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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.

 

 

How Can Understanding What We Value as Educators Shape What We Assess in Our Classrooms?
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By Guest Authors Jeff Evancho and Peter Wardrip

What do we want our learners to be like when they leave our classrooms at the end of the year? What does authentic learning look like in a maker-centered classroom? Your response to these questions might be an indicator of what type of learning you value as a teacher. Inspired by Carlina Rinaldi and her writing on the relationship between documentation and assessment, we used these questions to identify what types of learning or dispositions teachers value most within their contexts. Think of it as a lens for looking at learning. What we quickly realized is that the values educators bring to their work have implications connected to assessment.

What does it look like when students are engaging in that value? This question is similar to those that initiated the Agency by Design team’s second phase of work. These are also questions that the Maker Educator Learning Community in Pittsburgh has been wrangling with.

The Pittsburgh maker educator learning community is a diverse cohort of formal and informal maker minded educators, representing multiple content areas. We meet once per month for a full day workshop. Together we create opportunities to collaborate, design, develop understandings, and assess the “signs of learning” in a maker-centered learning context. We represent 18 organizations and 30 educators from around the greater Pittsburgh region.

The diversity of our group makes for a tricky space to find common ground for discussion and inquiry. Therefore, we decided to make our common focus connected to maker-centered learning. Learning is our highest priority. Though we also realized we needed to prioritize how we all talked about learning and as a result we decided to look at an old metaphor to help us assess our learning values.

Educators in the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community use different sized rocks to make their values visible.

Educators in the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community use different sized rocks to make their values visible.

Stephen Covey often talks about the relationship between the things we value in life and how we prioritize them. He uses the metaphor of a jar representing the capacity of our lives and various sized rocks representing the stuff in our lives. The big idea behind Covey’s metaphor is, if we fill our jars with the small rocks first we won’t have room in the jar for our largest values or big rocks. However, if we focus on the large rocks first the small rocks take care of themselves filling in the empty space between the large rocks. We believe that this concept is complementary to the process of assessment, so we created a riff off of Covey’s concept and asked our learning community to prioritize their rocks/values related to teaching and learning. We asked them to consider, as a teacher of math, art, or even science; name and notice all of the elements that define your instructional practice. These elements ranged from skill and content acquisition to less tangible concepts like curiosity and reasoning. Lastly, we asked our learning community to take their lists and prioritize them by importance, the most important became their large rocks and the least important their small rocks. We defined this activity as big rocks/little rocks.

Through this activity, we noticed an interesting aspect of what our 30 educators valued. Keep in mind that our educators represent all grade levels from pre-K to 12, content areas that stretch from science to art to mathematics to core elementary school teachers and even informal educators working in out-of-school contexts. When we categorized the teachers values and counted them up, we noticed that content-related values were the most frequently noted—with approximately 20 mentions. Reasoning was the second most listed value and it was mentioned almost half as much (see Graph A).

Graph A: Frequency of categories of values mentioned by our educators.

Graph A: Frequency of categories of values mentioned by our educators.

However, when we asked the educators to prioritize their values, we noticed different priorities. Taking the educators’ large values with a value of three, medium values as two, and small values as one, we looked to see which values were more considered to be larger, or more important, than others (see Graph B).

Graph B: Relative importance of the values mentioned by our educators.

Graph B: Relative importance of the values mentioned by our educators.

In Graph B, we can see that, on average, reasoning, creativity, and perception of self were the three most important values cited by our educators. Content, although being mentioned so frequently, was the third least important value. We interpreted this as indicating that while content may always be in the background of what our educators are teaching, the relative importance our educators ascribed to content was less than many of the other values they surfaced. It is worth noting, too, that while creativity and perception of self were two of the least frequently mentioned values, they were two of the most important values mentioned by our educators.

Understanding these values for our Maker Educator Learning Community is important for several reasons. First, identifying our values for learning is an important way for us to surface our priorities for the learning experiences we are designing. Second, by making the values explicit, we can begin to have conversations about what constitutes evidence of learner engagement in those values. In other words, we can begin to discuss what it looks like to productively engage in our classrooms when we discern what we want our students to engage in. Third, understanding what educators value enables us, to better facilitate our monthly meetings and provide feedback to meet the needs of the educators in our learning community. Finally, although these educators have come together around a focus on making and learning, educators within our community can find allies based on common values.

As we have moved forward throughout the year, these values have served as a bedrock of our conversations about teaching and learning in our Maker Educator Learning Community. What kinds of learning and engagement do you value within your classroom?

Jeff Evancho is the Project Zero Programming Specialist at the Quaker Valley School District and the co-leader of the Agency by Design, Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community.

Peter Wardrip is Assistant Professor of STEAM Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the co-leader of the Agency by Design, Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community

A special thank you to Cognizant Technology Solutions and the Grable Foundation for supporting this important work.

Framing a Value-based Approach to Documentation and Assessment for Maker-Centered Learning
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As many of you will know, the Agency by Design research team just began a second phase of work, focused on creating tools for documentation and assessment in maker-centered learning environments. Embarking on this work has prompted the team to carefully consider what this work will endeavor to explore—and what it won’t.

To some extent, the focus of this research phase is already articulated by the Phase II research questions, which asked us to consider: 1) how we can help learners make visible their abilities within the three core maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity, 2) how we can help teachers to qualitatively measure students’ performance within these capacities, and 3) how we can collaborate with students and teachers to design a suite of tools to support the development of maker empowerment. But within this scope of work, a great many decisions remain to be considered.

Today’s landscape of documentation tools in educational environments is extensive, including tools in both the analog and digital realms, frameworks for capturing, interpreting, and sharing documentation, and practices ranging from those that capture discrete “snapshots” of learning to those that chronicle long-term learning narratives unfolding over multiple years. The assessment landscape is even more diverse, encompassing a wide variety of audiences, purposes, and approaches that range from self-assessments to standardized tests.

Practically speaking, rather than cover the full spectrum of possibilities for developing maker-centered documentation and assessment tools, we have to make decisions about where to focus the energies of the project staff, as well as the work of our teacher partners in Oakland, California. These decisions are guided by deeply embedded project philosophies and ambitions, as well as key learnings from the first phase of AbD research which focused on the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning. Given the breadth of the documentation and assessment landscape, as well as the many purposes embedded within it, we see the need to establish a framing stance—a statement of what we will aim to undertake in our work, and what we will leave for others to tinker with and explore. Our hope is that this stance will help us to continually hone in on the aspects of this work that most align with our aspirations and values.

Zeroing In on Values

In an article from the Evaluation Exchange entitled “Evaluation and the Sacred Bundle,” author John Bare recounts a practice of indigenous North American tribes that preserved their culture by trusting a tribal elder with keeping relics connected to the tribe’s history (rocks, feathers, etc.). These items were kept in a pouch, or “sacred bundle,” which was brought out around the camp-fire as the elder told stories about each item. The items in this pouch symbolize a narrative history of a community of people. Bare relates these sacred bundles back to the idea of honing in on what we value most—the key points of a history or experience that we want to consider deeply and learn from. He connects this thinking back to a quote: “Measure what you value, and others will value what you measure.”

In order to establish a "values stance," the Agency by Design research team began by articulating the different perspectives they bring to this work.

In order to establish a “values stance,” the Agency by Design research team began by articulating the different perspectives they bring to this work.

This practice of zeroing in on values—of articulating what is most important to an individual or a community—not only applies to Stance calloutprogram evaluation (as Bare notes) or to referencing key historical moments (as in the case of the tribal elders), but also to broader thoughts about education. Too often, the values that guide the creation of educational assessment and documentation tools are far removed from the teaching and learning environments in which they’re used, and might even be mysterious to the practitioners that use them. Even more often, learners are completely left out of the practices of documentation and assessment, and framed as subjects of research rather than as participants in the process. This phenomenon seems to run counter to notions of maker empowerment—what our Phase I research identified as a frequently-surfaced value of maker-centered learning approaches—as well as participatory design approaches that keep the engagement of learners at their core.

Prompted by these and other conversations we’ve had as a research team, we wondered how we might consider value-based documentation and assessment—how can we let our values for learning guide the creation of tools for documentation and assessment, and also make sure that these tools are are of value to teachers and learners alike, as well as other stakeholders?

Framing Our Stance on Documentation and Assessment

So what are the Agency by Design research team’s values in regard to the development of documentation and assessment? On a recent work retreat with the Oakland Leadership Team and representatives from the Abundance Foundation, we carefully considered our values, and how they might manifest as approaches and principles that could ground us in the work ahead. Through these conversations, the following value statements rose to the surface:

  1. We value AGENCY & MAKER EMPOWERMENT— Building on the Agency by Design project’s focus on maker empowerment as the core outcome associated with maker-centered learning, the documentation and assessment tools we develop should invite critical consideration and questioning from learners and educators themselves. They should help these core audiences to work within existing models of documentation and assessment, while also seeing these models as malleable.
  2. We value SENSITIVITY TO DESIGN and the MAKER CAPACITIES that support it—In support of our focus on agency and maker empowerment, we seek to create tools that help learners develop a sensitivity to the design of the objects and systems in their worlds by looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity. These tools should help learners be sensitive to the design of learning experiences and aware of the systems in which documentation and assessment practices are implemented.
  3. We value a FOCUS ON PROCESS—We seek to create processes and tools that consider the shape, flow, and journey of the learning process, rather than focusing in on one finite point or end product of a learning experience. This suggests a leaning toward formative tools that tell the story of a learning experience and inform future learning, rather than summative tools that look at the sum total of learning experiences as they come to a conclusion.
  4. We value ONGOING DIALOGUEWe seek to create tools that enable learners to be in dialogue with others—parents, educators, peers, and more—about their own learning journeys.
  5. We value FLEXIBILITYInspired by the highly dynamic and diverse range of work represented in the maker movement itself, we seek to create tools that are flexible and can be used across disciplines, grade levels, and throughout a variety of formal and informal learning environments. We further hope to develop documentation and assessment tools that are adaptable to a variety of purposes.
  6. We value the perspectives and experiences of LEARNERS & EDUCATORS— We seek to create tools that empower the learner and the educator within a teaching and learning experience. We recognize that focusing in on these two populations leaves off the list a huge number of stakeholders—parents, administrators, and policymakers, just to name a few. We do not intend to create tools that are deliberately un-helpful to these other stakeholders, but we want to keep both learners and teachers in mind as our primary audiences for this work.

