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Exploring the Connection Between Ecosystem Changes and Human Health: A New Video About Out of Eden Learn’s Planetary Health Learning Journey
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This post is authored by Devon Wilson and Shari Tishman. Devon Wilson is a research assistant at Project Zero, where he works on the Out of Eden Learn project and the ID Global project. Shari Tishman is a co-director of Out of Eden Learn.

Out of Eden Learn is excited to share a short new video about the Out of Eden Learn learning journey, An Introduction to Planetary Health. The learning journey, developed in collaboration with the Planetary Health Alliance, helps students explore the relationship between environmental change and human health, and the video tells the stories of students and teachers from three different parts of the world who participated in a learning journey together in the fall of 2019. Though the video was completed just days before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, it feels especially relevant today.

As communities around the world entered lockdown in early 2020, a consequence observed by environmental researchers was an associated decrease in CO2 levels internationally along with a flourishing of many natural environments due to the reduced presence of humans. At the same time, the disparity of COVID-related health outcomes across communities has led to a dramatic increase in awareness of how local and global environmental conditions contribute to human health outcomes.  Many refer to this moment as an opportunity for a “great realization” – a moment to look at ourselves in the mirror and say that we cannot continue on as we previously have. Yet as economies begin to re-open, we already see increases in CO2 and environmental degradation, and most systemic issues affecting human health continue to persist. Indeed, with the loosening of environmental regulations in the name of economic recovery, these issues threaten to become worse. 

As we begin to return to classrooms around the world—whether online or in person—we are presented with a fresh set of opportunities to do things differently. The Introduction to Planetary Health learning journey gives students the opportunity to actively explore the intersection between environmental systems and human health—in their own communities and around the world.  Like all Out of Eden Learn learning journeys, students take walks in their own neighborhoods, investigate themes that have both local and global relevance, and share stories that matter to them with their online peers. Also like all Out of Eden Learn offerings, the learning journey is entirely free. It takes about 8-10 weeks to complete, and it can be used in online, in-person, or multimodal classrooms.  The curriculum can be viewed on the Out of Eden Learn website. The next round of OOEL planetary health learning journeys launch in September and October.  If you’d like more information or are interested in signing up, contact us at learn@outofedenwalk.com. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the video!

Listening to Learn: An Open Letter to Our Community
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Greetings to our Out of Eden Learn Community and other readers of this blog,

We have been thinking about our community members in different places and contexts at this extraordinary time.

As you know, the Out of Eden Learn team is physically situated in the United States, where recent and ongoing events connected to police brutality and racial injustice have reverberated around the world. We recognize the importance of speaking out in solidarity with communities of color—and in particular, the African American community within the US. We did not rush to put out a statement about our values and support for the wave of protests and what feels like a real opportunity for social and political change. As a predominantly white-presenting team situated within a predominantly white research organization, we’ve been focusing our team’s energies on listening rather than speaking, while individually participating in local Black Lives Matter protest events and other advocacy. We’ve also shifted some of the ways we use our social media and have been sharing posts from trusted organizations that more squarely address matters of social and racial justice. It now feels time to open up a more direct conversation with our community.

We believe that our collective work is as relevant as ever at this time—namely, breaking down barriers among young people and encouraging them to learn thoughtfully both with and from one another by slowing down, sharing stories, and making connections. During the past several weeks, for example, we have been conducting virtual focus groups with young people who have been working with our Three O’s framework of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering, which supports young people to both reflectively and critically engage with the world—online, in person, when reading the news, etc. Students’ thoughtful responses to our questions reveal that they are finding this framework to be a salient and powerful tool for interpreting and navigating the fraught and complicated world in which we all live. We invite you to scroll through some of their comments in the gallery below, and we look forward to sharing more about this work with you soon.

We have also been learning from educators about best practices for using our Dialogue Toolkit in order to promote thoughtful online and in-person interactions, including among youth who would not ordinarily encounter one another or who know little about each other’s lives. And we have been working on a video that captures what students have been learning about the interdependency of systems related to environmental and human health via our Planetary Health curriculum. We will share these new resources with you soon.

Nevertheless, while we believe all this work to be relevant and worthwhile, there are some genuine puzzles associated with doing international work focused on intercultural exchange across very different settings. Some questions on our mind include: Is OOEL paying too little attention to global inequities, including ones related to racial injustice? Is the project effectively upholding the status quo by not directly promoting activism or more critical debate? Because of the pseudonymous nature of the platform—and the extremely limited sharing of demographic information (e.g. race, gender, etc.)—are OOEL students and teachers steering clear of potentially uncomfortable and complicated, yet ultimately important conversations? As a research team, we recognize that we do not fully understand the specific learning experiences of students who experience various kinds of marginalization in their daily lives, nor have we persistently asked how we might serve them differently or better. Given the composition and geographic location of our research team, we undoubtedly have blindspots and biases in the most fundamental ways in which we develop the program and conduct our research.

As we reflect on what we need to do both in the short term and long term to improve our work, we recognize that we need our community’s help. One first step will be to send out a short survey to our educators in the coming days. The survey will ask the following four questions. We invite you to consider them now, and we warmly—and humbly—look forward to your survey responses.  Stay tuned for an email with the link to the survey.

  1. Consider one or more students in your classroom who might experience some type of marginalization and/or inequities—perhaps for different reasons, such as racial-, ethnic- or gender-based marginalization or inequities due to cognitive or physical differences. How, if at all, are they already experiencing safety and inclusivity on OOEL? For example, are there specific footsteps or activities that work particularly well for these students?
  2. What additional resources or strategies are you using to help support these students to participate in OOEL?
  3. How could the OOEL program be more inclusive for students who experience marginalization or inequity in their daily lives? How might specific features of our program, platform, or curricula be modified to better support these students?
  4. Some aspects of the OOEL curriculum encourage students to explore connections between their everyday lives and bigger systems. Are there specific ways that you think OOEL already helps students explore how systemic racism or local and/or global systems that promote different kinds of injustices such as economic, health, or environmental injustices?
  5. Would you like OOEL activities to do more to help students delve deeply into how local and global social and economic systems work, and how students themselves might be connected to such systems?  If so, what would you like to see?  What ideas would you like to share with us?     

If anyone reading this blog would like to leave a comment or email us at learn@outofedenwalk.com, we would welcome your thoughts. With resolve, intentionality, and humility, we hope to take the necessary steps to move onward and upward together.

With love,

The Out of Eden Learn Team

A SNAPSHOT OF THE CURRENT LEARNING LANDSCAPE PART 3
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Morgan Nixon, an international ELL educator and student in the Technology in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is working with the Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) team as a research assistant this semester.

This piece is the third in a series of Learning Landscapes—or weekly distance learning news, strategy, and big-picture updates. Similarly to parts one and two of this series, I have created a slideshow highlighting some key themes I noticed surfacing online this week as educators, administrators, and parents continue to navigate distance learning.  While the conversations I am looking closely at are mostly happening within the United States, emerging themes should be relevant to readers around the world. This week’s ‘winding words’ are: the future of learning, technology: digital divide, technology: new opportunities, and instructional approaches. You might notice that accompanying each of the key themes in this week’s slides are a set of reflection prompts for readers to consider as they explore the featured resources. We invite you to share some of your reflections in the comment section below. I hope you find this week’s online learning landscape helpful.

 

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A SNAPSHOT OF THE CURRENT LEARNING LANDSCAPE PART 2
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Morgan Nixon, an international ELL educator and student in the Technology in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is working with the Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) team as a research assistant this semester.

This piece follows up on the one I shared last week. I have taken the time to synthesize some key themes I saw coming up online this week, as educators continue to navigate—and adapt to—the new reality of distance learning.  While I’ve focused on what is happening within the United States, many of the emerging themes should be relevant to readers from around the world: this week’s ‘winding words’ are flexibility, basic needs, voice, special needs, and professional development. I hope you find my presentation useful.

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A Snapshot of the Current Learning Landscape
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Morgan Nixon, an international ELL educator and student in the Technology in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is working with the Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) team as a research assistant this semester.

In order to support our educator and learner community, it is important for the OOEL team to follow what is on educators’ and caregivers’ minds during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a research assistant and member of the OOEL team, I have put together this slideshow synthesizing some of the main themes I have been seeing in the media recently.

I hope you will find it useful if you want to know what educators are talking about at this fast-moving time, but do not have the bandwidth or time to follow lots of news feeds.

 

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Slow Looking and Deep Learning in the Graduate School Classroom
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This January, nineteen students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education spent two weeks immersed in an intensive course on slow looking. The class was taught by OOEL co-director Shari Tishman. Linked in spirit to Out of Eden Learn’s theme of slowing down to observe the world closely, the purpose of the course was to help graduate students explore the connection between slow looking and deep learning.This is a picture of a student sitting in a tree.

The class activities took place in a variety of locations. One brisk January day was spent outdoors at the Arnold Arboretum, a research center and public park in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, where students spent several hours observing a single tree. Another day was spent in a lab at the Harvard Art Museums where students explored the complexity of everyday mechanical objects—first by carefully taking apart a discarded object (broken hair dryer, old phone, electric fan); then by looking at artworks in the museum related to the transformation of everyday objects (Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Willie Cole); and finally by using the parts of the disassembled objects to make assemblages of their own (imagine a large-mouthed monster with the jaws of a phone receiver. The activity was inspired by Project Zero’s Agency by Design project. The website lists several routines and resources available to all educators.

This is a picture of disassembled mechanical objects, remade into other assemblages. Specifically featured here is a large-mouthed monster with a phone-receiver serving as its jaw.Toward the end of the course, a particularly memorable afternoon unfolded in the cozy interior of Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room: Students began by leisurely browsing its beautifully curated collection of poetry, and then settled in to listen slowly and repeatedly to an audio recording of Native American poet Layli Long Soldier reading her poetry aloud. (The Woodberry Poetry Room has an amazing archive of poet audio recordings freely available online in the Listening Booth.)

Several students in the course were professional educators, and they found that the principles of Out of Eden Learn—slowing down, sharing stories, making connections—resonated with their teaching goals. They left the course excited to introduce slow looking into their own classrooms, and excited to introduce Out of Eden Learn to new audiences. Learn more about the connection between slow looking and deep learning at Usable Knowledge, a digital publication of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

 

The Universe as Classroom
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Charlotte Leech, writer of this piece, co-founded Loka together with Sanat Kumar. Paul Salopek visited Loka on his walk across Northern India, and later met up with the Out of Eden Learn research team there.

