragments”

“I hope people will take away from our video the importance of interacting with people we don’t know”

It is pretty incredible how much we did in the two weeks of workshopping. I was personally really moved by the students’ collective commitment to producing a thoughtful and evocative piece and learning as much as they could in the process. And, of course, we had a lot of fun working together!

Two months after the workshop, the video was in a form ready to share. Oliver Brown, educator at Merlo Station High School in Beaverton, and Sandra Teng, educator at Nanyang Girls’ High School in Singapore both organized community screenings of the film and invited family and community members to view, share and reflect. At both screenings, the youth filmmakers spoke about the experience.

“You need to experience something new if you want to learn more. Leave your bubble and make new friends or leave your bubble and communicate more, leave your bubble and start a positive life. You can’t just be clustered in a little bubble forever.”

-Juritzi Dona Montoya
Interviewee
Beaverton, USA

Watch the final video, Traversing Worlds:

By Guest Author Jeff Evancho, Project Zero Programming Specialist at the Quaker Valley School District

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has a long-standing history of representing what it means to be a maker, and more importantly, a maker community. The industrial revolution established Pittsburgh’s maker community within a landscape of steel mills driven by a rugged blue-collar work ethic. Fast forward to the present—our steel mills may have disappeared but our maker spirit is stronger than ever. Pittsburgh is currently immersed in yet another renaissance—redefining itself in and through its maker DNA. This cultural rebirth is fueled by a global economy, the emergence of a thriving tech industry, and a growing culture of entrepreneurialism that is firmly-rooted in that gritty maker mindset.

The transformation of a city through a maker culture has extensive implications for education throughout the region. Catalyzed by the Remake Learning Network, Pittsburgh has emerged as a national leader in educational innovation. Recently, a network of makers, known as the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community, worked with Agency by Design to explore the application of the research team’s framework for maker-centered learning in our community. As with the current phase of AbD research, our purpose is to develop documentation and assessment strategies that surface signs of learning as they may be observed within the maker-centered classroom.

Members pf the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community engage in the practice of close looking during a design challenge activity.

A Tale of Two Maker-Centered Stories

Pittsburgh’s maker history can be told through two different maker education stories. These stories are represented by both formal and informal education. Here in Pittsburgh we have rich maker experiences happening in our informal settings, i.e., museums, public libraries, and other community spaces. Additionally, a different but related story can be told from the perspective of our more formal in-school maker education settings.

Recently several schools in our area began to build makerspaces to mirror some of the informal settings. However, many of these schools lacked the appropriate methods to connect their new spaces and tools to robust learning outcomes. While it is now clearly evident that positive learning is happening in both our formal and informal maker-centered learning environments, it is also evident that there are differences between the two settings. With these two stories at play, many of us began to notice that those representing formal and informal learning environments didn’t have the opportunity to work together to develop mutual understandings of maker-centered learning. As a result of this realization, with the support of the Grable Foundation, the Remake Learning Network and the Agency by Design research team helped us pilot a learning community to bridge this gap of communication.

Establishing the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community

The Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community was intentionally designed to connect educators from diverse maker-centered learning environments for the purpose of developing mutual understandings of their work. With guidance from Agency by Design and the Quaker Valley School District, my thought leader partner Megan Cicconi and I created a learning community comprised of educators from 11 organizations throughout the Pittsburgh region. Our initial goals were to develop an understanding of the Agency by Design research findings, and to utilize the AbD framework for maker-centered learning to collaboratively think about prototyping and testing assessment tools in the context of maker-centered learning.

Once our group started to meet, we quickly developed our own structure for mutual interactions within a study group setting. It became quite obvious that collegial dialogue about assessment for learning is of the utmost importance. Collectively we engaged in dialogue about the Agency by Design framework through a visible thinking routine called Chalk Talk. Focusing on the core maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity, we asked ourselves the following critical questions:

• Why is looking closely a valuable disposition to have?
• How do learners explore complexity?
• What is the value in learners finding opportunity?

This process of being engaged in thinking together about the core capacities of the Agency by Design framework allowed us to collectively explore deeper understandings related to the arc of learning within a maker-centered context. The Chalk Talk thinking routine further presented us with an opportunity to talk about the core capacities and their relationship to learning from our own perspectives.

Another important component of our workshops is the expectation of our cohort members to bring an artifact of student work to each meeting. We use these artifacts to create the teacher’s perspective and to facilitate conversations about student thinking and learning. We engage in a protocol entitled looking at students’ thinking to help us to surface the thinking that is present in the artifacts of student work. This technique has allowed us to shift our conversation to focus on two inter-related questions: What learning do we want to occur in our classrooms? and How might a particular maker activity facilitate that learning?

A sample of student work (far right) along with the documentation of the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community’s use of the Looking at Student Thinking protocol to discuss it.

As a learning community we have continued this framework of engaging in dialogue, investigating big questions, and looking at student work for the purpose of exploring learning outcomes. This framework became our professional routine. After each workshop concluded, all participants committed to using an Agency by Design thinking routine or simply being mindful of the core capacities while facilitating instruction. And when it was time for us to meet again, each participant of the cohort came prepared with a student artifact connected to their new understanding of the Agency by Design framework. As we continued this process, all participants have developed deeper understandings of the systems-level thinking embedded in the maker-centered learning practices they have been facilitating.

Making an Impact in the Maker-Centered Classroom

Timesha Cohen, a member of our learning community and teacher from Propel McKeesport Public Charter School, has talked about the impact of her participation as positively affecting herself and her students: “My students are able to make connections between what they know and what they need to know, as well as draw conclusions based on patterns they may notice in both math and science. They have learned how to take more of a leadership role in how they think, thus making them more confident in their ability to think without my constant direction.” Additionally, Timesha has talked about her work with the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community as impacting her teaching, “In other words, it has allowed me to develop a teaching framework that allows my students the time and opportunities to develop their instinctive ability to be problem solvers and creators.”

Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community member Timesha Cohen joins her colleagues in the redesign of a hands-on maker-centered learning activity.

Many of the other participants in our AbD Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community could likely share similar stories about how their work together with the AbD framework and educator resources has had a positive impact on their teaching and, most importantly, the opportunity for them to support student agency.

We are happy to announce that as a result of the success of our pilot experience, Cognizant Technology Solutions is now supporting the continuation and expansion of our work as a learning community. We are excited to see how our work in Pittsburgh parallels the work of the new cohort of Agency by Design Fellows in California—and how we may help contribute to the development of documentation and assessment tools for maker-centered classrooms throughout the United States and around the world.

As we move towards developing documentation and assessment strategies for maker-centered learning, we invite you to think with us about some key questions: What can be assessed within the maker-centered learning context? What is worth assessing in the maker-centered learning context? And what does maker-centered learning look like?