This values stance emerged from our past four years of work on the project, which challenged us to articulate the primary outcomes and benefits of maker-centered learning based on what we saw happening in classrooms and what we heard from the educators we spoke with. But as we framed the stance, more questions rose to the surface: In what ways can we both work within and push on the system of current documentation and assessment practices? What are the tools that are needed and desired by practitioners in the field? Who are the missing voices in this dialogue? And where does grading and evaluation fit into this whole conversation? We’re not sure how we’ll answer all of these questions yet, but in line with our core values, the AbD team is inclined to develop maker-centered documentation and assessment tools that illustrate the rich learning and growth that happens in the maker-centered classroom, rather than one-size-fits-all grading tools.

Establishing Your Own Values

As we continue to craft our values stance over the coming months, we invite you to consider essential principles that guide your own work in documentation and assessment, within the learning and teaching contexts that are important to you.

What values rise to the surface for you? What do you most want the educators and learners in your own context to get out of documentation and assessment practices? And how might you hold yourself accountable to these guiding principles as you engage in the complexities and rigor of real-life teaching and learning environments? We’d be interested to hear how you, and other practitioners and researchers engaging with this work, grapple with these questions.

Changing the Conversation about Migration: A Provisional Pedagogic Framework
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This blog post is co-authored by Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Emi Kane, and Sarah Sheya.

Last year, Out of Eden Learn piloted and launched a new learning journey called Stories of Human Migration. We wanted to see if the curriculum design principles we had developed for promoting thoughtful cross-cultural inquiry and exchange  — inviting young people to slow down, share stories, and make connections between their own lives and bigger human stories — could be applied to convene teenage students in thoughtful ways around what are widely perceived to be contentious yet timely topics.

The empirically-grounded framework we present here is specific to the topic of migration and is still a work in progress. However, we expect the overall structure to be applicable to other sensitive topics — something we will be exploring and reporting on in the coming year.

Changing the Conversation About Migration: A Pedagogic Framework from Out of Eden Learn

migration visual final_Sept17-1This diagram is intended to evoke the metaphor of a kaleidoscope: the various parts are interconnected and can come together as well as expand or recombine in different ways. The diagram is color-coded according to three broad aspects of learning. The pink shapes represent the affective or attitudinal qualities we hope to promote among young people as they engage around the topic of human migration; the blue shapes represent the kinds of substantive understandings we want them to develop; the green shapes convey the dimensions of critical awareness that we believe to be important for navigating this topic in insightful and sensitive ways. At the center of the diagram and stretching across it are the core design principles of the Out of Eden Learn model, which we believe help to foster the attitudes, understandings, and capacities identified.

The framework offers a roadmap or set of aspirations for educators and students. We are not suggesting that every student be expected to demonstrate every aspect of the diagram, but taken together the elements form a composite of the richest and most encouraging work, comments, and reflections we have looked at on the Out of Eden Learn platform. Below are brief descriptions of each of the three core categories, including counter-examples that indicate some of the challenges of supporting young people to engage in learning about this complex and sensitive topic. The framework is grounded in our examination of work from Out of Eden Learn but is intended to have much broader applicability.

Respectful curiosity and engagement

This category is concerned with students’ stances or attitudes towards the topic. We are interested here in students asking thoughtful questions and actively trying to engage one another in discussion. Are students asking questions of one another that are respectful in tone and which suggest a genuine desire to find out more about other people’s stories, lives, and perspectives?  Relatedly, are they listening respectfully and empathetically to one another, especially when peers are sharing their own or their loved one’s stories of migration? Where appropriate, are they actively making connections to their own experiences? Finally, this framework takes a broad approach towards students’ actions or intentions to engage, which may be civic in nature: for example, do students express an interest in reaching out to newly arrived migrants (or perhaps to their new community if they have recently migrated), getting involved in discussions or debates, or learning more about the topic? Indicators that the goal of fostering respectful curiosity and engagement is not being achieved would include the following: flippant questions or comments, shutting down a conversation, or a general lack of interest or willingness to engage in the topic.

Nuanced understanding

Migration is a complex topic. This category is concerned with students’ substantive understanding of historical and contemporary migration. Do they show awareness of some of the ways in which the will or determination of individual people interacts with much bigger structural forces that are beyond their personal control—for example, climate change, war, economic forces, or religious or political persecution? Do students demonstrate an understanding that individual migration experiences or people’s perceptions of migration are shaped by context—be that historical, geographical, political, economic, social, or religious? And do they appreciate that there is enormous diversity in terms of how different migration experiences play out, both across different contexts and situations and within the same communities or groups of migrants? Educators may want to pre-empt the following challenges: students tending towards binary thinking (migration is good or bad; individual migration experiences are wholly positive or wholly negative), over-generalizing about migration from single stories, or solely focusing on the willpower and character of individual migrants rather than taking into account broader contextual or structural factors that impact their experiences.

Critical awareness including self-awareness

This category is fundamentally about perspective-taking. It is one thing for students to care about migration and to understand its complexity: it is another for them to think critically and reflectively about their own and other people’s perspectives on migration. One aspect of this category concerns what is commonly termed media literacy: do students show an ability to engage critically and discerningly with media stories and other sources about migration, rather than dealing with them as straightforward pieces of information? Do they recognize that understanding other people’s perspectives is challenging and are they sensitive to the limits of their own understanding regarding the topic of migration and people’s migration experiences? Are they able to reflect on the ways in which their own perspectives have been shaped by context and experience? We acknowledge that some aspects of critical awareness can be a tall order for young people—and indeed everyone—but it is vital for educators to foster these capacities in their students. We seek to avoid the following scenarios: students making easy assumptions about other people’s experiences or being overconfident in their understanding of a complex topic; assuming that their own perspective on the world is universally shared or inherently superior to others; not taking the time to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings about migration and how they may have been formed.

Migration is an age-old and essential part of being human – as our collaborator Paul Salopek highlights via his Out of Eden Walk. But at a time when the ways in which it is discussed as a political issue and experience have become particularly contentious, we need to provide opportunities to change the conversation. We owe it to our young people to offer them meaningful opportunities to engage around the topic in ways that honor their individual perspectives and experiences and that allow them to learn both with and from one another.

Takeaways from the First Run of Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom
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As many of you will know, this past summer we launched the first run of Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom, an online course offered by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Programs for Professional Education which outlines the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning. The inaugural run of the course just wrapped up this week, and we are delighted to see all of the pictures of practice and big takeaways our participants from around the world had to offer.

Sharing Big Takeaways from the First Run

One of the biggest takeaways from the course included a new understanding of the importance of systems thinking in the maker-centered classroom. Regarding her experience trying out the Agency by Design framework in her 8th grade humanities classroom, one participant from a grades 6–12 school outside of Boston, Massachusetts wrote,

I think emphasizing how things work and how different parts interact with each other allow[s] students to focus their problem-solving skills. Solutions become more realistic and nuanced when students can see their idea as part of a bigger system, and the possibility to be impactful agents of change in the real world increases significantly.

Another participant in the course, a middle school teacher—and cricket coach—in South Africa noted that applying systems thinking through the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning helps students see beyond objects and to understand how their actions have impact on others. He wrote,

Systems thinking matters because it allows us to see beyond the”‘object.” It allows us to develop a far greater understanding and appreciation for all people and their impacts—learning to consider one’s actions in the world and the impact these will have on others… It lets us consider others at all levels and allows us to think carefully before acting, therefore, acting in a more meaningful way.

Another big take away from the course was the idea that maker-centered learning is about more than just a designated space or fancy equipment—and that the practices associated with the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning can be applied across content areas. As one participant from a team in New South Wales, Australia wrote,

Maker education is something that can be done anytime, anywhere, in any context and in any room.… [An] aspect of the course that resonated with me was the idea that maker-centered learning can happen outside of a maker-space. Though I am lucky enough to teach at a school that has a designated Maker Space, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to take the thinking that happens inside the space into my own classroom. The learning that comes from students having time to stop and think deeply about how things work—whether that thing is a 3D printer or a system of government—is extremely valuable.

A further big takeaway from the course was the impact Agency by Design’s two core concepts of sensitivity to design and maker empowerment in the form of student agency had for participants and their students. Reflecting on their experience working with their students throughout this course, a team of educators from a K–12 school in Victoria, Australia noted,

We watch and admire our students for their abilities to problem solve, experiment, collaborate, design, test, fail, critique and exhibit their learning. The students have established a sense of looking, exploring complexity and finding an opportunity to develop a sensitivity to all phases of making, designing, or redesigning.… We feel they have developed a sense of agency over their learning. They’re in charge, take ownership and have become agents of change. It’s a very noticeable shift in mindset. A more pronounced shift is the “can do” attitude, to have a go, make mistakes, fail and understand that failing is a part of growing as a learner.

Another participant, a science coordinator from a school in Amman, Jordan, wrote of how his students developed a deeper sensitivity to design as a result of the thinking routines and other resources he learned in this course, and then incorporated into his classroom practice:

I learned that the students will always accept the challenge, redesign plans and continue their work with motivation as long as they see beyond what they make to why they make. Therefore, adopting the thinking strategy routines will invite students to understand things in depth, develop students’ skills and enhance their confidence.

Lastly, participants also spoke of the Agency by Design framework’s capacity to support a sense of ethics and empathy amongst their students. As a middle school teacher participating in the course from Queensland, Australia wrote,

Throughout the course I enjoyed the fact that systems thinking and design sensitivity seem to naturally lend themselves to an awareness of sustainability and the practise of being an ethical consumer. I would like to further explore how these topics could be incorporated into a meaningful project where students are engaged in a rich design process.

A participant from an elementary school in Taiwan echoed this sentiment. Referencing her experience introducing her students to thinking routines designed to support an understanding of the various parts, people, and interactions associated with the made dimensions of our world, she wrote,

Moreover, it is important to empathize with various individuals and people connected in a system, not just to focus on isolated groups. The two key insights, empathy and interconnectedness, which provokes sensitivity, were very powerful.

While we are celebrating the great work our course participants have generated during this first run of the course, we are also gearing up for the next run of the course, which begins on September 19, 2016.

Join us During the Fall of 2016!

Are you interested in participating in the most popular and widely enrolled online course at Project Zero? Then join us for the fall term of Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom!

With cover 100 participants working in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and all across the United States, the fall run of Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom (TLMCC) is guaranteed to offer a global perspective on maker-centered learning based on the experiences of maker educators working in a wide array of learning environments.

Founded on the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning, Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom introduces participants to AbD’s core concepts of maker empowerment and sensitivity to design, as well as the project’s three core maker capacities and the thinking routines that have been designed to support them.

Throughout the course, participants tinker with the AbD framework in their study groups—and in their classrooms—to build towards developing a picture of practice that shows what maker-centered learning can look like in action.

Interested in experiencing the course for yourself? Please visit the TLMCC registration page on the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s website. We hope to see you online in September!

Launching a New Phase of Research for Agency by Design: Exploring Documentation and Assessment Strategies for the Maker-Centered Classroom
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From 2012 to 2015, the Agency by Design research team explored the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning. As a result of this multi-year study, the AbD team—supported by our teacher partners in Oakland, CA and across the United States—developed a framework for maker-centered learning accompanied by a host of pictures of practice, thinking routines, and other educator resources.

In addition to the core research findings associated with this first phase of work, we have also come to understand what important questions still remain to be addressed in this rich opportunity space. Specifically, we now see developing qualitative assessment strategies as the next frontier of research for maker-centered learning. In fact, we don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that if maker-centered learning is to be more than a passing trend, it is imperative to establish a means to gauge the real benefits of such learning experiences. To address this need, the Agency by Design research team has embarked upon a second phase of research geared towards developing innovative maker-centered documentation and assessment tools.

Though many will be quick to develop pre-/post- assessment measures that gauge student performance in the STEM subjects, as we have learned from our conversations with maker-centered educators and thought leaders throughout the United States, beyond acquiring knowledge and skills in the STEM subjects, educators at the epicenter of maker-centered learning view the dispositional concept of maker empowerment as a primary—if not essential—student outcome. This being the case, our research team has become deeply aware of the importance of developing strategies that gauge this core principle.

The challenge of documenting and assessing maker empowerment is a tricky one. Not unlike many other desirable educational outcomes and “21st Century Skills,” maker empowerment may be understood as an abstract concept with few tangible indicators. Nonetheless, as AbD’s work has shown, having a sensitivity to design is foundational to supporting maker empowerment. We believe that the three elements of the Agency by Design instructional framework—looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity—are concrete capacities that support the development of a sensitivity to design, which therefore may be documented, made visible, and assessed.

With these ideas in mind, our second phase of research will be guided by the following questions:

  1. How can learners make visible their ability to look closely, explore complexity, and find opportunity?
  2. How can teachers qualitatively measure students’ performance within the realm of these three core maker capacities?
  3. How can we collaborate with students and teachers to design a suite of practical documentation and assessment tools best suited to the development of maker empowerment?
AbD researchers tinker with various documentation and assessment strategies.

AbD researchers tinker with various documentation and assessment strategies.

Once again supported by the Abundance Foundation, this next phase of research will be centered around a collaboration with a professional learning community in Oakland, CA. It is our hope that by collaborating with this diverse group of educators working in a variety of teaching and learning environments, we may be able to develop, test, remix, retest, and refine a suite of contemporary assessment strategies designed to document, enrich, and support maker empowerment across all learning environments.

As we embark upon this exciting next phase of research, we are curious to hear from our colleagues in the broader maker-centered learning community. How do you document and assess learning in your own maker-centered classrooms? What tools and strategies have you used to support student agency and character building through maker-centered learning? What do you need documentation and assessment tools to do for you—and what opportunities and challenges have you encountered in this work?

Out of Eden Learn as a Site of Civic Agency
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Out of Eden Learn’s curricula and platform are explicitly oriented around three broad themes: slowing down, exchanging stories, and making connections. Carried out locally and through online exchanges with youth from different backgrounds, we see our program as a powerful vehicle for a range of potential outcomes – developing new insights about one’s own identity, identifying global forces in the local, developing nuanced understandings of culture, among other goals. But in what ways does Out of Eden Learn also lay the groundwork for civic agency?

The civic potentials of Out of Eden Learn is a theme I’ve been thinking about for some time, looking for ways to trace connections with other lines of my work where the civic is a central and explicit focus. With colleagues at Project Zero and beyond, I’ve been studying youth (specifically teens and young adults) who engage in participatory politics – using digital and social media to voice their ideas and seek influence around civic issues. This work has highlighted an array of positive opportunities and challenges for youth civic agency in digital life. In recent months, I’ve deepened my thinking about civic agency through collaborative work with Ben Mardell, a Project Zero colleague who does inspiring work related to young children as citizens.  As Ben and colleague Mara Krechevksy articulate so well: “Children are not just future or hypothetical citizens, or citizens in training, but rather they are citizens of the here and now, with the right to express their opinions and participate in the civic and cultural life of their communities.”

For Project Zero’s 50th anniversary symposium in October, Ben and I co-designed and led a session on Educating for Civic Agency with Danielle Allen (Project Zero & Harvard University) and Ron Berger (EL Education). For this session, we brought our respective insights about young children and older youth together to distill a set of key ideas and promising approaches to educating for civic agency.

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We took as our starting point the idea that civic agency is multi-faceted. Here, we are informed by our colleague Danielle Allen’s conception of civic agency as defined by three core tasks:

  • “disinterested deliberation”: sharing and listening to different perspectives on a public issue in order to understand the problem space
  • “prophetic frame shifting”: imagining new or alternative visions for one’s community or world
  • advocacy: advocating for change in one’s community or world

We then explored several case studies that illustrate how specific pedagogical moves, curricular activities, and intentionally designed online spaces can support young children and/or older youth to practice one or more of these tasks.

I presented Out of Eden Learn as a compelling case study of how thoughtfully designed online spaces can support civic agency in various ways. OOEL’s model of bringing youth from different backgrounds together on our platform to exchange ideas about meaningful issues is notable – especially given the recent launch of our Stories of Human Migration curriculum where the range of themes OOEL students discuss veers more often into more explicitly civic or political territory.

To illustrate how OOEL students are exploring this topic together, I shared the following student work and a dialogue thread sparked by the migration curriculum’s Everyday Borders activity. In this activity, students take a slow walk in their local area and notice borders and boundaries – including invisible ones – and consider how their own or others’ movement is restricted or enabled.

lingcai8_30, an OOEL student from Singapore, shared a lengthy post with a number of thoughtful reflections. Here are some snippets from her post:

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There are many kinds of boundaries, [including] physical and non-physical… Physical boundaries are between and across regions and countries, while non-physical ones are those in our minds… In both cases, boundaries only exist because we, as humans, allow them to. Some reasons could be for the greater good, such as to maintain sovereignty in countries, or to protect us from harm… 

Boundaries may also give us a sense of place and belonging…

Boundaries may also exist due to our selfishness, for example, the hunger to have more territory…Boundaries protect me from harboring dangerous ideas, or exposing myself to greater harm. 

A day or two after lincai8_30 shared these thoughts, students from other classrooms begin posting comments and several short but meaningful conversations unfold. In one exchange, alyss7nicole, a student from Beaverton, Oregon in the U.S., asks lincai8_30 a probing question:

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Do you ever believe that the rich and powerful create boundaries? …

Sometimes boundaries are created by our system based on how much money we have. Not only is it physical and mental but there is a system set up…and I believe that we do not choose that.  So if authority does choose, what do you think about that? Do you like having boundaries or would you rather live in a world without them?

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@alyss7nicole, your idea is very insightful! I do believe that the rich and powerful create boundaries, and they have their reasons. It could be for personal safety, or to prevent leakage of certain documents.

Your last statement got me thinking. Could wars be prevented if there were no political boundaries? If every nation coexisted together peacefully? But humans naturally have disputes (quite often) so it probably would not work out. Boundaries are there for a good reason (sometimes) so I think I would rather live in a world with boundaries.

These short excerpts from just one piece of student work and dialogue thread show how the invitation to explore everyday borders can be an impetus for noticing, discussing and pushing students’ thinking about “invisible” boundaries between different groups in their own and others’ contexts. While not an extended deliberation, this exchange suggests the promise of open-ended and learner-centered activities as a starting point for exploring timely, yet also transhistorical, topics such as migration.

Returning to Allen’s three tasks of civic agents, I would argue that these kinds of activities and exchanges on OOEL approximate – or at least reach toward – deliberative and frame shifting tasks.  The dialogue thread may not meet the ideal type of “disinterested deliberation” – prolonged discussion of a public issue – which Allen traces to “Athenian citizens gathered in the assembly, the town halls of colonial New Hampshire, and public representatives…in the halls of a legislature.” Even so, these young people are clearly voicing their ideas about everyday borders and appear to be engaged in authentic inquiry and listening to the ideas of their online peers in different contexts. They also appear to be using their imaginations to wonder about how the social, political and physical structures that are borders could be rearranged or erased. Finally, although Out of Eden Learn’s curricula are not explicitly aimed toward the civic task of advocacy, we do see our work as laying the groundwork for potential civic or political actions on the part of youth down the road. Indeed, the pedagogic framework behind OOEL’s migration curriculum foregrounds a set of learning outcomes – respectful curiosity, nuanced understandings, and critical awareness (including self-awareness) – that are optimal foundations for all three tasks of civic agency.

In sum, in exploring the problem space of educating for civic agency, I’ve identified what I believe are clear connections between Out of Eden Learn’s model and platform and essential tasks of civic agency today. Going forward, I hope to build on these ideas by listening to OOEL teachers’ and students’ perspectives on both the promises and limitations of OOEL as a site of civic agency.

 

Beyond waypoints and world maps: Disrupting our understanding of diversity
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Over 20,000 young people have participated in Out of Eden Learn in sixty countries around the world. Just over 50 percent of students have participated from public or government-funded institutions, about one percent are homeschooled, and the rest have participated from private or independent schools. Sixty percent of students have participated from within the United States, which is reflective of the fact that the project is US-based. The remaining 40 percent have participated from outside of the United States.

Young people do Out of Eden Learn in classrooms, after school programs, youth groups, home schools, and more. Educators have adapted Out of Eden Learn’s curricula to fit a wide range of content areas, including world history, language arts and writing, geographic science, journalism, photography, fine arts, ancient civilizations, government, digital citizenship, and many others.

This is all to say that Out of Eden Learn has certainly reached a variety of contexts. By mainstream measures in the realm of educational programs, our learning community would be categorized as “diverse.” But besides what we know from maps, surveys and metadata, what are we learning from students about the importance of the other diverse aspects of their lived experiences and how might that help disrupt our own understanding and definition of “diversity?”

Out of Eden Learn encourages participants to look closely at their lives and communities and share what they uncover, in the form of photographs, drawings and written stories. Some describe mountain ranges in their backyards and others share snapshots of city lights. They share personal experiences being homeschooled, being members of the LGBTQ community, being First Nations, living in gated communities, in migrant communities, in interim housing communities, and on military compounds.

Young people share the bits of themselves that are not likely to be categorized by check-boxes on a census report; the things that make us who we are but cannot be defined as A, B, or C; the kinds of music genres they listen to or their modes of transportation, and whether or not those choices are political; the foods they eat and the styles of clothing they wear; where they might be on a typical afternoon; and whether they choose paper, plastic, or bring their own bags. In surveys and interviews, Out of Eden Learn students tell us they are excited to really zoom in on the details of their own lives and the parts of themselves that they decide are worth sharing.

It is true we make our best effort to create online learning groups, or “walking parties,” that have as much geographic diversity as possible but we sometimes fall short of this expectation. In fact, there are a few values our research team hold in higher regard than just reaching waypoints on a map: that young people leave Out of Eden Learn with a curiosity and desire to engage in dialogue with other young people different from themselves, that they feel even just a little more equipped to do so, and that they are looking at themselves and the world around them a bit more carefully, with an eye to inquiry and an openness to perspectives different from their own.

Young people can develop these kinds of capacities and dispositions whether they are connecting across oceans or across tables in the same classroom. Our hope is to model for students and educators a way of valuing diversity that celebrates the world map, but also sets it aside when the moment calls for it. By emphasizing careful observation of the everyday, personal story-sharing, and authentic dialogue, we hope to encourage complex understandings of diversity and respectful inquiries into the many identities and experiences one person might hold, regardless of where they might be located in the world.

We are excited to learn how educators and students in our community are thinking about diversity in potentially more expansive ways as they take part in Out of Eden Learn. We look forward to hearing from you.


Out of Eden Learn invites young people to take neighborhood walks and share pictures of what they notice when they slow down to observe carefully. The animation above is a compilation of nearly 200 photographs by students around the world.

 

Noise as a Maker Practice
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By Guest Author Peter J. Woods, doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and recent Project Zero Artist-in-Residence

In a former life, I spent a number of years working as a high school math teacher during the day and as a touring noise musician during the weekends, winter breaks, and summers. Amidst these travels, I started to notice that the communities of do-it-yourself (DIY) musicians I worked with accomplished a number of goals I held as a teacher: cultivating a wide array of music skills and knowledge, building character, and, most prominently, developing agency (what the Agency by Design project describes as the benefits associated with maker-centered learning). I started to wonder “what was it about DIY music communities generally, and noise music specifically, that led to these outcomes? And how can existing arts programs utilize these affordances?” Attempting to answer these questions occupied my time as a Project Zero Artist-in-Residence where I used the Agency by Design framework for maker-centered learning as a springboard for my work.

Now before going any further, I should probably describe noise music. After countless circular conversations, I have found that the best way to explain noise to those who have not heard the genre is to just have people listen to it. So go ahead and give it a listen by clicking here.

The video you just watched shows Merzbow, one of the first and most prolific artists in the genre, performing live in his home country of Japan. A couple of questions may emerge after hearing this type of music for the first time, such as “Why would anyone want to listen to this?” and “Why did AbD put this on their blog?” While I may not be able to sufficiently answer the first question for everyone, an answer to the second one reveals itself when viewing noise music through a maker lens.

From a maker-centered perspective, noise music may be viewed as a maker-friendly arts genre because of its disregard for traditional instrumentation and musical elements such as melody or rhythm. Specifically, because noise compositions do not necessitate specific notes or rhythms, the definition of what counts as a “playable” instrument widens significantly. A quick tour through Instructables provides a plethora of ways to create the tools used to create noise. Contact Mics, Circuit Bending, Homemade Synthesizers, and a host of other noise-making devices make appearances on the site. And while some noise musicians do occasionally use familiar instruments to create noise, they inevitably utilize highly inventive techniques in their practice. Or, avoiding all of this, an artist can always just grab stuff from around the house.

But even going beyond the genre’s inclusive approach to instrumentation, noise also invites performers to conceptualize music with a maker-centered attitude. Looking closely at Agency by Design’s definition of Maker Empowerment for guidance, a peculiar idea emerges: maker empowerment does not necessarily have to come from making something. Sure, “building, tinkering, re/designing, [and] hacking” are all prevalent within makerspaces and easily accomplished through the creation of physical and digital artifacts, but there are also ways to do all of these thing within abstract systems and ethereal concepts.

Crank Sturgeon performing with what appears to be a violin, two rocks, a mixer, and amplified table. (Photo by Klaus-Peter. Image used with permission.)

Crank Sturgeon performing with what appears to be a violin, two rocks, a mixer, and amplified table. (Photo by Klaus-Peter. Image used with permission.)

Consider this piece by PCRV (aka Matt Taggart). In this performance, Taggart hacks foundational understandings of composition (the piece ends when a buzzer goes off, not when all of the notes are played), redesigns the role of the performing artist (Taggart is here to accomplish a specific task with its own intrinsic goal, not “perform” for the audience), and tinker with what qualifies as “playing music” (the majority of the sound coming residually from the folding of origami boxes as opposed to intentional, sound making gestures). All of this within one piece.

This expanded approach to making begs the question: what comes next? Which other artistic mediums allow for making in the abstract? How can educators allow for tinkering and redesigning of systems and concepts in other subjects? And what does the landscape look like after makers act on their “inclination and capacity to shape one’s world?”

So why did AbD put this on their blog? While I can’t speak for the Agency by Design research team, I can take a guess. In their article “The Maker Movement in Education,” Erica Halverson and Kim Sheridan note that “making can… challenge our understanding of what counts as a legitimate learning activity” while certain practices within the maker movement broaden “our understanding of what counts as making.” Expanding the horizon of both maker practices and legitimate learning activities means that educators, both formal and informal, have access to a growing selection of tools to engage a wider spectrum of learners. However, realizing the full potential of this work means exploring as many avenues as possible, including those that seem a bit bizarre. In their forthcoming book, the Agency by Design research team likewise present an expansive view of making “to develop the most porous boundaries possible” when considering what counts as “making,” and to be most inclusive of all those who may be considered makers.

Look around you and think about the practices you engage in. Where are the boundaries you can challenge? And where will you find the next untapped maker experience?

Peter J. Woods is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recent Project Zero Artist-in-Residence. Outside of his academic work, Woods is a touring DIY musician and head of the FTAM Productions record label.

When a Ship is not a Ship—It’s a Sabre-toothed Cat! A Story of Maker Empowerment and Collective Agency
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By guest author Ilya Pratt, AbD Oakland Leadership Team member and Design+Make+Engage program director at Park Day School

Last year Kyle (a pseudonym) was a kindergartener at Park Day School in Oakland, California—where I teach an Innovation Workshop class in our school’s new workshop space. Like many kindergarteners, Kyle had big energy and big emotions.  When things were exciting, joy was evident in his entire body. Disappointments were equally deep—and came with a long-lasting frown. Several months into the school year, he was still working very hard to temper those highs and lows, and to find his place in both the classroom and larger school community.

In our weekly Innovation Workshop class, Kyle was always very engaged and usually reigned in his energy. While he made safety mistakes with the tools he used in class, he also took them very seriously. However, Kyle often had difficulty really defining and executing projects. In these times, his dissatisfaction would reverberate through the workshop.

One day in Innovation Workshop class things came together for Kyle. After impatiently waiting for me to find my way to him, he proudly announced, “I made a ship!” He quickly followed with a meandering and not particularly convincing explanation of how the four long parts alongside the hull, two pointing forwards and two to the rear, weren’t guns even though they looked like guns (demonstrating a clear understanding of our school’s no weapons policy). He then picked up his ship only to experience the four non-guns, attached by one nail each, falling downwards.

A big whining “Awwwww!” ensued, accompanied by that deep frown.

His tablemates became silent—a pregnant pause in which hands froze in place and  eyes locked on Kyle, well-aware of an imminent emotional meltdown. In that moment I steadied the parts—now legs—and the upset suddenly ceased. With what felt like a tidal shift—for both him and his tablemates—Kyle announced, “I made a cat! I made a cat! I made a sabre-toothed cat!” With this he puffed out his chest and stood what had to be six inches taller. He remained at this height through our gallery walk sharing time, proudly introducing his sabre-toothed cat to his classmates.

The saber-toothed cat developed by Kyle in the Innovation Workshop class at Park Day School.

The saber-toothed cat developed by Kyle in the Innovation Workshop class at Park Day School.

During the next Innovation Workshop class, Kyle returned to his sabre-toothed cat to add to it. For the first time, a particularly skilled classmate—in both building and socially—asked if he could help Kyle. This was a big social success moment. In later classes there continued to be more positive exchanges around their projects, and playground play increased as well.

Kyle and his colleague work together to modify the saber-toothed cat construction.

Kyle and his classmate work together to modify the saber-toothed cat construction.

A couple of weeks later I noticed that the sabre-toothed cat had taken up lodging outside Kyle’s classroom, waiting to be brought home. After another week it appeared on a table by the building’s front door. Eventually it made its way back into the workshop—a teacher had respectfully moved it to its obvious place of origin. I finally asked Kyle if he wanted to take it home. “No. I don’t want it.” he replied. “It’s pretty cool—and you put a lot of work into it. Are you sure?” I asked. With certainty he said, “No, I don’t want to take it home.”

