A national dialogue has formed around gun violence, thanks to the efforts of very brave young people. The following video chronicles the story of my students using a maker-ed and design thinking challenge to create an object or performance to start a dialogue around the events and central themes in Kekla Magoon's award winning novel How It Went Down.
My instructional design process leveraged methodologies ranging from the human-centered design practices of the LUMA Institute, visible thinking strategies as outlined by Harvard School of Education's Project Zero, and the process of guided inquiry as articulated by Trev MacKenzie.
Our student products and performances were all inspired by the themes of Magoon's novel, including but not limited to the topics of gun violence, underrepresented communities, criminal justice system reform, racial profiling and the way that statistics (on race and violence) are reported, street art, and so much more.
Students built robots, recorded podcasts, created infographics and other forms of data visualizations, composed slide decks for presentations, and wrote spoken word poetry to share at a whole-school assembly. Inspired by the work of the students articulating their vision, many adults and classmates in other grades requested copies of How It Went Down and thus began an impromptu community book club.
The Fluency Project at Carnegie Mellon University's Community Robotics, Education and Technology Laboratory (CREATE Lab) presented powerful stories on building cultures of community around technology and making. I was honored to present our story as a member of the Fluency Project cohort at YOUMedia in Chicago, Illinois.
Getting Started: How might we add App Building to your curriculum?
- My work with the Fluency Project Cohort yielded tremendous personal and professional moments of growth. I also created a wealth of resources that we are publishing together. Here is a unit on challenging stereotypes that also encompasses app building. Please feel free to share, providing link to my site and attribution to me and The Fluency Project.
This is the latest blog chronicling my adventures with The Fluency Project. My students and I entered the world of virtual reality and exercised our critical consciousness by building apps in Fluency's "Inquiry, Case-Making, Advocacy" model. It's a longer than average read, though I can attest that I've been writing it over the course of the entire month. Those stolen moments of reflection have been instrumental in my thought process. So has the thinking of Anab Jain, the co-founder of SuperFlux and TED Fellow. As of late, she has reaffirmed my belief in the power we have to shape our own future. From this notion, agency stems. I hope you enjoy reading this post as much as I liked the month-long adventure of writing it with my students.
-J
Inquiry, Case-Making, and Advocacy - There’s an App for That Jennifer Lanas | June 1, 2017
To say that I was profoundly affected watching Clouds Over Sidra is an understatement. It was my first exposure to a VR documentary, and you can still see the indelible mark it left upon my soul. Upon concluding our summer residency, I went to Schenley Park to sit and collect my thoughts. Meditating upon Sidra’s story and that of the children in the refugee camp, I found it difficult to still the mind. My thoughts swirled around the empathic pull of this twelve-year-old’s narrative; I felt a stirring that welled-up from deep within, insisting that I must do something. Call it emotional velcro, or perhaps a VR inspired awakening? Either way, I was hooked. “My kids need to see this... Everyone needs to see this.” I feel as though I said aloud to no one in particular, save the squirrels in the park.
As the school year progressed, with our “Pittsburgh: Boom. Bust! Rebirth?” junior research papers in the rear-view mirror, the time had finally come to introduce my Cultural Literacy students to the enormity of the global refugee crisis. Together we would move into the final phase of our course and connect present day topics surrounding refugees and immigration within the context of historical inquiry. And so began our final unit: “Immigration and Historical Imagination: Looking Back, Dreaming Forward”. My students were embarking on the Inquiry, Case-Making, and Analysis model with the prospect of developing cellphone apps on one of the following four themes in this inquiry-based unit:
Before diving into these selections, however, I set-out to teach my juniors about the “inquiry, case-making, advocacy” model that so much of our work in The Fluency Project is centered upon. To do this right, to begin to use numbers and narratives in a meaningful way that starts conversations and drives change, we first needed to develop the skill of critically noticing.
