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

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

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

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

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

Students carefully observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) Username created by student especially for OOEL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A concept web created by a 5th grade student in Chicago, Illinois

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is an overview of the curriculum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece stems from research carried out by Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Emi Kane, and Sarah Sheya, with contributions from the rest of the Out of Eden Learn team.

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

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

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

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

*Some students mentioned more than one effect.

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

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

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

Here are some concrete changes we have made:

Promoting reflection

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

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

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

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

You might want to consider sharing:

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

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

Promoting critical engagement with news media

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

Consider the following questions as you compare the two reports:

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

Promoting engagement and dialogue

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

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

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

By Guest Author Jane Jessep, an instructional coach for the Agency by Design online course, Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This 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.