I am left with the thought that for Kyle, the sabre-toothed cat may have been important and empowering in the moment, but it was the social gains that were lasting and most meaningful for him. As a maker educator, Kyle’s experience with the ship that became a sabre-toothed cat reminds me that the products students make in our maker-centered classrooms are important. However, regardless of how cool and interesting the stuff students make may be, it’s the learning and experiences of collective agency that matter most.

Scaffolds for Deeper Exchange—Adapting Out of Eden Learn’s Dialogue Toolkit for Teacher Professional Development Contexts
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I recently returned from a site visit to the United Arab Emirates, where I spent a week with a practitioner cohort from seven schools in the GEMS Education network through the Creating Communities of Innovation research initiative at Project Zero. Started in 2016, Creating Communities of Innovation (CCI) is a multi-year study that considers how research-based tools might support teachers and educational leaders to create scalable innovations within individual schools, and how a cross-school network could help develop and sustain those innovations. The “innovation projects” developed by cohort members stemmed from needs and opportunities they saw around them, and ranged from creating new tools to support blended learning, to starting a student-run “thinking routine squad,” to implementing an ambitious parent engagement initiative to reach more than 5,000 school parents.

As you’ll see, Out of Eden Learn’s Dialogue Toolkit became a useful resource in this work.

Framing the Challenges of Peer Feedback

dubaiSince the start of this initiative, cohort members have been asked to give feedback to each other about their developing projects via an online platform. This platform created opportunities for cohort participants to view and comment on each others’ project documentation and online reflections. Cohort schools also presented their work to each other and to members of the public through exhibitions that showcased documentation of their school innovation projects and articulated key learnings, questions, and puzzles they encountered in that work.

In asking our cohort members to be candid about their experiences and put still-developing ideas in front of online and face-to-face audiences, we in essence asked them to take risks and make themselves susceptible to critique. Cohort members shared personally-important, student-centered work that they had developed over the course of many months. When presenting their innovation projects, cohort members spoke with passion and used carefully crafted language that revealed great insight and deep reflection.

But when we asked these same extremely thoughtful educators to give feedback to cohort peers about their innovation projects, the comments they gave often did not live up to the depth and substance of which we knew they were capable. Following a project exhibition, one cohort member told us, “we receive a lot of pats on the back, but no real feedback.” We saw similar dynamics when we asked cohort members to engage in dialogue on our online platform, where much of the cross-school discourse around innovation projects stayed on the surface level of “good job” or “I like what you’re doing.”

These votes of confidence of course came from a well-meaning and supportive place. But receiving the casual “like” on this work did not give our teachers’ contributions their due, especially given the vulnerability they faced by inviting critique on their projects. Our research team began to wonder: Why might it be challenging to give deeper, more meaningful feedback to peers? This question was especially important to our research focus on cultivating networked inquiry communities across schools working to push themselves outside the comfort zone of existing practice. Prompted by the suggestion of CCI Co-Director and Out of Eden Learn Principal Investigator Liz Dawes Duraisingh, our research team decided to try using elements of the Out of Eden Learn Dialogue Toolkit to encourage more meaningful cross-cohort dialogue.

The Dialogue Toolkit: A Scaffold for Deeper Exchange

Building on these ideas, the research team challenged the CCI practitioner cohort to try out a subset of the Dialogue Toolkit in both online dialogues and face-to-face exhibitions of their work. We honed in on the kit’s “tools” of Appreciate, Probe, Connect, and Extend:

  • Appreciate: Share what you like, appreciate or value in the ideas you heard. Be specific.
  • ProbeProbe for more details. Ask questions that will help give you a better sense of another person’s perspective.
  • Connect: Make a connection between something in the ideas you heard and your own experiences, feelings, or interests.
  • Extend: Describe how the ideas you heard extended your thoughts in new directions or gave you a new perspective.

What We’ve Learned So Far

At Project Zero we talk about dispositions, or “ways of being in the world” as being comprised of three elements: inclination, capacity, and sensitivity. We knew right from the beginning of our work that our teacher collaborators had a disposition toward meaningful dialogue. When we met up in person, we saw that they were eager to talk to each other about practice during informal social gatherings and in professional development settings, showing an inclination toward dialogue. The depth of the commentary we were able to solicit in small-group conversations and one-on-one interviews also demonstrated a strong capacity toward expressing powerful feedback and reflections. And we had set up online forums and exhibitions to help them be sensitive to opportunities to give each other feedback and engage in substantial dialogue. With the disposition already in place, we needed to routinize the practice of using the Dialogue Toolkit. So how has it worked? Since we started asking our educator cohort to use these tools, we’ve noticed a few things:

The Dialogue Toolkit in Online Communities: From Comments to Conversations

Every couple of months, CCI study groups create video updates on our online platform to share how their innovation projects are progressing and to request feedback from a partner cohort school. Before the introduction of the Dialogue Toolkit, we saw the type of online commentary that will be familiar to most who use social media platforms—one-off comments, “thumbs-up” shows of support, or critiques that could have gone much further in specificity or depth. The Dialogue Toolkit prompts have helped cohort members move from comments to conversations, as shown by a greater number of follow-up conversations and more in-depth dialogues that go beyond a single exchange from one school to the other. In this way, both the quantity and quality of the dialogue has increased. One cohort school has even adapted the Dialogue Toolkit prompts into student-friendly language to support deeper online dialogue among learners.

In-Person Interactions: Breaking the Ice in Peer Feedback

postitsWhen using the Dialogue Toolkit in face-to-face communications, we’ve seen our cohort members make more explicit invitations for dialogue and critique around their work. At a recent exhibition, one school articulated their questions for feedback on a piece of chart paper, asking audience members to focus their comments on those questions. In this way, the school was able to walk away with specific feedback that was targeted toward helping them move forward. The Dialogue Toolkit prompts also helped educators notice recurrences of similar audience questions, and to move beyond conversations about the practicalities of implementation toward deeper discussions about the merits of their work.

Can I have more meaningful dialogue in this setting? Yes, and…

Once we started to use the Dialogue Toolkit, it became embedded as a persistent mental Post-It note to remind our research team: say something meaningful. The Toolkit prompts do not necessitate essay-length responses—a few simple connections to other ideas or a deeply-considered probing question can do the job of helping to advance someone else’s thinking (and perhaps your own thinking as well!) and spur further conversation and purposeful examination of an idea. More meaningful dialogue might take place within a work setting, around the family dinner table, in an exchange with a stranger on the street, or in your own inner monologue. All it takes is being present to times when you want or need more (quantity, quality, or both!) in terms of dialogue or feedback, and times where you can give more to others as well.

Taking responsibility for deeper, more sustained dialogue can be a significant challenge within the competing demands for our time and cognitive energies. But our research team, and the practitioner cohort with which we work, has found great value in committing to this responsibility and in routinizing practices for more meaningful conversations. We continue to learn how the Dialogue Toolkit will work as the Creating Communities of Innovation research work and our cohort schools’ innovation projects progress. For now, we are excited to ponder the possibilities, and we look forward to hearing how you are using this work as well.

Happy Birthday Project Zero!
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Shari Tishman is a co-director of Out of Eden Learn and a former director of Project Zero.

Many readers of this blog know that Out of Eden Learn’s academic home is Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This is a big year for Project Zero, because it is our 50th anniversary. For five decades, researchers at Project Zero have led dozens of research projects that have influenced the field of education around the globe. Various special events will occur throughout the year, and to launch its 50th anniversary, PZ convened a special event on Friday, October 13th, 2017.

The event, entitled Changes in Mind, was part of Boston’s HUBweek forum. It was introduced by Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University, and James E. Ryan, Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education, and featured five short presentations by five Project Zero directors past and present: Howard Gardner, David Perkins, Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman (yours truly), and Daniel Wilson. Each presentation focused on different aspects of Project Zero work that have shaped contemporary ideas about learning.

A video of the entire event can be found here, and all of the 15 minute presentations are worth watching. My presentation, From Invisible to Visible (viewable below), focuses on the purpose and impact of making student thinking visible.

Although I don’t discuss Out of Eden Learn specifically, the theme of visibility is central to the Out of Eden Learn curriculum, which is designed to encourage students to make their thinking and learning visible in a variety of ways. In the talk, I use a range of images to show how instruction can be designed to encourage students to externalize their own thinking processes as they unfold, thereby creating a dynamic learning experience in which students’ emerging ideas help shape the knowledge they build. Check out a few of the images from the presentation below. Relatedly, I invite you to check out my new book on Slow Looking, which is very much inspired by Out of Eden Learn. If you are inclined to order a copy from the Routledge website, please use this discount code at checkout for a 20% discount: FLR40. I’d love to know what you think of the book!





Understanding Culture(s): Promises and pitfalls of Out of Eden Learn and other intercultural digital exchange programs
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The research described in this blog post was conducted by Out of Eden Learn team members Anastasia Aguiar, Susie Blair, and Liz Dawes Duraisingh.

Before participating in Out of Eden Learn, my understanding of culture was primarily taken from individual books about a culture … Since participating in Out of Eden Learn I would think, ‘Oh, this is not representative of all of the people of a country, not all things are necessarily like books portray them to be. Out of Eden Learn let me think about things from a wider variety of different perspectives.

– Out of Eden Learn student, Adelaide, Australia

In our interdependent yet divided world, how can we support learners to develop nuanced understandings about culture and to engage in thoughtful intercultural inquiry and exchange? A recent post describes how our interest in this question arose because numerous students reported appreciating learning about different cultures via Out of Eden Learn, even though this was not an explicitly-stated program goal. More specifically, we have been exploring the following questions: How do young people think about culture–that is, both the concept of culture and the cultures of different people? In what ways do online learning experiences with culturally-diverse peers appear to promote or hinder the development of their understandings?

An initial round of student interviews in the spring of 2016 helped us to clarify our aspirations regarding what students might learn about culture through Out of Eden Learn, and to inform our curriculum and research design. Then, beginning in the fall of 2016, we implemented pre- and post-surveys intended to capture shifts in our teenage students’ thinking about culture after participating in our program. We decided to focus on students in late middle school and beyond because we expected them to be both inclined and capable of thinking about the concept of culture, as well as their own identities and lives, in relatively complex ways. We subsequently interviewed 26 students via Skype to further understand their perspectives and experiences, and then analyzed the transcripts of those interviews to see how students talked about culture and their experiences on Out of Eden Learn. We are currently preparing a research paper as well as considering how to adapt our curriculum design in light of our findings.