(Photo Credit: The Washington Post)
The Art of Critically Noticing
They were taken with their faces--looks of elation, confusion, and sadness--to hear my students describe the above image from the Washington Post was to marvel at a pendulum of emotions as it swung through our learning space. At first, some were outraged that the majority of the refugees wearing lifejackets in the image above appeared to be able-bodied men. As I listened to their explanations, I coaxed them to continue describing what they noticed. At some point, a perceptible shift occurred, whereby a number of students raised the questions, “What if the men on the rafts are responsible for rescuing passengers tossed into the Mediterranean? Is it possible that some of the refugees who boarded the raft made a split-second decision to leave everything behind?” As our natural, human curiosity took over, my students found themselves hot on the trail of discovery.
Suddenly, even the most reluctant readers began to surreptitiously scroll through the news feeds and our vocabulary board filled with new and unfamiliar concepts such as refugee, migrant, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers. The art of slowing down, taking the time to critically notice, along with the use of photographs captivated my students’ imaginations in a deeply moving and personal way. Desperate to learn more, it was time to introduce my classes to the twelve-year-old Syrian girl named Sidra.
Virtual Reality: “Emotional Velcro”, “The Empathy Machine”, and So Much More
In the days leading up to viewing Clouds Over Sidra, I downloaded the UNICEF 360 app as well as Google Expeditions. During my prep one of my juniors, Jessiyah, dropped by to say hello. Inquisitive by nature, it did not take much to convince her to test drive VR using Google Cardboard. She spun about the room, delighting in the scene unfolding before her. As she sauntered out of the room, I could hear Jessiyah’s request to “borrow it for just one sec” trail behind her. I wasn’t worried, as I suspected that she would be back with one of her friends… Little did I know she would bring two, then three, then the second floor hallway became an impromptu VR lounge for juniors in their study hall, and a few whom I suspect were conspicuously missing from chemistry… Sorry, Robin! I tried to send everyone back in a timely fashion. Sometimes we just get caught-up in the learning process. It happens!
As we assembled for class the following day, many students already had informal discussions over whom would get first “dibs” on the Google cardboard and VR headsets on loan from the CREATE Lab. Eric Darsow was in our classroom for his weekly check-in with my Cultural Literacy group. Already knowing that Eric teaches classes in Java and GIS map-making at Community College of Allegheny County, he has taken the role of our resident expert and digital Sherpa in the world of cutting edge technology. I particularly enjoyed how students from all sections not only listened to him explain the science behind 360 image stitching, but also asked him thoughtful questions about the technology and the implications for its use. Before even putting on a headset, my students were plugged-in. For me, this was an exciting prospect that would only encourage more boundary stretching for my students to follow their curiosities. Chris Milk, one of the creative minds behind Clouds Over Sidra noted in his TED Talk that “VR is the ultimate empathy machine”. Beyond question, the moment you stepped into our classroom, or peered into the hallway, his statement proved to be an irrefutable truth. As Illah Nourbakhsh recounted to the Remake Learning Network panel assembled to preview the PBS documentary Schools of the Future, “Empathy is what connects the left brain and the right brain to the heart.”
The Future Does Not Just Happen… You Write It
The wide-ranging implications of teaching and learning with this medium goes well beyond the novelty of VR. As a learning community, we struck upon something very important that day. We need to be radically engaged in order for deeper learning to take root. This is just as critical for students as it is for teachers. Rich and varied learning experiences do not just happen, as one must be fully open to encounters with curiosity and wonder. Yet many times, we are guilty of opting-out of engaging. We need to wake up and seize the opportunities that present themselves to us. Our futures are actively being written by us--in the choices that we deliberately make and the passively accept. Yet, this may seem like a completely unfamiliar notion to the young adults entrusted to us at school.
I’ve often noticed that my students speak as though their future is something that just “sort of happens” to them. It is not a new phenomenon. Curiously enough, this is something that I have observed going on nearly a decade. The strikingly familiar sentiments echoed by my students attending a rural-suburban public school as well as an urban-ed parochial high school are probably similar to the refrains that you’ve heard in your own schools: Engage or disengage… does it matter? Read and annotate the article, or wait for the bell to ring… why bother? This is pointless...
As teachers, it pains us to hear these laments--to endorse them is to concede failure. Worse, to dismiss them is to perpetuate a failing system. Despite our most valiant efforts and most innovative approaches, we are largely failing to engage so many minds of this generation. By no means am I suggesting that VR is a panacea, yet there was something magical happening in our classroom the day my students Watched Clouds Over Sidra. Dare I say that there was a palpable sense of school having meaning, purpose, and value. It was as though my students picked up the pen and decided to author a page of their junior year and illustrate it in living color. They are actively writing their story… perhaps even dedicating it as a living prayer for children like Sidra.
Inquiry, Case-Making, Advocacy: There’s an App For That
My students are taking these experiences of building empathy and understanding for past and present asylum-seekers and using their “critical noticing skills” to build apps. Admittedly, at the high-school level, refining the Inquiry, Case-Making, and Advocacy model is still largely a work in progress. I have to admit, it is so uplifting to overhear conversations between students about “leveling-up” the quality of a question and whether it would be more compelling to investigate an issue using numbers or narratives. My heart swells--and others have taken notice, asking me about our “App Building Project”. But it’s not about the app. See, the app is a medium, just as VR anything else, by which a story is told. What makes it different from a graphic organizer? Well, few students get excited about publishing their graphic organizer or having the capabilities to text or air-drop a worksheet. Apps built on Code Studio’s App Lab can be simple, yet elegant means of making a case and initiating powerful conversations. In this instance, we are building apps that enable us to slow down and process what we are learning--to make connections with human beings facing extraordinary circumstances. It is at once a deeply moving experience as well as a cutting-edge addition to my Fluency toolkit. It’s the future… and if we engage our students in meaningful ways, they can and will be the authors of it.
We must find ways to empower ourselves and our students or else we all run the risk of burning out or fizzling out before reaching our potential. I have found my inspiration in the company of group of ragamuffin teenagers I am honored to call my students and a robust personal learning network called The Fluency Project… The story and future that we are writing will unfold in the days and years ahead. What is certain though is that as far as Inquiry, Case-Making, and Advocacy are concerned, there’s an app for that.
For curriculum to teach about the Syrian Refugee Crisis (including a curriculum guide featuring the BBC articles about refugees cited above) check out Global Nomads Group
"Paper-meets-electronics-meets-open-data" is an revolutionary concept fueling San Francisco based NEXMAP. With a mission to provide learners with readily accessible, hands-on experiences that "connect the principles of engineering, systems thinking, and creative expression", NEXMAP's Hack Your Notebook Project and Open Data / Open Minds initiatives open-up a new kind of #FutureReady innovation. It is this type of thinking that aspires to support underrepresented and underserved populations in developing the core competencies of creative confidence, problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration.
David Cole introduces the themes for the design-thinking workshop and establishes relationships with members of the Fluency Project on our Bay Area research tour. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)
Our Fluency cohort and team members met David Cole & Elisabeth Sylvan in the indie-industrial workspace of ManyLabs. As is the legacy of many fabled Bay Area / Silicon Valley start-ups, think-tanks, and entreprenurial incubators, this creative collective calls its home-sweet-home the friendly confines of a garage in San Francisco's dog-friendly Soma neighborhood. After touring all three floors of their facility, including the mindblowing, "data-driven food" aquaponics lab run by Eryk Maundu of Kijani Grows, we initiated our design-thinking workshop.
