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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Framing the Challenges of Peer Feedback

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

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

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

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

The Dialogue Toolkit: A Scaffold for Deeper Exchange

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

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

What We’ve Learned So Far

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

The Dialogue Toolkit in Online Communities: From Comments to Conversations

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

In-Person Interactions: Breaking the Ice in Peer Feedback

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

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

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

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

The research described in this blog post was conducted by Out of Eden Learn team members Anastasia Aguiar, Susie Blair, and Liz Dawes Duraisingh.

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

– Out of Eden Learn student, Adelaide, Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THOUGH BEWARE … THE THREE ‘O’s’

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

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

OVERCONFIDENCE. Relatedly, students can lack appropriate humility about their own knowledge, over-assert themselves as representatives of other people, or assume their own experiences and/or perspectives as the default. Some students leave Out of Eden Learn appearing to overstate how much they now know about other cultures and how well they understand or can take on the perspective of people from different cultural backgrounds. In our estimation, learning about culture is better viewed as a challenging, lifelong journey, albeit an exciting and enriching one.

OTHERING. We have found that some students tend to romanticize or exotify other people’s lives or circumstances, or make them an object of pity in uncritical and even disrespectful ways–presumably unintentionally. We have found this to be particularly true when students from affluent contexts talk about people who have featured in Paul Salopek’s reporting, but it can also happen when they talk about peers on the Out of Eden Learn platform. Finding the balance between thoughtful compassion and inappropriate pity is not easy, but paying close attention to context can help.

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

By guest author Brooke Toczylowski, Lead Coordinator and Coach for the Agency by Design Oakland Fellows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ilya Pratt

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

Aaron Vanderwerff

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

Brooke Toczylowski

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

Wendy Donner

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

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

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

* These numbers are based on School Accountability Report Cards from the 2014-15 year, filed with the California Departments of Education.

Luz Helena Cano es asistente de investigación de Out of Eden Learn y recientemente se graduó del programa de maestría de Artes en la Educación de la Escuela de Posgrados en Educación de la Universidad de Harvard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They captured footage both in and out of the classroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Juritzi Dona Montoya
Interviewee
Beaverton, USA

Watch the final video, Traversing Worlds: