How do young people use their cellphones to “speak back to political structures that were previously out of reach?” Casey Burkholder’s work with youth and cellphilming reveals how “young people are engaging in politics constantly, on and offline.”
A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a colleague who was complaining about his niece. “She never looks up from her phone,” he said. “When I was her age, I knew things about the world. I could fix things. I talked to people. I made eye contact with adults. I listened to adults when they spoke. Kids today don’t do anything. They just take selfies and make videos and text.”
I paused a moment and then said, “When I was her age, adults were lamenting that kids wore too much black, played with gender in disruptive ways, sulked too much, were generally depressed and didn’t work hard or appreciate what they were given.”
He laughed, and said, “Maybe…” in a condescending way.
I continued, “Look, young people are engaging in politics constantly, on and offline. If anything, researchers are acknowledging the vast stores of knowledge and ways of being in the world that youth communicate. In my own work, young people use their cellphones to speak back to political structures that were previously out of reach. I promise you, the kids are alright.”
“Yeah, but what are they actually DOING?” he responded.
I let this comment sit a moment, sighed, and changed the subject.
This interaction stuck with me for the weeks that followed. What is it, I wondered, about young people that previous generations find so threatening or impenetrable? Maybe it’s just that their ways of seeing, engaging with, speaking back and responding to the world is unfamiliar. And all that unfamiliarity is distressing.
Academics like danah boyd,1 David Buckingham and Rebecca Willett,2 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang3 have been writing about young people and the ways they engage and resist politically for some time now. Buckingham and Willett, for example, suggest that young people constantly make political decisions in their daily lives, from the things that they eat and the music they listen to, to the things that they wear. danah boyd explored the ways that young people create agentic communities and networks online. Tuck and Yang argue that the ways that young people resist can both uphold and confront inequities in society. Within this work on young people’s activism, political engagement, and media-making practices, I see opportunities to work with young people’s ways of knowing and documenting the world in order to speak back to these prescriptive and homogenizing discourses about youth. An example of these prescriptive and homogenizing discourses? Kids don’t do anything. Kids are always on their phones. Kids don’t. Kids just. And so on.
In my research, teaching, and activist practices, I work with cellphilming as a research methodology – where participants create short cellphone videos responding to particular prompts or community concerns in order to share (in my work, primarily) young people’s ways of knowing. In my doctoral research undertaken at McGill, I worked with my former junior high school students from 2008-2010 – ethnic minority young people who were living, studying, and working in Hong Kong. We created cellphilms about their sense of identity, belonging, and civic engagement practices in 2015, directly following Hong Kong’s youth-led Umbrella Revolution.4 For example, Katrina and Ann’s cellphilm, “Who Am I in Hong Kong?” makes visual the ways that they identify as Filipina-Hong Kongers, who were born and have grown up in the city, and who also experience feelings of otherness in the larger community. Sabi and Yuna’s “Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong” depict the ways in which ethnic minorities interact with Chinese people in public spaces, and the ways these interactions influence their sense of belonging as Nepali-Hong Kongers. Through these youth-produced cellphilms, I learned to see the ways that formalized, segregated schooling structures made students feel isolated in the larger community, but also that school served as a space where these ethnic minority young people created agentic communities that resisted feelings of isolation. We have shared these cellphilms through YouTube, on a group-controlled channel called We Are Hong Kong Too. Our Google+ description reads, “This is a sharing space for a cellphone video-making project exploring space, self, belonging and civic engagement with ethnic minority young people in Hong Kong. We hope to foster dialogue and encourage reflection about what it means to live, work, study, and grow in Hong Kong.”
Even three years after we had originally produced and uploaded the videos, new audiences are continuing to engage with the ideas and the cellphilms. This online space is an important example of civic engagement – demonstrating one way that young people can get together to speak back to the things that are written and said about them in their community. The We Are HK Too project continues on YouTube, through Facebook and other social media spaces, and its lessons have continued to inspire my own research practices.
Right now, I’m working on a project with young people in Wolastoqiyik territory – Fredericton, New Brunswick – called Think/Film/Screen/Change. This project is multidisciplinary, and looks to understand more about gender, identity, youth civic engagement and do-it-yourself (DIY) media-making in the context of Atlantic Canada. I’m working with young people aged 12-17. We’re going to make cellphilms to address community issues that matter to young people across the gender spectrum, committed to creating safer spaces for queer, trans, and gender non-binary young people.
The main focus of the Think/Film/Screen/Change project is to research with young people in Atlantic Canada by refocusing their everyday media-making practices – those selfies and videos and texts my colleague was so worked up about – to address youth-identified pressing social issues in this territory, including gender-based violence, poverty, water and food security, among other issues. These are the issues that these young people are talking about and these are some ways that they are engaging with activism and political engagement in their on and offline lives already.
The Think/Film/Screen/Change project seeks to understand a couple of key questions: 1) How might cellphilming deliver complex understandings of social issues and centre community experiences from participants’ perspectives? 2) How might these young people engage the public in community issues that matter to them through participatory exhibiting (e.g. organizing cellphilm screenings in community centres) and archiving practices (e.g. sharing and saving the cellphilms in online spaces, like social media sites)? Through the creation of cellphilms and an archive of these visual texts, the project will include the participants in media production and dissemination over time.
With the creation of cellphilms and sharing these texts in a participatory digital archive on YouTube, the research aims to create spaces for youth to “screen truth to power,”5 in response to traditional media that tends to exclude, other, or commercialize youth perspectives. The study is also innovative in that it aims to develop a participatory approach to the archiving of research participants’ cellphilms through YouTube, where each participant will have the password to a shared public channel. This practice will advance the development of participatory archiving practices in visual research, and deepen an understanding of what sustained and ongoing informed consent means in research. In particular, the study aims to highlight the rights of participants themselves to have control over their visual productions. Through the nuanced example of the participatory archive of cellphilms that will be co-managed by participants on YouTube, the project will provide a critical understanding of gendered and dissenting acts of citizenship through the example of youth media production as participatory political engagement. The results of the research will reach audiences both within and beyond the academy, and in so doing influence methods and practice with implications for youth-led policy-making.
The Think/Film/Screen/Change research aims to provide a critical understanding of gendered acts of civic engagement in Atlantic Canada through the example of youth media production as participatory political engagement,6 aided by the creation of a participatory archive of cellphilms on YouTube and girl-led public screening events. Speaking to the field of civic engagement, the study aims to provide a complex example of the ways in which young people’s civic engagement is affected by their intersectional realities. I envision the youth-produced cellphilms as an opportunity to speak back to structural inequalities and homogeneous discourses that seek to smother youth civic engagement. At the same time, as Tuck and Yang have argued, the findings from the study may also illuminate the ways in which young people assert themselves as civic actors, including ways that uphold structural inequalities and dominant discourses.
Each of these civic acts – even those that uphold structural inequalities and dominant discourses – in the process of the Think/Film/Screen/Change research will be examples of youth political engagement. It is political to get together to talk about pressing issues for youth in this territory. It is political to identify challenges and potential solutions to these issues by and for youth. It is political to create short cellphilm texts to share with other community members. It is political to organize community screenings. It is political to think about what should happen to these cellphilms over time, and to identify future audiences to share the cellphilms with. In each step of the research process, young people will be enacting civic engagement.
I would also argue that in their existing media making practices – those selfies and videos and texts and the things they like and they share (their own set of citation practices) – young people are being and enacting political engagement. To echo what Carol Hanisch7 said so powerfully in 1969, “the personal is political.” The personal remains political in 2018.
And so, I am writing this piece to speak not only to my colleague, but to others who work, live and interact with young people, and also to those who engage with youth only peripherally. When young people are homogenized through statements like, “Kids today don’t do anything. They just take selfies and make videos and text,” we deny them their intersectional, heterogeneous lived experiences. We refuse to acknowledge their ways of seeing, documenting, representing, and speaking back to the world. We suggest that our ways are inherently more valuable and appropriate. But I think, in making these assertions, we are making a big mistake and missing so much of what young people are thinking, saying, responding to and doing. All of this leads me to one sincere conclusion: the kids are alright.
Cellphilms from the Hong Kong project can be viewed on You Tube: “We Are Hong Kong Too.”
Photo: Courtesy “We Are Hong Kong Too”
First published in Education Canada, December 2018
1 danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The social lives of networked teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
2 David Buckingham and Rebecca Willet, Digital Generations: Children, young people, and the new media (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).
3 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).
4 The youth-led Umbrella Revolution occurred between September and December 2014, when citizens of Hong Kong occupied key commercial districts to protest the lack of democratic freedoms in relation to the 2017 Chief Executive Election. The movement’s name emerged from protestors’ use of umbrellas to block police-deployed tear gas. It is important to note that conversations about Hong Kong, democracy, and political autonomy from Mainland China continue to be expressed in the public realm, both online and offline, four years following the beginning of the Occupy Central movement – which blossomed into the Umbrella Revolution.
5 Svetla Turnin and Ezra Winton, Screening Truth to Power: A reader on documentary activism (Montreal, QC: Cinema Politica, 2014).
6 Henry Jenkins, S. Shresthova, et al., By Any Media Necessary: The new youth activism (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016).
7 Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,” in Radical Feminism: A documentary reader,edited by Barbara A. Crow (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
With the advent of social media, none of us can take our privacy for granted. The Privacy Commission of Canada says it’s critically important to teach students how to protect their privacy, exercise control over their personal information and respect the privacy of others.
By the time children start school, most have already figured out how to turn on the tablet, find apps on Dad’s smartphone and search the favourites tab for their preferred websites. But they still have a lot to learn about staying safe online.