Once upon a time there was a Small School with Big Dreams called Loka. It was tucked away along the Punpun river in Bihar, North-India. This school was not just a building with classrooms. It also had a farm, a flower garden, lots of trees, fields to play, pets and was surrounded by endless farming fields, chimneys of brick factories and other small villages. Children learning at Loka lived with their parents in muLoka 1d huts or simple unfurnished brick houses. They were mostly small-scale farmers and labourers. At school the children learned many things, not just from books, but also by exploring, creating, imagining, tinkering and through dialogue and reflection. At the end of every school day the children cleaned the campus and made sure to keep their surroundings neat, colourful and beautiful.

Loka 2

loka 3One day a man and a woman arrived at the gate of this remote school or free space. The man was Paul Salopek and he was accompanied by his walking partner Bhavita. Paul came walking all the way from Ethiopia and was on his way to Patagonia. He was curious to learn about people and places across the globe and write stories about them to share with the wide world. His long traverse was called ‘Out of Eden Walk’ and brought him to many unknown areas, just like the village where Loka’s school was emerging. Paul spent some days with Loka’s students, and the children were amazed by his journey. “Why walk by foot, why not use a car?” a puzzled student asked.  Another wondered what Paul thought about Bihar – a state often depicted in mainstream media as dangerous, corrupt and poor. “Bihar is Beautiful” he said, “and the people are kind and welcoming.” Everybody at Loka was inspired by Paul’s story and presence, and his choice to give up everything and live a different life. Likewise, Loka had touched Paul’s heart, it seemed, as just over a month later he returned with a wonderful group of researchers from Project Zero, a research center at Harvard University. Every couple of years Paul met with them to have a conference about Out of Eden Learn (OOEL), an online platform for cultural exchange the researchers developed which is linked to Paul’s Walk.

During their stay at Loka, three Project Zero researchers, Shari Tishman, Carrie James, and Liz Duraisingh, organised a learning walk.

Students went in pairs on a slow walk and were given the assignment to look closely at something they never looked closely at before.

 


Students carefully observed:

  • An ant walking over their hand.
  • A mango tree. Its flowers.
  • A mud oven. Good to boil the paddy.
  • An eggplant. Its leaves are rough.
  • A hole in the field. Possibly a rat’s home. When looking more closely, it looks
  • like a well.

After the slow walk, everybody shared their observations and responded to each others’ findings through ‘Appreciations’, ‘Wonders’ and ‘Connections’.

Dinesh: “Somebody wrote about the eggplant; why the flower comes first and not the fruit. That made me wonder.”

Sanatan: “I would like to say something about connection. Many children started their questions with the word ‘why’. That is a connection.”

Liz (researcher): “I want to congratulate your spirit and the way you did the activity. It was very beautiful to see.” (Appreciation)

Everybody at Loka learned a lot during the visit of Paul and the Project Zero team After their departure, students started to participate in OOEL.  Imagine children who, until 5 years ago had hardly met anyone outside their locality, were suddenly involved in an international online cultural exchange! Through OOEL, Loka’s students started to slow down, look more closely at their surroundings and share stories of their neighbourhood. They would also respond to stories, photos, videos and other assignments of their ‘walking partners’, children of other schools from all other the world. One of the assignments was to make a neighbourhood map. Some of the maps were created so attentively by Loka’s students that after posting them online, they received many appreciations. One boy from America commented on Dimple’s map: “Could you share some drawing tips?” Dimple never had proper drawing classes, so he explained how he imagined an image that he kept in his mind while drawing. There were also funny moments. For example, when somebody commented on LittiChowkha’s1 introduction post: “Cool that you live in India” and LittiChowkha (1) replied with: “It’s not cool in India, it’s hot!”

After Loka’s students completed their first learning journey, the list of things they said they had learned turned out to be endless. They mentioned practical skills such as improving their English, conducting an interview, making a video and writing an email. They also made observations that were especially interesting coming from children who, until then, had little access to the rest of the world. “Not everywhere is the same as in our village” one student observed. “I learned about the rest of the world by sitting in my school” another added. Other learning points mentioned by students included: how to make a slow walk and observe the big things and small things; looking more deeply; understanding the meaning of the everyday, and learning new words never used before which can make stories more interesting.

This is how a visit from a walking storyteller and a team of highly intelligent people deeply interested in education enhanced the mission of a small school with big dreams. What about the future? Students are eager to start their next OOEL learning journey. Besides that, the school will soon be enriched with a Maker Space through which students will be equipped to uplift their surroundings and–on village scale–create the kind of world we would all wish to live in. And how that world will look? Imagine the Impossible… because that is what children do.

(1) Username created by student especially for OOEL.

 

 

Mapping Local Planetary Health in Chicago
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Mike McPharlin is a 5th grade teacher at the Francis Parker School in Chicago, Illinois, USA, and a longtime member of the Out of Eden Learn Community.

Spending the second semester doing a deep dive into Planetary Health opened my students’ eyes to the role of choice and its impact on the interdependence of environmental health and human health. As we looked closer into this topic, our gaze inevitably turned towards our home city of Chicago. With a population of almost 3 million people, 22 miles of coastline, 156 miles of waterways, and over 8,800 acres of park space, Chicago is a fascinating urban example of the successes and failures of how humans choose to interact with the environment around them. The students were excited to learn that the new mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, has committed the city of Chicago to reaching 100% renewable energy by 2025.

While this made the students proud of their city, we also looked closely at the sobering results of the recent UN report released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in the Spring. The report summarizes that, “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundationmike 2s of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” (1) We also read an article about the decline of fireflies and monarch butterfly populations, specifically in Chicago.  The students were struck by statements like, “Chicago and the surrounding area has already seen “significant” declines in its insect and bat population,” said Andrew Wetzler, managing director of the Nature Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Monarch butterflies — the orange and black butterflies that flutter around gardens and flowers in the spring and summer — and fireflies, a staple of many Chicagoans’ childhoods, are expected to be among the local insects that will be lost. Insects like butterflies and creatures like bats are pollinators, and plants need to be pollinated to produce food.

“We’re profoundly dependent on nature. One out of every three bites of food that we take are pollinated by an insect or bat,” Wetzler said. (2) While this article pointed to an unfortunate reality here in Chicago, it also gave the students hope that there is still time to make a difference through actionable choices that are already happening throughout the city. Identifying those actions and creating a record of what is being done locally to share with the community, and our walking parties as a means to inspire action became the goal of this mapping project.

mike 1

The first step was to brainstorm topics that could be the focus for our maps. Students drew from our neighborhood walk in Footstep 1 where they identified things that could have an impact on human and environmental health. This slow look into our immediate area had raised questions like, “How much green space is there? Green roofs?”, “Will habitat restoration really make a difference?”, “How many miles of bike lanes have been established?”, “Do farmer’s markets really make a difference in energy consumption and quality of food?”, “If so, who had access to farmer’s markets and who didn’t?” We considered the choices that had been made in our community of Chicago, and thought about who had the power to make those choices and who didn’t. Ultimately, we settled on the following topics to research further and the students self-selected the specific topic they wanted to explore and map.  Students studied: bike lanes and location of bike share stations, farmers markets, native plant restoration, Chicago River clean up, green roofs, and public transportation.
mike 3Students began by researching everything they could find that was happening at a local level, who was doing the work and what the issues were the Chicago community is trying to fix.  They explored innovative ideas like robots being used to clean up the river. They discovered areas of the city that contained no farmer’s markets and were introduced to the concept of food deserts. They discovered the importance of planting native species in their own gardens and the impact that can have on pollinator populations.

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From there the students used information they found as KMZ files on the City of Chicago data portal and imported that into Google My Maps. They also dropped pins adding information and links to existing sites to provide  further information. Pictures and videos were added to provide media. Once completed, all of these different layers were uploaded onto one map that can be shared with our community to inform and inspire work that is currently happening.

5M Planetary Health Map – Chicago

This project came together quickly towards the end of the school year so there is a lot of room for development and improvement. Things we are considering for the next iteration of this project (including the time of year we work on it) are possibly focusing on a specific topic and diving deeper into that.  We are also considering a partnership with a local organization and giving students space to develop their interview skills to gather information. This could also include a site visit, which would give the students a chance to create their own content through 360 degree photos or video. We are also interested in exploring the structures of power when it comes to decision making for Planetary Health here in our city. There is also the possibility of exploring other platforms to convey information such as the ArcGIS platform by ESRI for mapping.

With all the challenges our world faces, students need to feel empowered that their voices can be heard and that those voices can be used to teach or inspire others. These maps were a step in that direction.

1. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

2. https://blockclubchicago.org/2019/05/09/fireflies-monarch-butterflies-could-die-off-in-chicago-due-to-climate-change/

Slow Looking Through a Big Data Lens
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Kate Tanha is a student at Minerva Schools majoring in Computer Science, with an interest in politics and psychology. The data shared in the post below is a result of analyses conducted by Kate using Wolfram, an application for computational programming.

In the summer of 2019, I spent four weeks at Project Zero working with the Out of Eden Learn team. Deeply interested in discovering and sharing stories in data, I was excited by the potential to investigate the impact of a design-based research study like Out of Eden Learn (OOEL). To date, OOEL researchers have conducted qualitative analyses of the data (student posts, comments, etc.) on the platform. While nuanced findings are more likely to emerge when using qualitative approaches, quantitative analysis can yield interesting insights from particularly large data sets. For example, a large data set might be the over 115,000 posts and more than 260,000 comments on the OOEL platform. As an OOEL Research Assistant, I set out to unearth what was buried in this trove of data. When conducted responsibly with nuanced interpretations, big data can help uncover stories we might not otherwise have seen, illuminating the diversity of the OOEL community.

To date, over 30,000 students have participated in Out of Eden Learn’s free online learning platform from 60 different countries (Figure 1) and 399 different cities (Figure 3) around the world. In the United States (US) alone, the platform has reached 44 different states. About 60 percent of the students on the platform are from the US, which is not surprising considering that OOEL is based in the United States. One of the first insights during my research was: once we look at city-level data, the most commonly represented city is—surprisingly—not in the US or North America, but is instead Serpong, Indonesia, as shown below in Figure 3. In the following word clouds, the size of each entity—country or city—depends on its frequency i.e. the number of students registered to participate in Out of Eden Learn in each country/city.

A word cloud of all the countries where students participate in Out of Eden Learn from. There are sixty countries total.

Figure 1. Countries represented in the Out of Eden Learn platform, where the size of each country is scaled by the number of students participating in that country.

A word cloud of the countries where students participate in Out of Eden Learn from, excluding the United States.

Figure 2. Countries represented in the Out of Eden Learn platform (excluding the United States), where the size of each country is scaled by the number of students participating in that country.

A word cloud of the 399 cities represented on the Out of Eden Learn platform.

Figure 3. The 399 cities represented in the Out of Eden Learn platform, where the size of each city is scaled by the number of students participating in that city.