In the meantime, as part of our commitment to develop practitioner-friendly tools, here is an overview that is intended to alert educators to some possibilities (and potential pitfalls) of intercultural digital exchange programs for enhancing older students’ engagement with and understanding about culture. The overview is a distillation of what students reported thinking and doing as a result of participating in Out of Eden Learn and what we noticed them doing when they talked about their experiences. It isn’t intended as a tool for assessing individual students.


PROMISES AND PITFALLS OF INTERCULTURAL DIGITAL EXCHANGE PROGRAMS FOR PROMOTING STUDENT UNDERSTANDING ABOUT CULTURE(S)

Our research suggests that intercultural digital exchange programs like Out of Eden Learn can offer students opportunities to:

CONNECT AND CARE. Such programs can foster respectful curiosity, a sense of connection to or solidarity with other young people, an appreciation for and knowledge of other cultures, and a desire to connect with peers across different cultural contexts. Young people say that they appreciate the opportunity to connect in authentic ways with diverse peers in a safe, social media-type environment: it appears that intercultural digital exchange programs can be powerful gateway experiences that leave students inspired to learn more about culture.

SEE CULTURE EVERYWHERE. Being exposed to a range of firsthand stories and perspectives can expand young people’s view of what “culture” means: they can come to see it as a complex, fluid, phenomenon of which they are a part, and as something deeply individual and personal as well as something associated with particular geographies or communities. While foods, fashions, and local traditions, for example, are recurring and welcome topics of discussion on Out of Eden Learn, many students pick up on other, subtler aspects of culture, such as communication styles, prevailing cultural values and behavioral expectations, and relationship patterns across different generations. They also hear from students who experience cultural hybridity on a daily basis and/or come to see that there can be range of cultural influences within any one community or place.

(RE-)CONSIDER AND (RE-)COMPARE. For some young people, programs like Out of Eden Learn present an opportunity for them to actively consider the existence of different cultures for the first time and to compare their own culture and life experiences to those of other young people, be they their own classmates or students living thousands of miles away. For other students, it is more a case of re-considering what they thought they knew about different cultures and/or re-comparing their own culture to those of others – which may help overturn existing stereotypes or faulty assumptions (though may also lead to some of the pitfalls listed below). For all students, intercultural interactions can enhance their understanding of both commonality and diversity within and across cultures.

BECOME MORE SELF-AWARE. Programs like Out of Eden Learn can become vehicles for promoting students’ self-awareness of their own perspectives and why and how they might be similar and/or different to those of people living in other cultural contexts. The opportunity to (re)consider and (re)compare their own and other cultures can help students to situate their own lives, identities, and values relative to other students and to reflect on the ways in which they themselves are shaped at least in part by particular cultural influences or expectations.

THOUGH BEWARE … THE THREE ‘O’s’

Even while engaging in the opportunities listed above, students may also write or say things that reflect the following pitfalls:

OVER-GENERALIZATIONS. Students can at times default to single stories, make sweeping or vague statements about their own or other people’s cultures, or gloss over similarities and/or differences among different cultures and different individuals. At times, it can seem as if students have replaced a previous single story about a culture with a new one that is based on a single interaction with a peer on the Out of Eden Learn platform. Recognizing the complexity and diversity of cultures can be a useful antidote to this tendency.

OVERCONFIDENCE. Relatedly, students can lack appropriate humility about their own knowledge, over-assert themselves as representatives of other people, 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 other cultures and how well they understand or can take on the perspective of people from different cultural backgrounds. In our estimation, learning about culture is better viewed as a challenging, lifelong journey, albeit an exciting and enriching one.

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 from affluent contexts talk about people who have featured in Paul Salopek’s reporting, but it can also happen when they talk about peers on the Out of Eden Learn platform. Finding the balance between thoughtful compassion and inappropriate pity is not easy, but paying close attention to context can help.


In reality, the categories in the overview overlap with one another. There are also many gray areas where it isn’t clear for example, when excitement and enthusiasm about global cultural exchange crosses the line into exaggerated confidence about how much students think they know or can know about other people’s cultures. As I have noted previously–when writing about cultural perspective taking–there are certainly risks attached with programs such as Out of Eden Learn. However, to my mind, it is indefensible to do nothing to promote intercultural understanding and exchange, particularly at this moment in our human history. To summarize, let’s make a concerted effort to invite young people, and ourselves, to:

Agency by Design in Translation
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“Egun on.” “Buenos dias.” “Good morning.”

A morning greeting in three languages is an appropriate way to start each professional development day in Bilbao, the largest city in Basque Country, Spain.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend three days with educators from Bilbao to focus on two Project Zero (PZ) frameworks: Agency by Design and Artful Thinking.

Begoñazpi Ikastola hosted the event, for over 100 Pre-K – 12th grade educators, from several of their network schools. Sergio Fernández, the professional development coordinator at the school, hoped that teachers would engage with PZ frameworks that would further support incorporating art, design, and maker-centered learning into their existing practices of hands-on and project based learning.

Courses at Begoñazpi Ikastola are taught in Basque, Spanish, or English. In order to accommodate my lack of fluency in Basque and Spanish, translators supported our learning throughout the three days. The Agency by Design team is grateful for our PZ colleagues, Patricia León Agustí and María Ximena Barrera, who translated four of the Agency by Design thinking routines into Spanish and we are excited to be able to share those translations on our thinking routines page along with a few ways we experimented with the Agency by Design framework over the three days in this post.

Where frameworks intersect:

One natural intersection for Artful Thinking and Agency by Design is through the practice of using thinking routines to build specific thinking dispositions. The Parts, Purposes, Complexities (PPC) thinking routine was developed, over a decade ago, as part of the Artful Thinking framework. A useful strategy for looking closely at art, it has been “upcycled” or repurposed for Agency by Design because it also provides a highly effective practice for looking closely at the design of objects and systems.

Euskal Museoa, a museum of ethnography and the history of Basque people in Bilbao, graciously hosted us for the afternoon of our first day. Images, photos, documents, artifacts, and dioramas from Basque life provided compelling entry points to consider broader systems.

Educators look closely and explore the complexity of the Euskal Museoa.

Educators look closely and explore the complexity of the Euskal Museoa.

A larger-than-life parade puppet in the Euskal Museoa in Bilbao.

A larger-than-life parade puppet in the Euskal Museoa in Bilbao.

Looking closely and exploring the complexity of a diorama at the Euskal Museoa.

Looking closely and exploring the complexity of a diorama at the Euskal Museoa.

Additional thinking routines: Parts, People, Interactions and Think, Feel, Care have been designed to support the analysis of systems in a variety of contexts. Dioramas depicting traditional ironworks or larger-than-life parade puppets are excellent specimens for exploring the complexity of historical and contemporary systems that are a part of Basque life.

PPC, or Partes, Propósitos, Complejidades was also employed during day two when we did a deep dive into the capacities of the Agency by Design framework: Looking Closely, Exploring Complexity, and Finding Opportunity. We began the day by looking closely at everyday objects and exploring the complexity of those seemingly simple items.

Using technology to engage in a parts, purposes, complexities thinking routine.

Using technology to engage in a partes, propósitos, complejidades thinking routine.

Moving into the third capacity in the Agency by Design framework: Finding Opportunity, educators engaged in a materials exploration through redesigning everyday items like wallets as well as iconic sculptural pieces from Bilbao like Louise Bourgeois’ Maman.

Redesigning wallets with educators after using the parts, purposes, complexities thinking routine.

Redesigning wallets with educators after using the partes, propósitos, complejidades thinking routine.

Educators found the opportunity to use aluminum foil to recreate Louise Bourgeois's iconic "Maman" sculpture.

Educators found the opportunity to use aluminum foil to redesign Louise Bourgeois’s iconic “Maman” sculpture.

Design tags were used as another way to Find Opportunity. Educators carefully considered redesigning the translator booth (we learned from our translators that it can be a very hot place to sit all day) and considered a possible redesign of the sliding doors in the chapel room where we were working.

Educators used design tags to find opportunity.

Educators used design tags to find opportunity.

Looking closely and exploring the complexity of a translation booth.

Looking closely and exploring the complexity of a translation booth.

Thanks again to all of our friends who helped to make these days a success and to our new friends from Bilbao. Hopefully we can share Basque translations of our thinking routines—along with those from other languages—in the future!

In the meantime, we encourage you to share the Spanish translations of the Agency by Design thinking routines—and to please let us know if you are interested in translating these thinking routines into other languages. We’d be delighted for you to do so!

Eskerrik asko. Gracias. Thank you!

Introducing the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellowship
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By guest author Brooke Toczylowski, Lead Coordinator and Coach for the Agency by Design Oakland Fellows

Now that the school year has begun, and our research into documentation and assessment practices is off and running, we’re excited to welcome the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellowship cohort, a group of 28 educators from around the San Francisco Bay Area. This group will grow into a professional learning community together, engaging in ongoing inquiry around the project’s current research questions. In turn, we hope to learn from these educators, as well as their students and contexts, to inform how pedagogical ideas work in practice.

When designing a research project, it’s not just nice to have multiple voices in the room—it’s essential to learn from various perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Who we are impacts what we will create. The AbD Oakland Fellowship cohort is a diverse group of educators serving a variety of student populations, and from the beginning we’ve focused in on what this means for our work. To begin, we’ve taken a values-based approach to this research journey to best outline our own individual perspectives and values as they relate to documentation and assessment.

The public, private, charter school distribution of the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The public, private, charter school distribution of the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

By partnering with these educators, 93% of whom work in or with California public schools, we hope to shift mainstream ideas about what maker-centered learning looks like, who it’s for, and how to document and assess it. The maker movement has seen a large number of makerspaces in independent and charter schools, which is why it’s noteworthy that 72% of the fellows work in or with district-run public schools. Furthermore, 68% of the fellows work in district-run schools in the Oakland Unified School District.

The geographic distribution of the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The geographic distribution of the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The cohort represents 19 different schools and organizations mostly based in the East Bay, including Project H, ACOE’s Integrated Learning, and the Oakland Public Library. Only 3 of the 28 educators work in informal learning environments; most work in formal classroom settings.

Our cohort of fellows is predominately based in Oakland, a city of more than 400,000 people that is known for its racial diversity but also its income inequality; for example, 71% of the student body in Oakland public schools qualifies for free or reduced-priced lunch.

The distribution of students in poverty in the learning environments served by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The socioeconomic distribution of students in the learning environments served by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

Consistent with the interests of the Abundance Foundation, a major focus of our work is serving students of color in under-resourced public schools. Our AbD fellows work in schools that serve more than 5,000 students, who come from a range of backgrounds and learning needs, but who are predominantly high-needs and students of color. One notable data point: In the schools at which our fellows work 70% of the students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Additionally, 33% of the students in these schools are classified as English Language Learners, and 11% are classified with a disability.*

The racial distribution of students served by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The racial distribution of students served by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

As we embark on this second phase of research, we know that having a balance of grade levels and content areas will be important in getting a full view of what documentation and assessment in maker-centered learning looks like. To that end, approximately one-third of the cohort works at the elementary school level, one-third in middle, and one-third in high school.

The distribution of grade levels taught by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

The distribution of grade levels taught by the 2016-2017 Agency by Design Oakland Fellows.

Additionally, the cohort has a range of content diversity, including:

  • 8 educators who consider themselves maker, art, or design instructors
  • 5 math/science educators
  • 5 humanities and social sciences educators
  • 3 educators who teach technology courses
  • 2 librarians
  • 1 educator who teaches in a bilingual English/Spanish setting
  • 2 special education teachers

The AbD Oakland Fellowship cohort is led by the AbD Oakland Leadership Team, which comprises four educators working in a variety of settings. This team collaboratively guides the fellows in their inquiry with the AbD framework, and their exploration of documentation and assessment strategies for maker-centered learning.

Ilya

Ilya Pratt

Ilya Pratt is the Design + Make + Engage Program Director at Park Day School, the sole independent school represented in the cohort. Ilya has been a part of the Agency by Design project from its inception and has helped to shape the questions and research along the way, both as a teacher-researcher and project coordinator.

Aaron Vanderwerff

Aaron Vanderwerff

Aaron Vanderwerff is the Creativity Lab Director at Lighthouse Community Public Schools. He is particularly excited about collaborating with educators interested in adopting the Agency by Design framework to turn learning over to students in meaningful ways. Aaron has been integrating making into his teaching and school programs for the past 15 years. He joined the AbD Oakland team in 2015.

Brooke Toczylowski

Brooke Toczylowski

Brooke Toczylowski is an Art/Maker Specialist and Coach in the Oakland Unified School District. She was a teacher-researcher in the first phase of the Agency by Design project, in which she experimented with AbD ideas in her art class at Oakland International High School. In the second phase of AbD research, Brooke is the lead coordinator and coach for the AbD Oakland fellows.

Wendy Donner

Wendy Donner

Wendy Donner is the Education Program Director for the Abundance Foundation, the funder of Agency by Design. A former teacher and school administrator, Wendy has been overseeing the Bay Area based parts of AbD since its formation in 2012.

This project represents a strong collaboration between public school teachers, education coaches, and researchers. Both the Oakland Leadership Team and the Project Zero researchers are thrilled to kick off this year of thinking with such a diverse and engaged group of fellows, and we look forward to the work ahead.

For more information about this local group, check out the Who We Are section on the AbDOakland.org website.

* These numbers are based on School Accountability Report Cards from the 2014-15 year, filed with the California Departments of Education.
Recognizing, Reflecting, Contemplating: How students are engaging with beauty in nature through Out of Eden Learn
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This post was co-authored by Susie Blair, Michelle Nguyen, and Shari Tishman

One of Out of Eden Learn’s core learning goals is to encourage young people to slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others. If you are an educator who uses our curriculum, you may have found that students tend to appreciate this dimension of Out of Eden Learn, especially after they have experienced the curriculum activities that ask them to take walks in their neighborhood and document the everyday. Students’ enthusiasm for ‘slow’ has been quite striking to us, and several months ago we decided to do some research to try to understand exactly what qualities of ‘slow’ students especially appreciated. We did this by analyzing data from various sources, including student surveys and student work posted on the platform, and we wrote up an overview of our findings in a two-part blog post in September of 2016 (Part 1 and Part 2). Broadly, we learned that students point to a variety of themes when they reflect on the value of slow. One of these themes we chose to call “philosophical well-being,” which refers to when students make some sort of philosophical, “deeper” connection as a result of slowing down. For example, one kind of philosophical connection students often make has to do with the role of nature in their lives.  Another has to do with the role of beauty. Thus, these two themes became subcategories.

By refining our coding scheme and further analyzing our data, we noticed that there was quite a bit of—though not total—overlap between the “Nature” and “Beauty” categories. It appears that when students slow down to observe the world carefully, they are often drawn to noticing the beauty that can be found in nature. This seems to be the case for both students in urban as well as rural environments: Out of Eden Learn students find beauty in nature in settings as diverse as a dramatic sunset, a bird nesting in a window box, or a cluster of weeds poking through a crack in the sidewalk.

As shown in the diagram below, young people have much to say about beauty in nature, and their comments often fall along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, students express that they find the beauty of nature captivating; they notice details, and experience the delight of noticing. Mid-way along the spectrum, students take their observations beyond recognition and reflect on how their perception of beauty in nature shapes their outlook on life: As the student quoted in the diagram says: “It makes me stop, take a step back, and appreciate the simple things in life.” At the other end of the spectrum, students move from an appreciation of the beauty of nature’s small details to a contemplation of large universal themes.  

beautydiagram 10.5.17.png

The function of ‘slow’ in Out of Eden Learn activities is to provide a space for students to make their own observations and connections. No one point on the spectrum is better than any other; the spectrum simply illustrates a range of ways students become attuned to the beauty of the natural world. That they become attuned isn’t a surprise: Humankind has been finding meaning and beauty in the natural world for millennia. However, it can be easy to dismiss students’ experience in this realm as simple or unsophisticated. But as their ideas show, there is much nuance that they can bring to the experience. A question that remains for us is whether the slow experiences in the Out of Eden Learn curriculum encourage students to notice beauty and nature more broadly in their everyday lives. We hope so, but we can’t know for sure. It’s question we would love to explore through further research.

El primer evento en castellano de preguntas y respuestas con Paul Salopek // The first Q&A in Spanish with Paul Salopek
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Luz Helena Cano es asistente de investigación de Out of Eden Learn y recientemente se graduó del programa de maestría de Artes en la Educación de la Escuela de Posgrados en Educación de la Universidad de Harvard.

El viernes 16 de julio, llevamos a cabo la primera sesión de preguntas y respuestas con Paul Salopek. Nos acompañaron maestros y estudiantes que han participado en la versión en español de nuestro programa y también aquellos que se han unido a nuestros recorridos de aprendizaje en inglés pero que pertenecen a colegios bilingües. El rango de edad de los estudiantes que nos acompañaron está entre los tres y medio y los quince años y se conectaron a este primer Google Hangout desde Bogotá (Colombia), Albacete, (España), dos grupos de Buenos Aires (Argentina) y una clase en la ciudad de México (México).

Paul nos acompañó desde Biskek (Kirguistán) o “el ombligo de Asia” como él lo llamó, mientras hace las preparaciones necesarias para seguir adelante con el recorrido hacia la India. En su presentación nos contó detalles sobre su caminata e invitó a su compañero y amigo de caminata, Aziz a saludarnos y contarnos sobre el cruce de Uzbekistán con Paul el año pasado. “Es bueno reconocer que esta caminata no es una caminata que hago solo, siempre ando caminando con amigos y colegas locales que no solo vienen siendo traductores sino que son mis ojos para ver el paisaje y la cultura local y regional”, dijo Paul.

Muchas preguntas interesantes y profundas hicieron nuestros estudiantes a Paul. Por ejemplo, los alumnos de preescolar preguntaron por qué Paul no ha viajado a México o por qué hay guerras. También hubo preguntas por parte de estudiantes de secundaria sobre la familia de Paul, las barreras tanto físicas como emocionales y sociales que se ha encontrado en el camino y la formación de lazos con individuos o grupos en el camino.

Con respecto a esto último, Paul habló de que sus enlaces pueden parecer superficiales porque no pasa mucho tiempo con la gente, pero dijo que ha aprendido rápidamente a exponerse más fácilmente porque cuando va caminando a través de un “paisaje humano o una topografía humana”, se aprende rápidamente a exponer el corazón para hablar más honestamente, porque solo se tiene un tiempo breve para comunicar. “Las conexiones con la gente que me encuentro en el camino son muy significativas porque están muy marcadas por la generosidad y cada vez que alguien me saluda o me indica el rumbo o a tomar un café o un té es como una afirmación de este proyecto y se me pasa una palabra en la mente y es ¡sí!”

Aunque su recorrido a través de movimientos de refugiados y zonas de guerra en el Medio Oriente y Turquía lo ha puesto en peligro en ocasiones, esos incidentes son una minoría de los días de su viaje. Recalca que los recuerda muy bien porque son muy dramáticos pero insiste en que “lo más común es la bondad y la gentileza de la gente ordinaria que se encuentra en el camino”, sin importar la religión o la zona geográfica por la que pasa. “Me da esperanza, es una gentileza común a través de todas las culturas.”, dijo Paul.

Por otro lado, una estudiante le preguntó a Paul cómo hizo para tomar la decisión de hacer este recorrido y si fue un proceso largo o una decisión rápida. Su respuesta fue: “puedo decir que me he estado preparando para este viaje desde que niño, desde que cruce mi primera frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos. Fui a escuelas mexicanas, bailé bailes mexicanos y me enamoré al estilo mexicano, y lo que hizo eso fue abrir mi mente a cruzar fronteras no solo políticas sino de la experiencia humana y ese fue el impulso para hacer lo que estoy haciendo ahora. Yo diría que todas estas decisiones que tomamos en nuestras vidas están impulsadas muchas veces por impulsos que están un poco ocultos y a lo mejor muy antiguos también. Tomé la decisión en un par de meses.”