Eryk Maundu demonstrates how the arduino's sensors transmit nutrient information back to an easy-to-understand computer interface. Kijani Grows is a play on the Swahili word for "green", hence the idea "green grows". (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)
The aptly titled workshop "Numbers and Narrative" was broken-into three segments: a hands-on demo working with paper circuitry, an applied-ideation session facilitated by creative process worksheets (polished and beta-tested), and finally designing for data, or a glimpse into how experimentation and fabrication can lead to students collecting and working with data.
Elisabeth Sylvan emphasizes that science is an iterative process of asking and answering questions. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)
Three immediate take-aways:
ManyLabs and The Fluency Project share common goals around developing "habits of mind" and "fluency" around a "process-oriented" approach to Student Learning, Data Literacy, and Technological Integration.
In many instances it becomes almost too easy to become enamored of the technology, or maker-ed tinkering components and lose sight of the learning. A process-oriented approach to learning and constructing meaning with empathy at its core is a safeguard to losing sight of what matters most.
Pigeons vs Seagulls: A prototype fabrication and design project to facilitate student data collection and interpretation. (Photo Credit: B. Slezak)
Quick-fix approaches to educational disparities too often throw money and an illusive promise of new technology as a panacea that will cure underperforming schools.
Shiny new baubles are not designed to address systemic inequity. A pedagogical shift is necessary to ensure that we are meeting our students' diverse needs and cultivating a culture of curiosity that empowers students to take control of their learning.
Brett, Lauren, and I are simply transfixed as we develop ideas for our own data collection prototypes. (Photo Credit: J. Kaminsky)
Sound research and strong practices of teaching and learning drive innovation, civic engagement, and data literacy--not just in the classroom, but in all realms of existence.
We are helping to shape and mold the next generation of thought-leaders, innovators, and change agents. We want them to represent all of our communities and to design solutions to problems that they face, to answer burning questions that they have, and above all else, to see the power that they already have as vested stakeholders in our collective future.
How might we build inquiry muscle and cultivate a disposition of critically noticing? Authentic inquiry, case making, and advocacy are central tenants that will remake learning, transforming a system built upon compliance to one that empowers all learners to follow their curiosities. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)
Wow-- talk about exploring just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to come from this site visit and trip as a whole... This is just a first draft reflection while it is fresh in my mind. Already I am envisioning the educational implications of this type of design, fabrication, and data collection process in an interdisciplinary project. I dream of empowering my students in this manner.
My gratitude to our hosts, David and Elisabeth of ManyLabs, as well as the awesome CREATE Lab Fluency team, and my incredible Head of School at Holy Family Academy who pledged her support for me to go on this Bay Area tour.
In our work at #TheFluencyProject, we affirm that "relationships help create safe spaces, provide accountability, and open new learning outcomes." I was honored to present these thoughts as The Fluency Project toured YouMedia in Chicago.
The subject of the above slide deck is on forming relationships and building agency through project based learning. As an educator, there are few greater joys than sharing our transformative moments of student learning. The story of how two remarkable young women, Khashona and Daviona, are using young adult literature and robotics to develop empathy and start a powerful conversation on the affects of community violence on the lives of young people is a story on the promise of personalization.
When we provide students with the opportunity to author their own very unique stories in the classroom, learning becomes real, relevant, and engaging. Our ladies are still in the process of designing their robot, but already they've received some very encouraging feedback. Author Kekla Magoon even took to social media to give Daviona and Khashona a shout-out via Twitter. It's incredible what a little positive recognition can do to fuel students as they work through a meaningful design challenge.
Despite having just crossed the threshold of the first quarter, our enthusiasm is still pretty infectious. We are entering the time of year that we’ve looked toward with mounting anticipation, and perhaps just a modest amount of apprehension: project proposal and action plan season! Needless to say, everyone in Cultural Literacy III has something to look forward to over the next few weeks.
Cultural Literacy III students at Holy Family Academy are encouraged to explore literature and life… to utilize numbers, narratives, and the arts in order to tell powerful stories. (Photo credit: Jennifer Lanas) In quarter one, our juniors in Cultural Literacy III (Contemporary American Issues) read Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down and paired it with close-reading and empathy building techniques. Along with preliminary research and narrative storytelling strategies, our Holy Family Academy students ideated wrestled with real-world issues present in the novel and inspired by their own experiences. In turn, students submitted project proposals ideating upon these issues with the goal of bringing the story to a wider audience, promoting awareness, understanding, and empathy. Ultimately, to become change agents we must first be ambassadors of deeply personal stories inspired by literature and life. Keshawn is critiquing a proposal using the “think-puzzle-explore” peer-review sheet. Inspired by Agency by Design and Project Zero, this “Think-Puzzle-Explore” method of peer review yielded thoughtful, targeted feedback. (Photo credit: Jennifer Lanas) To evaluate each other’s work, we adapted a tuning protocol by Agency by Design. It is a systematic way to look at student work and offer feedback to reflective practitioners. My dear friend and colleague, Kristin Alvarez is a member of ABD’s Pittsburgh cohort. When she taught this to our Holy Family Academy teachers, I immediately began thinking of how I might be able to hack it for our Cultural Literacy students to use. The resulting activity yielded some of the best peer-review conferences that I’ve witnessed in my teaching tenure.
Our Holy Family Academy Juniors selected their own topic of exploration and the medium by which they would bring their projects to life. This falls under Trev Mackenzie’s definition of “Guided Inquiry”. (Photo credit: Trev Mackenzie) Admittedly, it is a challenge facilitating so many different projects among three sections of Cultural Literacy. In a few instances, I am coordinating meetings with teams of students spanning multiple class periods. Moving forward, we are utilizing at least one class period per week (70 minutes) as well as taking advantage of our flexible schedule that gives all juniors a one-hour block of lunch and Independent Learning Time (ILT) three-days per week. Some teams and individuals are more enthusiastic about continuing this process of guided inquiry and project-based-learning than others. These motivated teens are writing podcast scripts, blogging at home, and sketching-out plans for storyboarding mini documentaries or constructing robotics projects. In order to facilitate the project and continue the pacing of our contemporary issues curriculum, we have project benchmarks throughout the month of November and the early part of December.
Manor New Tech High School located near Austin, Texas is an example of a school pioneering a dynamic PBL model. Their story is featured in this video highlighting PBL success from start-to-finish. We are not quite there, yet… (Photo credit: Education Week / New Tech Network)
I would be a liar if I said that 100% of our students are on-board with this departure from the traditional “culminating project” model that we are all accustomed to. We spend one class period per week studying a mentor text or conducting primary source investigations in addition to the one period that we devote moving forward on our PBL goals. Considering that we only meet three sessions per week, it is imperative that everyone do their collective part to stay focused. I have to be a reflective practitioner and flexible in terms of timing and scheduling. It’s not as though I pitched the project timeline to our juniors and their joyous shouts of approval ensued a celebratory parade down Ohio River Boulevard… Had that occurred, I would request that we ride unicorns and invite sasquatch, chupacabra, and a leprechaun to preside over the festivities.
Botticcelli's Bigfoot will serve as the grand marshall of the parade celebrating teenagers applauding a school initiative that doesn't involve extended vacation and/or the addition of nap pods to the classroom. In all seriousness, my students really seem to enjoy this departure from the ordinary, but it is admittedly more work compared to what they were previously accustomed. (Photo credit: fullfrogmoon.com)
Without a doubt, I consider it a preliminary victory for our students to take control of the story of their learning. They are engaging in deeper learning, becoming experts in the topics that they have selected. I have become a student in the world that they creating--whereby they are expert researchers and designers of an experience that will educate others. At this phase in the process, our juniors are now looking for an authentic audience to share their work and expert knowledge. I could not possibly be more proud of our students. Needless to say, perhaps I have the most to look forward to and to be thankful for this November. This post can also be found on #thefluencyproject blog.