Undoubtedly, the OOEL platform represents a diverse cohort of students from all around the world, a claim further supported once we look at the languages students report they speak at home. To date, we have students that speak 144 different languages on the platform (Figure 4). This incredible diversity of languages include: Tongan (an Austronesian language spoken in the Polynesian country, Tonga), Wolof (the Niger-Congo language of the Wolof) and Basque (a language spoken in the Basque Country with 750,000 native speakers).

A word cloud of the 145 languages that students at the Out of Eden Learn platform report they speak at home.

Figure 4. Languages that students on the Out of Eden Learn platform report they speak at home. The languages here are not scaled, meaning the number of students that report the same language does not affect the size of the text.

Another intriguing question relates to the content of student participation—specifically, which curricular activities generate the most engagement? Currently, OOEL offers four Learning Journeys (i.e. curricula): Core Learning Journey 1: The Present and the Local, Core Learning Journey 2: The Past and the Global, Stories of Human Migration, and An Introduction to Planetary Health. Each curriculum is subdivided into various Footsteps, a set of curated activities and online sharing using the OOEL platform. A core component of OOEL’s philosophy and model is the importance of opportunities for young people to engage in meaningful online interactions to complement their offline learning and reflection. 

Answering this question proved to be a challenge because we needed to begin with a comparable indicator of dialogue and settled on the number of comments as the indicator. Next, we had to find a way to standardize the entire dataset. To illustrate the problem, Learning Journey 1 has been running since 2014 when OOEL’s platform launched and consequently has far more posts and comments, while Stories of Human Migration launched in 2016 and therefore has fewer posts and comments. As a result, determining how to make meaningful dialogue comparisons between learning journeys became a puzzle.

We sought to solve this problem by defining a measure of Dialogue, where we scaled the total number of comments by the total number of participants in the particular learning journey. In other words, we had an approximate measure of how many comments each student is likely to make during the course of the learning journey. Then, we divided this figure by the scaled dialogue in each learning journey and found the percentage of Dialogue Action. Consider an arbitrary Learning Journey, X:

An image of the equation: Dialogue= Total number of comments in Learning Journey XTotal number of participants in Learning Journey X Dialogue Action = Dialogue for Learning Journey XSum of Dialogue for all Learning Journeys* 100

Figure 5. Dialogue Action for each learning journey. According to our metric, Learning Journey 1 received the highest dialogue while Stories of Human Migration received the least dialogue.

As we can see above in Figure 5, Learning Journey 1 has the most Dialogue Action while Stories of Human Migration seems to have the least. At this stage, there is another caveat: we are yet to account for depth to understand the data. 

Gauging the depth of student dialogue is easier for an educator with years of experience in both pedagogy and working with students, but a difficult feat for a mindless computer! The OOEL platform currently logs the total number of comments and the comments themselves in response to each student post. It is possible to retrieve the length of each comment from this dataset. Though we understand that comment length is not always going to be an accurate representation of “deep” commenting, we needed to begin with a broad indicator and settled on comment length. 

Through this analysis, once we compare learning journeys, it is apparent that Stories of Human Migration (SoHM) has a greater proportion of comments that are longer in terms of word count, despite a relatively low score for Dialogue Action (Figure 6). This made sense because of the structure of the SoHM curriculum, which invites students to share deeply meaningful stories of their own and connect with one another around the topic of human migration. Students are, on average, writing longer comments for posts in the SoHM learning journey.

Figure 6. Distribution of comment length in Stories of Human Migration (SoHM), with the number of comments with a specific length as a callout outside each pie. Although Stories of Human Migration had the least dialogue according to our Dialogue Action metric, we noticed that SoHM has the greatest proportion of longer comments (compared to Learning Journey 1, Learning Journey 2 and Planetary Health, as seen below in order from left to right).

Figures 6,7,8,9. Distribution of comment length in Stories of Human Migration (SoHM), with the number of comments with a specific length as a callout outside each pie. Although Stories of Human Migration had the least dialogue according to our Dialogue Action metric, we noticed that SoHM has the greatest proportion of longer comments (compared to Learning Journey 1, Learning Journey 2 and Planetary Health, as seen below in order from left to right).

Figure 6. Distribution of comment length in Stories of Human Migration (SoHM), with the number of comments with a specific length as a callout outside each pie. Although Stories of Human Migration had the least dialogue according to our Dialogue Action metric, we noticed that SoHM has the greatest proportion of longer comments (compared to Learning Journey 1, Learning Journey 2, and Planetary Health, as seen above in order from left to right).

During my final week on Out of Eden Learn, I focused on text analysis. Since we are still trying to improve the reliability of our results, I will only discuss my procedure. Researchers at OOEL are interested in the overall emotionality of student comments. In modern machine language terminology, this is a classification task, in which we want to predict the label—or emotion—of a given piece of text. Classification tasks generally involve two major steps: at first, a dataset is fed into the computer with annotated samples (the training set) and an algorithm is trained using this data set to classify a new set (the test set). We usually check the accuracy of the classifier on the test set i.e. how many of the sentences were labeled correctly. 

Machine learning is about detecting patterns. The training set in our case was a list of texts with their labeled emotionality. While such analysis is a relatively popular field, there are various competing theories of emotion in psychology and hence, various training sets to choose from. Broadly, these theories involve either labeling discrete emotion labels such as fear, sadness, anger, joy, etc., or characterizing sentiment as a distribution over various polarities (positive, negative, mixed) and intensities (high, medium, low). The OOEL researchers were interested in the former approach of discrete emotions, so I trained a classifier on two different datasets, one containing 4,870 annotated tweets from Twitter and the other trained on selected texts from the Gutenberg Project. Unfortunately, there were too many discrepancies on both classifiers’ results. Presumably, this is because comments on OOEL have a very different pattern compared to tweets from Twitter or texts from novels. So, we began the work of training another classifier on a different OOEL dataset from a prior analysis of dialogue on the OOEL platform, which identified major themes from participant responses. Early results showed promise—for example, we were able to identify a spike in emotion for certain footsteps, such as Documenting the Everyday (Footstep 5 in Learning Journey 1) and Everyday Borders (Footstep 2 in Stories of Human Migration). We hope to continue this work in the future.

During my first week in OOEL, I attended the Vision and Justice Convening, a conference at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute on the intersection of art, race, and justice. When asked about the role of machines in predicting the trajectory of someone’s life, lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson shared an anecdote of someone with a history of childhood abuse and multiple offences, who nevertheless went on to lead a very productive life with a happy family—an unexpected outcome compared to what crunching numbers would have us believe. Stevenson further expanded that it is imperative for data collectors and analysts to be mindful of their own biases and to have compassion for the subjects whom they are researching. My experience on Out of Eden Learn has reinforced this view, showing me how educational analytics are useful insofar as we collect student data in a thoughtful and responsible manner and we carefully consider the kinds of questions we ask.

Announcing a New Partner: QFI
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Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) is honored to announce a gift from Qatar Foundation International (QFI).

QFI shares with OOEL a commitment to supporting students and educators in developing more nuanced understandings of culture, with a special focus on cultures in the Arab world.  We invite readers to explore QFI’s active blog through which they showcase the inspiring work they do with students and educators in primary and secondary schools, universities, and nonprofit organizations.

Their gift will support OOEL’s ongoing work to connect young people from different places in the world for meaningful exchange. It is also an opportunity to revisit our partner journalist Paul Salopek’s writings from his journey through the Arab world in the earliest stages of his Out of Eden Walk.  We are hopeful that our collaboration will encourage more students from the Arab world to take part in our learning journeys. QFI’s gift will allow us to build on our newer initiatives, including our new Planetary Health Learning Journey,  expanded dialogue toolkit, and ongoing research on culture, online dialogue, and engaging youth around the topic of migration.

We look forward to the next steps along our journey with our new partners at QFI.

[You can read QFI’s announcement about our partnership on their blog here.]

qfi website

 

Uncovering the Big Idea of Planetary Health
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Out of Eden Learn and the Planetary Health Alliance have partnered to develop the Introduction to Planetary Health learning journey—a new special curriculum on the Out of Eden Learn platform.  The purpose of the learning journey is to introduce young people to the complex subject of planetary health and help them uncover connections between planetary health and their own lives. To supplement the curriculum, we created the video below, along with this text. In the video, Chris Golden from the Planetary Health Alliance and Shari Tishman from Out of Eden Learn discuss “The Big Idea of Planetary Health.”

 

A special thank you to Alex Griswold at Harvard’s Center for the Environment for his generous contributions and for filming the video featured in this post.

New Dialogue Moves in Action: How Out of Eden Learn students use POV, Challenge, and Name tools
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This post was co-authored by Susie Blair and Carrie James.

We recently announced the expansion of Out of Eden Learn’s online Dialogue Toolkit to include three new dialogue tools: POV, Challenge, and Name.

The impetus behind these new tools is to support students to practice dialogue strategies that can deepen their conversations and, in turn, their understandings of their own and others’ stances on meaningful issues.

In this post, we provide examples of how OOEL students have used these dialogue moves. The student work we share is drawn from a pilot we carried out with one walking party (online learning group) taking part in our Stories of Human Migration curriculum in the spring of 2018. The pilot included students and educators in five classrooms in diverse contexts in the United States and one classroom in Australia.

For each move below, we share a few different ways in which students put the move into action. We then point to insights from pre- and post-surveys with students and conversations with educators, offering specific suggestions to support students in their use of each move.


The POV (point of view) move is an opportunity for students to express their ideas and opinions to an authentic audience of young people whose backgrounds (and possibly viewpoints) may be different to their own. In our pilot walking party, we noticed students using this move to share their perspectives on a variety of themes prompted by the curriculum—including “everyday borders,” media accounts of migration, political discourse around migration, and other topics  relevant to migration and students’ related lived experiences.

One student’s Everyday Borders post raised the perspective that social media can erect boundaries in communication because of the absence of facial expression and tone. In response, student Lindashi acknowledged the original poster’s perspective and offered a similar POV:

I completely understand people often communicate with each other on social media. I think we should have more face-to-face communication. Therefore, It can improve the relationship between people. – Lindashi (Adelaide, Australia) commenting on LindaZ’s “Everyday Borders” post

In a later comment, a student from the U.S. shared an example of a different border that was more salient to his experience:

In my point of view it is a barrier to speak a different language because it’s hard to communicate with others. When I was younger going to school was hard because I didn’t understand English which was a big barrier for me. – CM18 (Oregon, United States) commenting on LindaZ’s “Everyday Borders” post

In this comment, CM18 is drawing on his personal experience as a young English Language Learner as the basis of his stated POV.  While we do not require that Out of Eden Learn students “back up” their points of view with specific details of their lives that may be influencing their perspectives (though we do explicitly invite them to do so with our new Name dialogue tool, discussed below) we are encouraged by the fact that some students feel comfortable enough on our platform to share such personal anecdotes.