Otro elemento que descubrimos de la vida de Paul y que nos ayuda a entender su pasión por el recorrido que se encuentra haciendo fue la respuesta que dio cuando un estudiante le preguntó por lo que más le ha gustado de su caminata. Resulta que Paul nació en el desierto, al sur de California y en sus palabras nos dijo, “creo que algo de arena me entró a las venas porque me gustan muchísimo los desiertos y he pasado por muchos. En el desierto hay una increíble soledad; hay belleza muy sencilla, a veces una belleza muy dura. Pero el esfuerzo o nuestra tarea como reporteros e historiadores y también como humanos es encontrar ese tipo de belleza en todos los paisajes, hasta en las ciudades más grandes y frenéticas hay belleza, solo hay que encontrarla.” Un desierto que atravesará nuevamente en unos años será el de la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México. Ante la invitación de una estudiante de preescolar, Paul respondió: “cuando llegue a México en 5 años acompáñame a caminar”.

Entre otras maravillosas preguntas de nuestros estudiantes y las correspondientes bellas y sabias respuestas de Paul, este primer evento en español nos ayudará, como dijo Paul, “a unirnos todos, a tratar de comunicar mejor a través de las fronteras, comunicar a través de las culturas, comunicar a través del arte, de las historias que todos llevamos en el corazón, porque lo que yo he descubierto caminando de continente a continente es que todos llevamos historias que son muy comunes.”

Siga este enlace para ver el evento de preguntas y respuestas con Paul Salopek. ¡Es el inicio de una conversación que seguiremos!


Luz Helena Cano is an Out of Eden Learn research assistant and recently graduated master’s student from the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

On Friday, June 16, we held the first Q&A session with Paul Salopek in Spanish. Teachers and students who have participated in the Spanish version of our program and also those who have joined our learning journeys in English but who come from bilingual schools attended the event. Classes joined the Hangout from Bogotá (Colombia), Albacete (España), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Mexico City (Mexico). Youth participants ranged in age from 3-15 years old.

Paul joined us from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, or “the navel of Asia” as he calls it, while making the necessary preparations to continue with his journey towards India. He invited his friend and walking guide, Aziz, to greet us and tell us about his experience crossing Uzbekistan with Paul last year. “It’s good to recognize that this walk is not a walk that I do alone. I am always walking with friends and local colleagues who not only come to be translators but are my eyes to see the landscape and local and regional culture,” says Paul.

Our students asked Paul many interesting and profound questions. For example, preschoolers asked why Paul has not traveled to Mexico, and even why there are wars. Questions from high school students included questions about Paul’s family, the physical and emotional social barriers that he has encountered, and the bonds of friendship he has developed with individuals or groups along the way.

Regarding the latter, Paul said that these personal bonds may seem superficial because he does not spend much time with people, but that he has learned to open himself up more easily. When you are walking through a “human landscape or a human topography,” you quickly learn to open up the heart to speak more honestly, because you only have a brief time to communicate. “The connections with the people I meet on the way are very significant because they are marked by generosity and every time someone greets me or offers me a coffee or tea, it is an affirmation of this project, and a word passes through my mind and it is ‘yes!’”

Although Paul has encountered some danger along his route, such as walking through militarized zones in the Middle East and witnessing firsthand the Syrian refugee crisis and its impact on neighboring countries like Jordan and Turkey, dangerous incidents have been uncommon on his journey. He remembers them clearly because they were very dramatic but insists that “the most common thing is the kindness of ordinary people along the way,” regardless of the religion or geographical area through which he passes. “It gives me hope, it’s a common kindness across all cultures,” says Paul.

One student asked Paul how he made the decision to embark on this adventure and whether it was a long process or a quick decision. Paul responded: “I can say that I have been preparing for this trip since I was a child, since I crossed my first border between Mexico and the United States. I went to Mexican schools, I danced Mexican dances and I fell in love with the Mexican style, and what that did was open my mind to cross borders, not only political, but also those of the human experience. And that gave me the impulse to do what I am doing now. I would say that all the decisions we make in our lives are driven many times by impulses that are a bit hidden and maybe very old too. I made the decision in a couple of months.”

Another element that we discovered about Paul’s life that helps us to understand his passion for his journey was the response he gave when a student asked him what he liked most about his walk. It turns out that Paul was born in the desert, to the south of California. He told us, “I think that some sand entered my veins because I like the deserts very much and I have passed across many. In the desert there is incredible solitude, but there is also very simple beauty, which is sometimes a very hard beauty. But the effort, or our task as reporters and historians and also as humans, is to find that kind of beauty in all landscapes. Even in the biggest and frantic cities, there is beauty. You just have to find it.” A desert that Paul will cross again in a few years will be that of the border between the United States and Mexico. At the invitation of a preschool student, Paul responded, “When I arrive in Mexico in 5 years time, walk with me.”

Besides the wonderful questions from our students and the correspondingly beautiful and wise answers from Paul, this first event in Spanish will help, as Paul says, “to unite us all, to try to communicate better across borders, communicate through cultures, communicate through art the stories we all carry in our hearts. Because what I’ve discovered by walking from continent to continent is that we all carry stories that are common to all of us.”

Follow this link to see the complete first Q&A hangout with Paul Salopek. It is the beginning of a conversation that we hope to continue!

The iterative relationship between practice and research on Out of Eden Learn
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In December, 2014, I wrote a blog post called Research and Out of Eden Learn: Forging Our Own Path. Re-reading this piece, much of what I wrote then still resonates: we continue to strive to do research that is action-oriented, collaborative, and learning-centric, even if we ended up going down slightly different paths than we envisaged at the time of writing. This post reprises my discussion of the relationship between practice and research on Out of Eden Learn. It offers an overview of some of our current research interests and the ways in which research and practice iteratively inform one another in our collective work.

What kind of research do we do? We spend a lot of time developing, pilot-testing, and refining our curriculum materials and platform design. We also consider more broadly what we can learn from students about their understandings of the world, and the possibilities and limitations of online spaces to help them build on and develop those understandings. We implement pre- and post- student surveys, conduct interviews with educators and students, and look slowly and carefully at student work and the comments they leave for one another. The goal of such activities is both to improve the Out of Eden Learn program and to contribute to the field of education more broadly. Ultimately, our aim is to distill what we’re learning in ways that will help educators working in very different contexts (both online and offline) to design authentic, relevant, and engaging learning experiences for their students.

We are currently focused on the following themes, each of which we will expand upon in future posts.

Young people’s understandings of culture(s) and the affordances and limitations of online exchanges to promote those understandings. This research interest arose because we heard repeatedly from students that they were learning a lot about other cultures by participating in Out of Eden Learn – even though we did not use the word culture in our materials or stated aims. We wanted to find out how young people were thinking about the general concept of culture, as well as specific cultures, and what exactly they thought they were learning about them through our program. We subsequently articulated the kinds of nuanced and thoughtful understandings about culture we wanted to promote and have since continued to modify our materials to try to support the development of those kinds of understandings. For example, based on our finding that relatively few students spontaneously reflect on their own cultural perspectives, we are currently piloting some private reflection questions designed to help them synthesize what they have learned from being exposed to different students’ perspectives and to consider how their own social and geographic contexts influence how they view the world.

Young people’s online exchanges and their use of our dialogue toolkit. This research strand involves looking closely at how young people interact on our platform. We developed our dialogue toolkit because of the relative thinness of the comments students initially left for one another, which contrasted with the thoughtfulness of what they had to say to us in interviews. While our research shows that student dialogue has become richer and more extensive since we introduced the toolkit, we have also noticed that many students seem wary of challenging one another’s ideas or engaging in critical conversations. We are now developing and piloting three new tools designed to support students to forthrightly yet respectfully discuss differences in perspective or opinion. In turn, we will conduct further research to see what we can learn from student responses to these new tools.

Ways in which students can develop their understanding of human migration through intercultural exchange. As presented in a blog post this past fall, we are developing a pedagogic framework for thinking about how to engage young people in thoughtful ways around the topic of human migration. The initial version of the Stories of Human Migration curriculum represented an effort on our part to take the principles we established in our white paper for fostering thoughtful online cross-cultural inquiry and exchange, and apply them to engagement around a substantive, timely, yet potentially sensitive topic. We are truly excited by the thoughtfulness and quality of much of the student work. However, we have already modified the curriculum to encourage more students to develop nuanced understanding of, for example, the diverse structural forces and motivations involved in different migration stories, and a greater self-awareness of their own perspective and relationship to the topic – including how and why their thinking may have shifted by participating in Out of Eden Learn. Our findings have and will continue to inform the pedagogic model we are developing and future curriculum designs.

The piloting of a new learning journey on planetary health. This curriculum-in-development is a response to students’ interest in the natural environment and their relationship to it, as described in this recent post, which built on our research into what young people do when invited to engage in slow looking. The curriculum, which involves a collaboration between Out of Eden Learn and the Planetary Health Alliance, supports young people to look at the world through a planetary health lens—that is, to notice and appreciate complex interactions between environmental change and human health in their own neighborhoods as well as the wider world. As the pilot phase unfolds, we will examine the kinds of ideas and understandings that students develop – as well as things they seem to find challenging to understand – in order to further develop the curriculum and glean broader insights into how to engage young people in thinking about complex systems.

Looking ahead, we intend to maintain an iterative relationship between the research we do and the vibrant community, platform, and resources we have built up over the past several years. Indeed, the two aspects of our work are mutually dependent. Our research would not be possible without the real-world practice that is Out of Eden Learn. And Out of Eden Learn would likely be less effective at providing powerful learning experiences for young people without the contributions of our research. By thoughtfully enmeshing practice and research, we believe that we are well-positioned to make an original and substantial contribution to the field of education, particularly with regards to promoting intercultural digital exchange, helping young people to understand complex global issues, and developing effective pedagogic practices for today’s world.

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

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


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

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



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

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

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


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


 

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


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


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



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


They captured footage both in and out of the classroom.



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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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






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

-Juritzi Dona Montoya
Interviewee
Beaverton, USA

 

Watch the final video, Traversing Worlds:

Building a Maker Educator Learning Community in Pittsburgh
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By Guest Author Jeff Evancho, Project Zero Programming Specialist at the Quaker Valley School District

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Maker-Centered Stories

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

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

Establishing the Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making an Impact in the Maker-Centered Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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