Our Migration in the Media footstep activity—which involves comparing two journalistic pieces about migration—invites students to interpret and raise questions about media representations of human migration. In doing so, they often express their stances on the author’s handling of the topic itself, stating their own POV in opposition and starting a “dialogue” between themselves and the author.  

For example, one student explored how images of migrants used in news articles may reflect particular attitudes about migrants in the United States, then shared her own POV on the matter:

Every immigrant should be seen as a part of our community and no person can be illegal. I do believe the photographers had the same ideas I had when they took their images. – Angel8all, New Mexico, US

Educators reported that although sharing a POV (especially on a public issue or topic that might be sensitive) did not feel appropriate or warranted across all Stories of Human Migration activities and discussions, students did practice the move in different ways (as illustrated in the examples above). These students’  use of intentionally careful language appears to promote a positive tone in their discussions. In that spirit, the current iteration of our Dialogue Toolkit  includes suggested sentence starters for the POV tool—for example, “From my perspective…” and, “Some argue that… Others say…. In my opinion…”


The Challenge move is intended to push dialogue to go deeper as a means of raising critical questions—albeit while maintaining  a constructive, respectful tone. We encourage students to use the Challenge move not only to challenge one another’s POVs, but also to challenge narratives presented by various media sources as part of our Migration in the Media activity.

For example, in her original post, oReOs4LiFe expressed concern over the absence of refugees’ voices and perspectives:

While this fairly unbiased article gives insight into the diplomacy side of the story, and what the U.S. and Mexican governments have done to combat the issue, the voices of the migrants themselves seem to be absent from this story. There are quotes from the U.S. president, an administrator from the Agency for International Development, and also a member of an independent think tank, but none from the people that the measures taken will directly impact. Although they are a large part of the story, there have been no migrants or relatives of migrants interviewed on how this will affect them. I feel that the migrants, not just in this story but in this topic in general, are being treated like animals that have escaped their cages and are now trying to be shoved back in. –oReOs4LiFe, Maine, US

Like oReOs4LiFe, a student in Oregon shared a critical perspective on the article she examined about refugees. Taking care to own it as her “own point of view,” this student similarly pointed to concerns about missing perspectives:

What I can say from my own point of view [is that] this writer was very blunt and insensitive with the word choice. I feel the way I feel because this article is suppose to be in between, yet I see no in-depth refugee interview, and I think that there should be because this is a article about the people. – Alexis, Oregon, US

As with the previous example, this excerpt serves as an example of both the POV and Challenge moves, as Alexis offers her contrasting point of view as a means to challenge both the tone and substance of the piece she examined. Alexis is also careful to reiterate that she is speaking on only her own behalf—”What I can say from my own point of view—reflecting that she is aware that her opinion may not be shared by all of her walking partners. This student also is explicit when providing evidence to support her opinion, using the phrase “I feel the way I feel because

While educators reported that their students were often hesitant to use the Challenge move in relation to other youths’ perspectives, some tried out the move when commenting on their peers’ work. Lizcheng, a learner in Adelaide, Australia, appeared to carefully “Challenge” some claims made about the usefulness of social boundaries in another student’s Everyday Borders post:

And by your last sentence, could you please give some examples of what lessons can boundary teach us? I can fully understand that you want to hide sometimes to avoid those judgements and questions, but I think sometimes [facing] those judgements straightly and [using] actions to prove your ability might be a better way; you will find the people who truly know you along the way. – lizcheng (Adelaide, Australia) commenting on oReOs4LiFe’s “Everyday Borders” post

Here, lizcheng makes a point to find some common ground with her dialogue partner, stating that she “can fully understand” their point of view on social boundaries yet ultimately disagrees, asking for supporting examples of her walking partners’ claim that boundaries can “teach us lessons” and offering her own perspective as an alternative. This use of the move reflects a sensitivity to tone and tact, a theme that surfaced prominently in student feedback collected before and after our pilot via surveys; a large portion of respondents  advised that an online commenter remain respectful, non judgmental, and kind when challenging another’s POV online.

While it is certainly heartening that students are careful to practice politeness when using the Challenge in online spaces like Out of Eden Learn, it is important that this isn’t overemphasized to the point where dialoguers feel like they can’t disagree for fear of being considered rude. To preempt this potential roadblock, we have crafted sentence starting prompts like “Although I appreciate your point of view, I see it differently. I think that…” and “Another way of looking at it is…” to equip learners with concrete language with which to respectfully—yet firmly—challenge one another’s viewpoints. Additionally, some educators provided in-class time for students to draft comments, get feedback, and revise them before posting on the platform – offering additional opportunities for reflection and feedback on tone.


The Name move asks students to explore and make connections between their POVs and their backgrounds, experiences, identities, or the places they live and/or have lived. This move was designed to prompt learners to critically (and perhaps meta-cognitively) think about where their opinions and perspectives are coming from and to unpack the various pieces of their identity that may be at play (in the realm of social science research methodology, this concept is referred to as positionality).

Some students use this move to point to important features of their family’s and/or their own experiences that shape their perspectives on—and emotions related to—particular issues.

For example, one student used the Name tool in her response to a  “two-voice” poem by another student in Oregon in which they juxtaposed quotes from President Trump with excerpts from immigrant stories

Hi jg00, I really liked your poem. It kind of hit home because my parents and most of my family are Mexican immigrants. I really liked how one of the voices in your post was the opinion or point of view of Trump and the other voice was an immigrant.  – Lisbon (New Mexico, US) commenting on  jg00’s “Migration in the Media” post

Lisbon traces her emotional response to jg00’s poem to an important aspect of her identity: being a second-generation immigrant.  A crucial component of Out of Eden Learn is that students are required to remain pseudonymous, not sharing any identifiable or traceable information (including personal names, specific locations, or photographs of themselves). Some students report that pseudonymity is a positive affordance of Out of Eden Learn—they can feel freer to be themselves with less fears of being judged or stereotyped. By requiring pseudonymity among Out of Eden Learn students, we hope that they can feel free to share any and all parts of their identities that they feel are important and would like to share with others, rather than others making assumptions about them based on their outward appearance or presentation.

In contrast to Lisbon’s example, other students used the Name move to indicate the limits of their understanding, calling out that they had not had relevant or direct experience with the topic at hand:

My own view on migration is that I think it is a very sad and sensitive topic to talk about. I personally can’t say anything about it because my family has never been forced to move out of our hometown. My thought on it is that, each and every person, should be given a second chance at their life. If that means they are going to flee their country, they shouldn’t be stopped and told they have no rights to do so. – adetemple, Utah, US

Quotes like this illustrate another exciting potential of the Name tool. Just as students can use the tool to unpack their positionality as a means to qualify their opinions, they can also use it to detect their own blind spots, think critically about subjectivity, and learn more from those with relevant lived experiences.

For other students, the Name tool functioned as way to share more idiosyncratic parts of their identities—things like personality traits, interests, and attitudes:

I am thinking of how you write about the separation of people/friend groups from the point of view of someone who never really fit into any of them. I think this separation of people is discouraging for people who are going to a new school or group. Seeing people who already have their “thing” sports, art, math etc. it can be hard trying to find where you fit in.  A question i have from this viewpoint is why is it hard for some groups of people mix with people from other groups? I think this border can also be beneficial if you have found a thing you love and want to find others that also like it. – Athens_0 (New Mexico, US) commenting on HockeyGal15’s “Everyday Borders” post

In this comment, Athens_0 expresses an opinion that is specific to her identity as a young person who “never really fit into” any social group. She goes on to ask HockeyGal15 questions that are from this particular perspective: “A question I have from this viewpoint is…” It is important for students to recognize, as Athens_0 has, that their identity, experiences, and backgrounds influence not only their understanding of an issue but the kinds of questions or wonders they have, too.

Taking a cue from Athens_0’s comment, our latest iteration of the updated Dialogue Toolkit includes a similarly structured commenting prompt to support student use of the Name tool: “I am thinking of [the topic] from the point of view of someone who… [name the particular identity/experience that is influencing your perspective on the topic].

Educators reported that students were initially confused about the definition and purpose of the Name tool and how it differed from offering a POV. Trying out the move helped to clarify its purpose and power, however. As one educator reported, asking two students to Name the sources of their conflicting perspectives on a public issue in an in-class discussion helped each student listen to one another with more respect.


The jury is out on whether students in our expanded dialogue tools pilot feel any more confident when it comes to expressing their points of view and challenging others’, or if they better understand the ways in which their points of view are shaped by their own positionality. However, since the project’s inception, many students have shared that a major strength  of Out of Eden Learn is the diversity of perspectives they encounter. These three new tools are scaffolds to support more nuanced (and, at times, more critical) dialogue around such perspectives. As OOEL student Hockeygal15 commented on a peer’s culminating Collecting Our Thoughts on Migration post:

“…I think it is awesome how you included how important it is to connect with people from around the world because in my opinion, it was the best thing … that we could learn and hear each other’s thoughts and ideas, and whether to agree or disagree.

As you support your students in using our new dialogue tools, we hope you’ll draw inspiration from the examples shared here. Additionally, we have developed a resource, OOEL Dialogue Tools in Action, containing further examples of these new moves—and all nine of our Dialogue Toolkit moves.

 

Elevating Youth Voice: the Power of Participatory Design
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Every summer for the past 23 years, Project Zero has hosted an annual institute on teaching and learning known as the Project Zero Classroom at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The institute is a convening of educators, administrators, and professionals from the non-profit and technology sectors from around the world. Throughout the week, participants attend a series of plenaries, study groups, and interactive courses, or sessions geared at exploring and trying out Project Zero ideas as well as other innovative pedagogical practices shared by members of the Project Zero community.

Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) educator Natalie Belli has regularly co-facilitated the Out of Eden Learn interactive course at Project Zero Classroom with members of the OOEL team. Natalie teaches at a public elementary school in Marblehead, Massachusetts. For three years, Natalie’s students participated in the course by sharing their work and engaging in dialogue with institute participants. In an effort to make this collaboration between researchers, educators and students more participatory, we tried something different this year. Two of Natalie’s rising 6th-grade students, Tatum Amberik and Finn Bergquist, co-designed and co-facilitated the 2.5-hour interactive course, drawing from their experiences as participants in Out of Eden Learn. Tatum and Finn led the majority of the course, with support from OOEL research assistant Susie Blair, Natalie and me.

Facilitation team

The OOEL facilitation team in front of the Project Zero project wall (left to right): Susie Blair, Sarah Sheya, Finn Bergquist, Tatum Amberik, Natalie Belli. The OOEL interactive course was offered two times during the week of Project Zero Classroom.

The most common uses of the term “participatory design,” also known as co-design, stem from the fields of IT, product design, and urban planning, which focus on the idea of “customer co-creation” (Trischler et al., 2018). However, the concept of participatory design has become common vernacular in a number of arenas in which there is an interplay of power, positionality, decision-making, and the voices of various stakeholders. There have even been exploratory studies involving learners in co-designing instruction (Konings et al., 2010). Some readers may notice connections between participatory instructional design and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), a method of research that has developed over the past 10-15 years and is centered specifically around empowering young people to lead research projects within their communities, alongside practitioners and researchers, often in order to investigate community issues and propose and enact solutions (Caraballo et al. 2017).

At Out of Eden Learn, we believe it makes complete sense to involve students in the design of instructional sessions that focus on exploring and unpacking their own learning as well as the pedagogical practices that were most meaningful for them. After all, students make the best teachers. Our approach resonates with the notion of participatory creativity, which emphasizes that creativity is a distributed and participatory process (Clapp, 2016). We entered into the co-design and co-facilitation process of this year’s interactive course in that distributed and participatory spirit. We were intentional in honoring youth participation and themes common to participatory practices, such as elevating youth voice, holding space for youth agency, and, perhaps most importantly, simply listening to the young people involved in the design.

Participatory instructional design also provides opportunities for young people to authentically demonstrate their understanding and inquiry. Student co-facilitator, Finn, says it best: “During the mini course, I was able to be the teacher and the teachers were the students so they could see both sides of the learning environment.” She continues, “I also noticed how the participants seemed surprised when they found out what amazing work students can produce if teachers just let them color outside the lines a little, or even create their own design.”

This year the planning process was much different from previous years. Rather than assigning students their roles in facilitating, we began our initial planning meeting with a few open-ended questions, directed at the students: “What is the story you want to tell? What have you done on OOEL that is meaningful to you? What would you tell a friend who knew nothing about OOEL?”

Finn and Tatum dove right into brainstorming and reflecting on their experiences, then quickly began crafting ideas on how they might present their learning. The students seemed naturally empowered, which undoubtedly is a result of Natalie’s practice of cultivating student voice and agency in her classroom. Student co-facilitator Tatum explains, “It was a really different and cool experience to be teaching the teachers, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable talking to adults because we do so much debating in Mrs. Belli’s class. We don’t talk to her like she’s our teacher. We talk to her like she’s our friend.”

Tatum and Finn chose to center the course around a particular Out of Eden Learn footstep (or activity) that they had both enjoyed doing as participants in OOEL. The footstep is titled “Noticing Global Forces in the Everyday.” They began the session by introducing the term “global forces.” They then invited participants to brainstorm some common global forces, as well as connections between these forces. As participants offered up their ideas, Finn and Tatum drew a concept web on the whiteboard, making visible their students’ thoughts. They were also prepared to add in some examples along the way to keep the conversation going.


Finn reflects on this experience: “I found that when we were doing the mind map, people were just skimming the surface, not deepening their thoughts. I remembered back to when I first started Out of Eden Learn, this was like me just skimming the surface. After a little bit of nudging here or there, and by the end of the session, we were having more deep, more intricate discussions leading to questions, connections, wonders, and endless thoughts.”


After inviting participants to map connections between different global forces, Tatum and Finn then asked the class to go out into Harvard Square and try out the footstep. The instructions, adapted from the OOEL curriculum, were simple:

  • Take a slow walk of your own
  • Notice global forces along your walk; you can choose to photograph, sketch or film what you see
  • Along your walk, write down your ideas and questions

Tatum and Finn offered some strategies for slow looking and careful observation, inviting participants to “relish what they see” along their walks. The young facilitators also generated some reflection questions in preparation for the course, and when participants returned from taking walks, they were invited to debrief in small groups and consider the following questions:

  • What surprised you during your walk?
  • What were your strategies for noticing global forces?

Then when it came time to share out to the larger group, Finn and Tatum asked:

  • What did you learn from your partner/small group?
  • What did you do on your walk that was different from your partner/small group?

Reflecting on this segment of the session, Tatum says, “I loved talking to the mini course participants because of all the different perspectives they shared. On the Out of Eden Learn platform, we talk to other kids, so it was interesting to see how adults did one of the footsteps.”

The final student-led component of the course involved Finn and Tatum sharing some of their work from the Out of Eden Learn platform, which we printed and hung around the room. Tatum and Finn invited participants to use an analog version of OOEL’s online Dialogue Toolkit to comment on their work. Participants posted sticky-note comments to the work and engaged in informal conversations with the facilitators and each other.


Tatum reflects on this process: “At first I was worried that all of the participants would just say “great job” and “good work” when they commented on our student work, but their comments were actually very deep and interesting. We had different and thought-provoking conversations every time.”

The participatory approach to designing and facilitating the Out of Eden Learn interactive course laid the foundation for a facilitation ecosystem: adult co-facilitators created the conditions for student-driven and student-centered design simply by asking open-ended questions and stepping back to listen, while youth co-facilitators shared their own stories of learning, perspectives on pedagogical practices, and what was most meaningful to them throughout their learning experiences. Co-design and co-facilitation by students foreground and honor student voice, promote authentic demonstrations of Project Zero ideas, and provide powerful learning experiences for institute participants. Let’s do more of it.

An illustrated reflection on Out of Eden Learn
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In the summer of 2018, after graduating from the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I worked as a research assistant on the Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) project. I had the opportunity to look through a lot of student artwork and dialogue on the platform. The delight I felt at the way students respectfully engaged with OOEL’s curriculum and each other was difficult to put into words. In the spirit of how OOEL students are able to capture complex themes through photographs, drawings, and diagrams, I drew on my background as a visual artist to create a few illustrations that I feel embody Out of Eden Learn. This graphic blog post is inspired by There is No Right Way to Meditate: And Other Lessons by Yumi Sakugawa, a book that inspired me to “be a silent witness to my thoughts” and creatively reflect on my time at OOEL.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





 


Click here to access a downloadable PDF of these illustrations.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Out of Eden Learn pilots a new learning journey on Planetary Health
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A concept web created by a 5th grade student in Chicago, Illinois

Have you ever stopped to consider the connections between large scale changes in the environment and your own health and wellbeing? It’s a daunting challenge, but it’s exactly what a group of fifth and sixth graders did this year when they helped pilot test an Introduction to Planetary Health, a new Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) special learning journey.

You may not have heard the term ‘planetary health.’ We hadn’t, until a few months ago. It comes from the medical profession, and it is the name of an emerging field that brings together researchers across disciplines who are investigating the complex ways that human-influenced changes in ecosystems impact human health. Ecosystem changes are things like changing land use due to urbanization and deforestation, changing air and water quality due to pollution, and changes in the biodiversity of plants and animals due to human intervention. Human health impacts include impacts on nutrition, disease, and mental health. The Introduction to Planetary Health learning journey is designed to help young people explore the connections between health and environmental change by encouraging them to consider their everyday lives through a planetary health lens.

There is a story behind how the OOEL team chose this topic. We have known for a while that we wanted to create a learning journey related to environmental change. It is a topic of global significance, and OOEL students and teachers frequently express an interest in it. But it is a big topic, and we’ve been pondering what angle to approach it from. An idea came from Stephen Kahn. Stephen is the director of the Abundance Foundation, which is a major funder of Out of Eden Learn. In addition to leading the foundation, he is also a physician, and he has a longstanding interest in global health. He told us that in the field of global health, a new theme was getting a lot of attention—the theme of planetary health—and he suggested we look into the work of the Planetary Heath Alliance (PHA)—a consortium of universities and organizations that have come together to advance the field. Conveniently, the Planetary Health Alliance’s headquarters is currently located at the Harvard School of Public Health—a short walk from from OOEL’s home at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So we reached out.

The Planetary Health folks graciously agreed to meet with us, and we had a great conversation. We learned a lot about the good work they do, and they helped us see that although the topic of planetary health is indeed complex, its core themes could be made accessible to young people. Much of PHA’s work to date has focused on university education, but they have recently begun to collect and disseminate resources for younger students. The PHA group resonated with OOEL’s overarching learning goals—slowing down to observe the world closely, exchanging stories and perspectives, making connections between the local and the global—and immediately saw how they connected with the topic of planetary health. The group was also excited by OOEL’s capacity to reach students around the world, and by the idea of offering a planetary health learning journey on the OOEL platform. We readily agreed to collaborate. The Planetary Health Alliance kindly loaned us a researcher named Sarah Stone, and Sarah joined a team at OOEL to develop the curriculum. In addition to Sarah, the OOEL planetary health development team included Susie Blair, Sarah Sheya, Nimah Gobir, and me, Shari Tishman.

In keeping with other OOEL special learning journeys, the Introduction to Planetary Health consists of four activities, or ‘footsteps.’ It’s quite a challenge to develop a short learning journey on such a vast topic, and we began the work with many spirited discussions about how to focus the curriculum. Eventually, we settled on four learning goals. We decided that the curriculum should encourage students to:

  1. begin to take on a Planetary Health Lens, which means learning to notice and appreciate the complex interactions between environmental changes and human health—in their own neighborhoods, and in the wider world;
  2. appreciate how their everyday activities connect to broader natural systems;
  3. feel empowered to investigate topics related to planetary health on their own; and
  4. develop a sense of agency with regard to planetary health by identifying ways that their own actions and aspirations can make a difference.

Here is an overview of the curriculum.

The learning journey follows the standard format of all OOEL curricula. Each footstep has three parts: Get Inspired, in which students explore a variety of resources related to the footstep; a Do an Activity, in which students do an inquiry-based activity, and Interact with Your Walking Partners, in which students post their work on the OOEL online platform and comment on work posted by other students in their walking party.

As the curriculum overview suggests, the learning journey is designed to be introductory and exploratory rather than comprehensive and information-heavy. The footsteps are inquiry-based: they encourage students to find things out for themselves, make their own connections, and pursue their own interests. But even with this inquiry orientation, students still need some background knowledge, and the curriculum offers several resources. For instance, there is a student-friendly overview of the topic of Planetary Health developed in collaboration with our Planetary Health Alliance colleagues. There are video instructions for each step that provide examples of student work and tips for how to complete the activity. There are links to inspirational videos, such as this video by the spoken word artist Prince Ea, and this video about the environmental dangers of microfibers. And naturally, there are resources from Paul Salopek, the journalist whose work gives the Out of Eden Learn project its name and inspiration. Paul has a deep interest in the connections between global forces and individual lives—in a sense, it’s the rationale for his Out of Eden walk across the world—and he often writes on themes that connect directly to planetary health, as in his dispatch about the effect of environmental change on the animals of Central Asia, and local efforts to change things.

To pilot test the curriculum, we assembled a walking party of five 5th and 6th grade classrooms from diverse geographical locations. Our students and teachers hailed from Chennai, India; Chicago, Illinois; Danville, California; Kamuela, Hawaii; and Marblehead, Massachusetts. All of the teachers, and most of the students, had previously participated in Out of Eden Learn. We implemented the pilot between March and May of 2018, and we collected information about how things were going from three sources: We looked at the work students posted online, we analyzed the written surveys students took at the beginning and end of the learning journey, and we had regular check-ins by phone with the teachers.

We were very excited to pilot the learning journey, but we also had some worries: Would students be so daunted by the complexity of the topic that they would find the activities inaccessible and frustrating? Would students be able to do the activities in a meaningful way, without much background knowledge about the science of planetary health? Would students feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of environmental problems that they’d wind up feeling hopeless about making a difference instead of feeling inspired to make change?

These are real concerns, and students certainly brushed up against them. For example, in response to a survey question about what was challenging about the learning journey, one student wrote: [It is challenging] because planetary health comes in so many forms that it’s hard to keep track of them! Another wrote: Sometimes it’s hard to understand what going on when there is a lot coming at you about the world that you didn’t know before. Yet another student said: What is hard about [planetary health] is that all the stuff we are researching is because of US!!! And that makes me feel bad, but I am going to do what I can to help!!!! These are entirely reasonable reactions to the magnitude of the topic. But we were thrilled to discover that students rose to these challenges beautifully, and even seemed energized by them. Most students said they enjoyed the learning journey, and the work they posted on the platform was overwhelmingly strong. To be sure, there was a lot of variation across students’ posts. But almost all of the student work fell well within the range we were hoping for, and we were especially pleased to see that students with diverse abilities, interests, and background knowledge were all able to participate in meaningful ways.

The big questions that linger with us have to do with students’ sense of agency. Will students feel empowered to make changes in their everyday lives that relate to planetary health? Even more ambitiously, will they continue to look through a planetary health lens going forward, and continue to look for opportunities to affect the planet in positive ways? We can’t see into the future, so it’s impossible for us to answer these questions now. But students’ comments on the follow-up survey make us hopeful. One student wrote: I enjoyed documenting some choices I made, and what I could do about it. It made me feel as if the little things I do to help matter. Another student reported: I feel personally connected to the topic of planetary health because I feel as if whatever I do will make a difference to the environment. I also feel like I know more about what is good for the environment, and what’s not good for it. Yet another student, giving voice to an experience many students seem to have had, put it like this:

In my life now, as a result of participating in this learning journey, I am paying more close attention to health problems around the globe. Before this journey, if I saw an example of an unhealthy environment on the news or online, I would say, “That doesn’t concern me. That place is on the other side of the world. It won’t affect me.” Now I take an interest in problems around the world and brainstorm what I can do about them.

We are currently in the process of revising the curriculum, mainly by adding adding resources and tweaking instructions, and there are several additions we hope to make. Assuming our work goes well this summer, we plan to officially launch An Introduction to Planetary Health along with the other OOEL learning journeys this fall. It will be available to grades 4-12. We’ll also launch it again in the spring.

If you decide to give it a try, we’d love to hear about your experience! 

Out of Eden Learn extends a special thank you to all of the students and educators who participated in the initial pilot of Introduction to Planetary Health. 

Enriching user experience and online interactions: Supporting sustained and varied dialogue on Out of Eden Learn
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The Out of Eden Learn platform is a unique online space that supports young people to interact, share stories and be their authentic selves in a safe environment. It is different from other social media in many ways. Most notably, participants create pseudonyms and at no point share their real names or pictures of themselves. Young people report that on Out of Eden Learn, they don’t feel the same judgment and pressures they encounter in other online spaces. Participants are also offered specific tools to support respectful and meaningful dialogue across the platform.

As part of our iterative design and research process, we periodically re-examine our platform, curricula, and community norms to see how they might be enhanced to advance our evolving project goals. Recently, we worked with Yeti, the group that has taken over supporting the Out of Eden Learn platform, to see how we might improve our platform features and functionalities. In this blog post we are excited to share several major changes we have made, and the thinking that led to them.

The platform changes were motivated by our interest in supporting students to enrich their interactions in two key ways. First, we hoped to see students encounter a wider range of posts – looking beyond the most recent posts at the top of their activity feed. We also hoped to see them engage in more sustained dialogue with students from other classrooms. With these two key goals in mind, we designed and implemented the following new features:

Bookmarking
Participants are now able to “bookmark” specific posts. This function allows students and educators to save posts, easily revisit them, “follow” certain users and more easily keep track of their ongoing conversations with other participants. Our hope is that with the ability to seamlessly find and revisit specific posts, this feature will support young people to continue conversations with one another.

Search function
Participants can now search for specific user names/keywords among all of the posts for a particular activity. This function will support users to “follow” one another while also providing opportunities for young people to uncover themes and connections across all of the posts. The search function will also encourage participants to search for posts that focus on themes or topics of particular interest to them.

Sort function
The new sort function allows participants to easily encounter a variety of posts without scanning through all of the posts. Users can sort posts by location (A-Z and Z-A), by most recent post first, by oldest post first, and by random sorting. This function will automatically sort the posts in a random order, offering students the opportunity to engage with and access posts they may not have otherwise seen, hopefully leading to increased and more varied interactions.

Continuous scroll
This function mimics the continuous scroll feature of popular social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. Whereas before, Out of Eden Learn participants would have to click through multiple pages of posts, they now can simply scroll through all of the posts for a particular activity. This will make the experience of browsing through posts smoother and more efficient.

To get an inside look of how these new features work on the Out of Eden Learn platform, we invite you to watch this short video.

We hope that students and educators alike will find their interactions on Out of Eden Learn enriched by these small but important design changes. As always, we are excited to follow their journeys.

Research to design and back again Part 2: Iterating on our Stories of Human Migration curriculum
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This piece stems from research carried out by Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Emi Kane, and Sarah Sheya, with contributions from the rest of the Out of Eden Learn team.

In a recent post we outlined how we have developed a framework for engaging young people around the topic of human migration, as informed by our design-based research. In this post we focus, in turn, on the ways in which the development of the framework has informed and is informing changes to our Stories of Human Migration curriculum. To remind readers, our research agenda has involved looking closely at student work, comments, and reflections – as well as interviews with educators – to try to understand the possibilities and limitations of peer-to-peer programs like Out of Eden Learn for fostering nuanced understanding and engagement regarding the topic of human migration.

As we’ve developed our framework, we have naturally looked at the big picture of what students are doing and saying on our platform to determine what is working well and where there is room for improvement in terms of our own curriculum design. We ask: How could we help as many students as possible to develop the most sophisticated or thoughtful kinds of work that we’ve encountered during our analysis? In this post we outline several specific changes we have made or are making to our curriculum to promote the three major dimensions of our framework – curiosity and engagement, nuanced understanding, and critical awareness – as well as to mitigate “the three O’s” of overgeneralizations, overconfidence, and othering.

First, to what extent does the Stories of Human Migration curriculum embody the pedagogic framework we developed? In broad brushstrokes we found that the majority of students exhibited curiosity and engagement on our platform. Consistent with our findings since the inception of Out of Eden Learn, most students reported enjoying connecting with peers and finding out about their lives and perspectives. We saw this enthusiasm playing out in their comments and interactions: many students readily made connections to one another’s posts and made affirming or validating comments in response to what they read. Many students also indicated that they felt more actively engaged in the topic of human migration after completing the curriculum. For example, 84 students responded as follows to this private reflection question:

Are you doing anything differently now as a result of participating in this learning journey? Differences could include the ways in which you interpret news media, select which news media to look at, interact with people around you, interact on social media, talk about migration, think about the world, or something else. Please explain in detail.

Following migration and what is going on in the world more closely 36*
Reading the news media’s portrayal of migration and other news stories more critically and/or attentively 23
Behaving more considerately or respectfully towards migrants and/or feeling more invested in their wellbeing 17
Discussing the topic of human migration with family and friends, perhaps to alert them to the issue 9
Asking people more questions to find out more about their individual migration stories 6
Planning to get involved with organizations that help refugees 3
No change (4 saying because they were engaged and/or actively involved already) 18

*Some students mentioned more than one effect.

While we would like as many students as possible to have a learning experience that leaves them motivated to learn more about or engage with the topic of migration, we would not want to be overly prescriptive in this regard or expect all students to respond to our curriculum in the same way. Overall, while we felt that we were fulfilling this aspect of the pedagogic framework relatively well, we saw opportunities to facilitate more sustained engagement among students on the actual platform: promising conversations had a tendency to taper off and some rich posts were left without comments.

We found it more difficult to discern the extent to which we were promoting nuanced understanding of migration. We certainly saw examples of rich stories that interwove individual narratives with bigger structural forces and/or which captured the complexity of individual migration experiences. And some students in their reflections or posts commented in thoughtful ways on similarities or differences they were noticing across different migration experiences. But we felt that we had not designed the learning experience such that students were likely to distill or reflect on important substantive understandings about migration they might be developing, at least not in visible ways.

Likewise, with critical awareness. One of the key strengths of the Out of Eden Learn model is that students are invited to slow down to consider the issue of human migration in new ways at the same time that other young people – many of whom they would not ordinarily encounter – are doing likewise. The platform structure provides them with an opportunity to develop an understanding of the nuance and complexity of the topic by taking into account the range of stories and perspectives that have been shared; situate their own observations and insights relative to those of other people; and perhaps gain insights into how their own contexts and lived experiences help shape their own perspectives on the topic. We certainly saw encouraging and even exciting indicators that such understandings were being developed but we felt that too much was being left to students’ own initiative. We did see some students grappling in critical ways with media representations of migration and migrants during the activity that invited them to do just that (Footstep 3); however, we felt that there was room to make the instructions more supportive of critical thinking.

Here are some concrete changes we have made:

Promoting reflection

First, we decided to put reflection front and center of the concluding activity of the curriculum rather than rely on individual post-curriculum surveys that we in any case knew not all students would complete. Indeed, the previous version of our concluding activity – which asked students to create a piece of media that could be helpful to migrants seeking to navigate their communities – had proved somewhat problematic. Students worked with unspoken assumptions about the needs of migrants to whom they were pitching their media: many students in the US assumed poverty (hence focusing on food banks and volunteer organizations offering resources) while students in Singapore, for example, assumed affluence (hence referencing to touristic sites and expensive restaurants). The activity was effectively encouraging overgeneralizations, overconfidence, and othering – the three O’s we are now seeking to avoid. Here are the reflection activity instructions:

This footstep is an opportunity to reflect on your learning experience and share your learning with your walking partners.

We invite you to create something that demonstrates what you’ve learned from this learning journey so far. What would you most like to share with your walking partners? Consider how your ideas about migration have changed or developed from reading the resources, doing the activities, and/or interacting with other students.

We encourage you to share your learning in creative ways, ideally in a way that combines text and images. Formats to consider: a slideshow of images or a collage; an illustration, painting or cartoon; a blog post or short essay; a piece of spoken-word or written poetry; a short video.

You might want to consider sharing:

  • New things you learned about migration
  • Similarities and differences across migration stories, and why those similarities and differences exist
  • Things you learned about your own perspective or your own identity
  • Things you learned about how the media helps shape your own and other people’s perspectives
  • Things you are doing differently or would like to do differently
  • Things you’d like to learn more about

The suggested prompts nudge students towards reflecting on and developing aspects of the nuanced understanding and critical awareness dimensions of our framework. Meanwhile, ‘things you’d like to learn more about’ is designed to help students consider what they don’t yet know in a bid to mitigate overconfidence and sow the seeds for future engagement. While most students have opted to share written reflections rather than use more creative formats, this change in the curriculum has helped students to articulate what they’ve learned and enabled them to compare their takeaways and insights.

Promoting critical engagement with news media

The third activity or “footstep” of our curriculum asks students to interrogate and compare two media portrayals of migration or migrants. We have honed the instructions to foster critical awareness, in ways that we hope will help students to actively interrogate all kinds of media.

Consider the following questions as you compare the two reports:

  • What is the date of publication? Has this report been written or produced in response to a particular event related to migration and if so, what?
  • Who is likely to be the intended audience?
  • What do you think the attitude of the author is towards modern day migration and/or migrants? Pay careful attention to the author’s word choices.
  • What is the headline or title of the report and why do you think that is?
  • If there is an image, look closely at it. Why do you think it was chosen?
  • Whose voices are represented and whose are missing? What’s been left out and why do you think that is?
  • What questions or wonders do you have?

Promoting engagement and dialogue

We are currently piloting a new version of our dialogue toolkit with a learning group following the Stories of Human Migration curriculum. The goal is to foster more critical dialogue among young people and to help them name the particular perspectives they are bringing to the topic. Look out for a future blog post on the findings from this pilot, which for the moment are highly encouraging. We also just rolled out design changes to our platform in order to facilitate and sustain student engagement on the platform and with one another. For instance, students can now bookmark and retrieve posts they find interesting, search for the work of particular students, and enjoy a continuous scroll functionality when they browse through posts. More on that is coming soon to this blog too.

The process of iterating our curriculum is far from over. Here are some puzzles we are currently grappling with. How do we find the appropriate balance between inviting young people to engage in authentic story telling and encouraging them to develop specific understandings about migration? Should we explicitly ask students to consider the complexity and diversity of human migration experiences upfront in the activity instructions rather than leaving such insights to emerge through the structure of the platform? To what degree should explicit language be embedded in the instructions so that students are mindful of avoiding making overgeneralizations, sounding overconfident in their assertions, and/or making statements that risk othering?

I will close this post by emphasizing that while it’s incumbent on the Out of Eden Learn team to develop the most thoughtful and empowering curriculum design that we can, at the end of the day the success or otherwise of our program rests with dedicated educators on the ground. They are the ones who interpret, adapt, and bring to life the curriculum. We have been humbled – and continue to be so – by the expertise, dedication, and sheer brilliance of many of the educators with whom we work. Design-based research is about working with practitioners rather than working in isolation in our university offices. That is what helps us to do research that, we hope, is relevant to educators and yields what our home institution likes to call Usable Knowledge: implementable ideas and resources that can help change the way we are preparing young people for the complex and dynamic world in which we live.

Breaking Down Barriers through Engaging Exchanges
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Mark Urwick is the Instructional Coach at RJ Frank Academy of Marine Science and Engineering in Oxnard, California.  Last year he supported 11 classrooms that were participating in Out of Eden Learn.

Getting Started

In the early 1990s I started my teaching career in Japan at a small English conversation school about two hours north of Tokyo.  The chance to spend three years living in a totally foreign culture instilled a love of travel and interacting with different environments.  This experience also left me with a desire to nurture student curiosity about the world.  When I discovered Out of Eden Learn at Project Zero Classroom I was hooked.  I remember thinking, “Someone built an entire platform that provides structure to support students from my school to interact with students around the world and it is all free?! Not only that but they are collaborating with an awarding winning journalist who is walking across the world and providing content from some of the countries and people we know the least about.  SIGN ME UP!”

As an Instructional Coach I have the opportunity to attend many trainings and work to implement and support programs that can help our students become career and college ready.  We are close to 90% Latino and many of our students come from homes where hard-working parents put in long hours supporting our thriving agricultural industry on the Oxnard plains.  Out of Eden Learn provides a platform for students I worked with to engage with primary source content and share observations about this content with students from around the world.

I was able to arrange my schedule so I could visit each class once a week helping to team-teach a new footstep or following up on having students post at least two comments and making sure everything was uploaded. This quickly became the most rewarding part of my job with students constantly reminding me, “Mr. Urwick don’t forget you are coming into 4th period today!”  I loved being able to team-teach the lessons with the classroom teacher and provide the extra support our English learners need to keep up with the pacing of the program.

Breaking Down Barriers

Many of the students I work with do not have the opportunity to interact with young people beyond their neighborhood. They have often have extended family nearby so there is not much incentive for day trips to explore the surrounding area.  I am always amazed when I ask how many students have seen snow and only a few hands go up. When I hear educators comment about the lack of “funds of knowledge” of these students, I get frustrated because it is not a lack – it is just different.  They may not have my funds of knowledge, but these students are eager to share their rich, daily experiences with other students far and wide.

English language learners, though challenged, felt confident responding and interacting on Out of Eden Learn.  Although the content was challenging and our school has high numbers of English learners and students reading below grade level, the students felt very comfortable commenting on posts from more affluent private school students.  Middle school students understand “the world is flat” and, yes, some of these students were posting photos from wealthy gated communities with private lakes, but issues of class never came up.  We were all members of a walking group eager to engage with new found friends from around the country and around the world.  Students were much more interested in sharing hobbies and commenting on daily routines that would come up through photos and drawings rather than talking about what their parents did for a living.

Many of the countries in our walking group, such as Spain or Mexico, were familiar with photos of neighborhoods and climates much like our own in Southern California.  For us, one of the most foreign members of our walking group was a school from Vermont, with photos of large trees, deep snow and hobbies that revolved around the seasons.  Italy, Greece, and even South Asia gave us context for daily routines we understood…. but 10 feet of snow?!  My students had all sorts of questions and a focus on higher level questioning brought out all sorts of discussion.  The Out of Eden Learn platform provided the scaffolding to really push my students to go beyond the who, what and where to ask open-ended questions and probe the daily routines and perspectives of a New Englander.  One of the highlights of my day was to pull up the comments students were posting on each other’s assignments and then give a shout out the next day to students that were using higher level questioning and the language structures supported by the Out of Eden Learn team.

I am constantlly asking my students “What makes you say that?” when they comment about Paul’s posts, the curriculum on the platform, or the the interaction between walking groups members.  My hope is that students break down preconceived notions about people around the world and get to know each other on an individual level.  When someone draws a Mosque or Temple in their neighborhood map, it becomes a point of interest, not a list of stereotypes.  Ron Ritchhart talks about providing time, opportunities, interactions, environment and language that build the culture of thinking, and Out of Eden Learn is the one place I have found that ties all these aspects together.


Kimberly Patton shared photos and lessons she used last year which already has me thinking of how to improve our role out of Out Of Eden Learn at my school this year. Pictured here is her Out of Eden Wall.

Continuing the Journey

Out of Eden Learn is helping to break down barriers for students who don’t have opportunities to travel far beyond their own communities. And as we are just beginning the school year, I am excited to once again support Out of Eden Learn in a number of classrooms as well as bring together an Out of Eden Learn network from the Oxnard School District. This has me excited about the posibilites to expand what I learned last year and explore how others are using this unique and powerful platform with students from all around our increasingly interconnected world.

 

 

Just “Hacking Around”: Bringing New Meaning to a Storied Word
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By Guest Author Jane Jessep, an instructional coach for the Agency by Design online course, Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom

It was a cold, snowy day late in February of 1965. A small group of high school senior boys and girls, who had been close friends for several years gathered at one of their homes during winter break. Before leaving their homes, each of the teenagers’ mothers asked where they were going, and each responded, “Oh, we’re just going over to Mike’s and we’re gonna hack around for a few hours.” And so it went for most of the vacation, a motley crew of teenagers gathering each day to do some serious hacking around. The memory is still vivid.

A page from author Jane Jessep's 1965 year book, featuring images of her and her friends "hacking around."

A page from author Jane Jessep’s 1965 year book, featuring images of she and her friends “hacking around.”

I’ve been thinking about this word “hack” or “hacking” quite a bit lately. The word has been in the news a great deal over the last few years, and the news hasn’t been very positive. The mega entertainment company Sony’s emails were hacked and publicly shared a few years ago, much to the embarrassment of various media celebrities. The hacking of the popular budget store Target resulted in the purloining of data from millions of credit card holders. Most recently the national election of the United States was hacked by a foreign power, raising serious concerns about our government’s vulnerabilities to the nefarious purposes of our adversaries. These stories and others like them are chilling, so it is easy to see why many people might have a negatively charged understanding of this word.

According to the Random House dictionary, the word “hack” has been in use since around 1200. It has roots in Middle English, Danish, and German. Its meaning, “to cut to pieces” or “cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion.” It has also been used to mean someone who is a drudge with little style or panache, or a mercenary. A hacking cough is a painful and dry cough. The term “to hack around” seems to have emerged in the 1950s, meaning to pass the time idly, to indulge in idle talk. Some have opined it comes from the golfing world. It was used widely by teens throughout the 50s and 60s.

“Hack” began to appear in yet another context in the 1950s: “mischief pulled off under a cloak of secrecy.” As described in a recent Wired magazine article, there is a note in the minutes of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, from 1955, which says; “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system to turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.” From this basically benign activity, by would be engineers in the 1950s, we move to the 1960s, during which time hacking began to acquire multiple connotations. To “hack” meant not only working on a system, but now implied as well, exploring systems and expanding their possibilities. And ominously, even in the earliest days of computer culture, people were aware that malicious intent was a dark possibility. Thus the concept arose of “white hat hackers,” for example, Apple tech creators of apps and new devices, versus “black hat hackers,” invaders of data systems, and email systems, meant to embarrass, steal from, or manipulate victims or even destabilize governments.

The author, Jane Jessep, today--reflecting on the meaning of the word "hack."

The author, Jane Jessep, today–reflecting on the meaning of the word “hack.”

However, I’ve been thinking about the word “hack” not because of its constant appearance in the news. I have the great fortune to work as a coach in the online course designed by Agency by Design researchers, Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom. The book Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape their Worlds is the central text for this course. And the definition for “maker-empowerment” within that text triggered my long ago memory and invited me to add additional texture to my understanding of hacking.

Maker empowerment: A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking. (p. 98)

In this context, hacking is a positive, improvisational, creative, agency developing action. Makers and hackers can be, but are not necessarily merely, technically gifted object makers, they also have the disposition to be observant explorers and participants in their communities, resourceful and persistent. They are not only concerned with hacking computer related apps or programs, but also might consider school culture systems or political systems possible foci of exploration, with the intention to improve them, with the intent to make their world a better place. Drawing on a popular phrase from the world of Design Thinking, the authors of Maker-Centered Learning state that makers (sometimes known as hackers) have a “bias towards action…” (p. 99)

This brings me back to my time in 1965, when my friends and I had so many delightful moments of “hacking around.” These were moments of structure-less time, and no parental involvement. The hours were for us to shape as we would, creatively, with clever banter, laughter, music sharing, and a great deal of meaning making. We had hacked, while hacking around, our parents’ social norms and mores and were in the earliest, most innocent moments of creating new ones. We were co-creating new understandings of our world and ourselves as future shapers of that world.

As I continue to work with the many thoughtful educators and administrators who participate in the Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom online course, I wonder how others make sense of or respond to the words “hack,” “hacker,” and “hacking” when they hear it? I would be very curious to know how those of you reading this post make meaning of these words—and what memories or new possibilities these words trigger for you.

Research to design and back again Part 1: Iterating on our pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration
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This piece stems from research carried out by Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Emi Kane, and Sarah Sheya, with contributions from the rest of the Out of Eden Learn team. All graphics are by Sarah Sheya.

As we explained in a recent blog post, the research agenda of Out of Eden Learn is intimately connected to the real-world implementation of our program. We are doing design-based research in which  “the central goals of designing learning environments and developing theories or ‘prototheories’ of learning are intertwined.” (1) Part of this work consists of systematically analyzing data related to the project–such as student work, comments, and survey responses, and student and teacher interviews–to discern emergent patterns and themes that can inform both theory and practice.

One of our research strands involves investigating the opportunities and challenges associated with engaging young people online around the topic of human migration. This blog post, the first in a series of two, revisits the emergent, empirically-grounded pedagogic framework for changing the conversation around migration that we previously shared. The intent is to share some details of our ongoing research and design process and to present and explain a slightly revised version of our framework. A follow-up piece will describe changes we made to the Stories of Human Migration curriculum in light of our research and development of the framework.

First, here is a brief description of our research process. We used spreadsheets and coding software to analyze our data, which came from three principal sources, all collected in the fall of 2016/spring of 2017:

  •     Student work and comments. We looked at student work from two walking parties (online learning groups) involving 140 students from seven different countries, including five different US states. Their learning contexts included history, social studies, journalism, photography, and English language classes. We exported all pieces of student work and associated student comments from our platform.
  •     Student survey responses. 65 students completed an optional online survey about their experiences with the Stories of Human Migration learning journey shortly after completing the curriculum.  Students were asked to reflect, for example, on what they had learned, appreciated, or found challenging about the learning journey.
  •     Educator interviews. We conducted video chat interviews with 14 educators who had experience using the curriculum in a range of subject areas and with varied student populations. We looked for signs of resonance with student perspectives, as well as important information regarding how educators were interpreting and implementing the curriculum within their different teaching contexts.

The three team members working on this strand of research (Emi Kane, Sarah Sheya, and myself) then engaged in “open-coding” of the student data–that is, we took careful note of what we saw students doing (e.g., making personal connections to other people’s migration stories or critically analyzing news articles) and saying (e.g., stating that they had learned the importance of trying to take on other people’s perspectives or that they now felt motivated to follow migration in the news more carefully). What we noticed in the data was certainly informed by our aspirations for the curriculum; however, we very much wanted to learn from the students about the possibilities of the space rather than merely assess the extent to which they did or said things we already hoped for or anticipated.

This initial analysis generated a wide range of ideas. In fact, we started by identifying 44 different themes, which we then consolidated and revised into a much leaner model or framework: the colorful kaleidoscope-inspired graphic we presented on this blog last September. This diagram was organized around three core dimensions related to engaging young people around the topic of human migration: respectful curiosity and engagement, nuanced understanding, and critical awareness including self-awareness.

We have since revisited the student work, survey responses, and educator interviews to ensure the robustness of the framework and its ‘fit’ with our data. As part of that process, the three of us independently analyzed the same 40 pieces of student work to make sure we were being consistent in terms of how we were interpreting the data and applying the framework. For the most part, the original framework feels like a solid fit. However, we have made some small adjustments, as reflected in the updated visual below:

migration visual_March2018_text

You can download a high resolution printable version of the framework here.

Below is a summary of the changes we have made.

In the NUANCED UNDERSTANDING cluster, we have tweaked the three components to differentiate more carefully among the kinds of understandings we have seen students start to develop, but which could collectively be summed up as “migration is complicated and diverse”.

Understanding 1

This first triangle is intended to represent a broad range of understandings related to the kinds of push/pull factors involved in human migration. We found that the richest student work took account of individual human agency and bigger forces at play when explaining particular migration stories. Our previous wording focused more on “the interplay” of structural forces and individual stories: while students will ideally consider how the individual and the structural interact, this focus felt rather specific for the general orienting purposes of this framework.

Understanding 2The second triangle points to the wide diversity of migration experiences across humanity, as shaped by different historical, geographic, and political contexts. Our analysis suggests that this aspect of understanding is enhanced when peers from different contexts share stories with one another: students commented in the surveys, for instance, that they had learned from reading different posts that migration experiences can be extremely varied. At the same time, students may notice unexpected resonances across migration stories, especially given that migration is a fundamental and ongoing aspect of the story of our human species.

Understanding 3

The third triangle points to the complexity of how individuals experience migration. Individual migration stories can involve a dynamic blend, for example, of loss and gain, fear and hope, and connection to the old as well as adaptation to the new. We removed the word ‘diversity’ from this triangle in an attempt to distinguish between difference or commonality and complexity in the triangles.

 

 

Awareness 1(1)

The CRITICAL AWARENESS cluster remains largely unchanged.

The aspect of critical awareness captured in this triangle carries over from the initial diagram given the role of news media and other content in shaping contemporary perceptions of migration, at times in polarizing or simplistic ways.

Awareness 2

Perspective-taking also holds up as a crucial aspect of critical awareness. However, we have shifted our wording to emphasize the importance of students valuing opportunities to try to take on and understand other people’s perspectives, while also being aware that perspective-taking is not a simple task. People’s perspectives are shaped by a complex and shifting combination of factors including personal background, life experiences, social contexts, and exposure to different kinds of narratives and perspectives.

Awareness 3The content of the third triangle, meanwhile, has been conceptually expanded. The new wording is intended to capture students’ ability and willingness to reflect on their own relationship to and understanding of migration, and how their relationship and thinking may be evolving or developing over time, perhaps because of an experience such as Out of Eden Learn. They recognize that their own perceptions of migration are at least in part shaped by their own identities, backgrounds, and life experiences.

For the final cluster, CURIOSITY AND ENGAGEMENT, we have taken the word “respectful” out of the heading –not because we no longer value it but because there was a risk of us privileging this quality over other important qualities such as bravery or authenticity, which similarly feature in the Out of Eden Learn Community Guidelines.  In addition, we have made some adjustments to the components in the cluster so that they capture the bigger aspects of what students were doing and saying in our data, rather than more specific actions or indicators.

Curiosity 2This wording replaces two previous aspects:  “honors and connects to others” and “asks thoughtful questions; initiates discussion”. These two previous aspects certainly captured what we observed students doing in our data but we felt they were indicative of something more important. Our choice of the phrase “Responds with sensitivity” intends to convey being attuned and attentive to what others are saying, as well as responding thoughtfully and with respect. Importantly, it invokes the act of listening.

Curiosity 3(1)

This component is about more than making connections between one’s own life or family story and those of other people, though that is certainly important and to be encouraged. It is about feeling part of or included in the bigger and unfolding story of human migration, which in one way or another ultimately implicates us all.

Curiosity 1(1)

 

This final aspect, which points to future-looking shifts in motivation or engagement, remains the same. We define “engagement” broadly to include things such as keeping abreast of current news stories involving migration, making an effort to be thoughtful and supportive of newcomers, or advocating and/or volunteering for organizations that work with or are run by refugee communities.

Meanwhile, the core design principles of Out of Eden Learn, which we believe help to foster these dimensions of learning, continue to be threaded through the center of the diagram: slowing down, sharing stories, making connections.

Finally, it is worth noting that while the framework is written in terms of positives, our analysis also picked up on what could be deemed counter-examples for each of the categories. However, given the challenge of determining student intent and/or assessing what was perhaps missing from their posts, as researchers we often found it hard to agree as to whether individual pieces were somehow deficient or problematic. Given that the goal of this framework is to orient and provide ideas to educators as they seek to engage young people around the topic of migration, we think it is useful to summarize a few potential pitfalls to look for when using this guide. Here, we noticed great synchronicity with another Out of Eden Learn research strand on young people’s thinking about culture(s): we are therefore sharing language adapted from a recent blog post on that topic, regarding the “Three O’s”:

OVER-GENERALIZATIONS. Students can at times default to single stories, make sweeping or vague statements about their own or other people’s migration stories, or gloss over similarities and/or differences among different types of migration and different individual experiences.

OVERCONFIDENCE. Relatedly, students can lack appropriate humility about their own knowledge, over-assert themselves as representatives of particular migration stories, or assume their own experiences and/or perspectives as the default. Some students leave Out of Eden Learn appearing to overstate how much they now know about migration and how well they understand or can take on the perspective of people who have had different experiences to their own.

OTHERING. We have found that some students tend to romanticize or exotify other people’s lives or circumstances, or make them an object of pity in uncritical and even disrespectful ways–presumably unintentionally. We have found this to be particularly true when students who feel settled in one place talk about people who are forced to migrate primarily because of push factors such as war, violence, or economic hardship. Finding the balance between thoughtful compassion and inappropriate pity is not easy, but paying close attention to context, tone, and language can help.

It is important that we offer young people opportunities to engage in meaningful and thoughtful ways around the topic of human migration. As this post demonstrates, we are still learning about how to facilitate such opportunities, and anticipate our work involving further iterative loops of research to design and back again. Part 2 of this series will explain some tweaks we have made to our own curriculum and further changes in the works as we attempt to promote the capacities outlined in our kaleidoscope diagram and to circumnavigate the “Three O’s.”

(1) The Design-Based Research Collective (2002).  Design-Based Research: An Emerging Paradigm for Educational Inquiry. Educational Researcher 32 (1) pp. 5-8.

 

 

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