The risks associated with connecting to the Internet have grown exponentially in recent years. From cyberbullying, sexting and child luring, to tracking, hacking and email scams, the threats can be daunting for many adults, let alone children and teens. At the same time, personal information has become a hot commodity as businesses seek to monetize our data. It has become difficult to discern who is processing our information and for what purposes and everyone, regardless of age, must weigh the benefits and risks of each product and service they use, each time they use it.
This is why it’s important that students become savvy digital citizens who are able to both enjoy the benefits of being online and avoid potential pitfalls. Young people need to be equipped with the knowledge necessary to navigate the online world and participate in the digital domain in a privacy protective manner.
“It’s one thing to know how to use the Internet, it’s quite another to know how to use it safely, securely and appropriately,” says Daniel Therrien, Privacy Commissioner of Canada. “It’s critically important that kids know how to protect their privacy, exercise control over their personal information and have respect for the privacy of others.”
Indeed, the importance of privacy education is something that was recognized internationally in 2016, when participants at the 38th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners passed a Resolution for the Adoption of an International Competency Framework on Privacy Education. The resolution encourages governments, and especially authorities responsible for education and other stakeholders in the education sector, to champion the inclusion of privacy education in schools and to advocate for and develop training opportunities for educators in this area. In addition to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), Canadian provincial and territorial privacy oversight offices attending the conference signed on to the resolution. The framework adopted at the conference, the Personal Data Protection Competency Framework for School Students, serves as a roadmap for teachers around the world, outlining nine foundational privacy principles students ought to know and understand.
Prior to the conference, the OPC, along with provincial and territorial privacy oversight offices across the country, formed a working group aimed at increasing youth awareness of privacy issues and risks, as well as the need to boost privacy education in schools.
“While there is a role for regulators, legislators, the business community and parents to play in protecting kids online, education is fundamental,” says Commissioner Daniel Therrien. “Teachers can help provide children with the tools and confidence they need to operate in the online environment safely and respectfully.”
To that end, the OPC, along with provincial and territorial information and privacy oversight offices, has produced a number of resources to help teachers spark a classroom discussion about online privacy and explore some of the issues and risks Internet users encounter every day. These resources include:
Understanding privacy protection has become an essential life skill. “By better understanding privacy communications, children will be able to make more informed choices about the websites they visit and the apps they use – skills that will benefit them well into adulthood,” says Commissioner Therrien.
To access and download the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s privacy resources for classroom use, including the graphic novel, lesson plans, videos, activity sheets and poster, visit www.youthprivacy.ca and click on “Educational resources for teachers.”
Find the Personal Data Protection Competency Framework for School Students (click on Documents, then Adopted Resolutions – 2016).
First published in Education Canada, December 2018
Teaching people to write is a bad idea! Writing extinguishes memory, stifles the free flow and development of ideas by freezing them in text, provides the semblance of wisdom without real depth, and, therefore, creates superficial and boring people. In short, writing destroys the discourse necessary for deep learning. This is essentially the argument Socrates made 2500 years ago to his friend Phaedrus, who extolled the virtues of a discourse on friendship written by the orator Lysias. Phaedrus had a copy of the speech with him and testified that Lysias had covered the subject comprehensively and, he believed, “no one could have spoken better or more exhaustively.”1 Socrates, however, disagreed. He had questions about several elements of Lysias’s argument, and without the author present saw no way to explore those. For Socrates, discourse (and therefore learning) was a living thing, a conversation in which participants could ask questions, press for meaning, and make arguments. Writing, he believed, stifled all of that by separating the author from his or her words, and, therefore, was anti-educational. What appeared to Phaedrus to be an educational innovation was, in Socrates’s view, a disaster.
I know just how Socrates felt. Digital media is often touted as a democratizing force and a boon to civic participation, but I have serious doubts. Whether it be reading the nasty comments of trolls at the end of news articles online, learning about the secret appropriation and misuse of digital data to manipulate public opinion and, in particular, electoral politics, or watching a vicious and superficial dispute on Twitter, my observations of civic engagement in the contemporary world leads me to a Socratic view of digital media: it is antithetical to informed civic discourse! And I am not alone. Writing in the Globe and Mail recently, British historian Niall Ferguson argued, “Sadly, over the past two years, it has gradually become apparent that the Internet may pose a bigger threat to democracies than to dictators.”2
While it would be nice to crawl into my curmudgeon’s shell and ignore the innovations of technology, I really can’t and still claim to be a civic educator. Socrates may have hated writing, but we know that, ironically, because Plato preserved his arguments in written from. Writing did not disappear because the Athenian philosopher railed against it; it became pervasive and most of us would agree it has not undermined thought or destroyed education. Similarly, digital media are here to stay and will shape our civic life in important ways.
That is not to say Socrates’s concerns about writing were all wrong. Writers do often treat important concepts superficially, use rhetorical techniques to distort arguments, and make very selective, and often inappropriate, use of evidence. In short, they always privilege a particular view of the world and often descend into propaganda. Furthermore, in many contemporary societies published written works are often imbued with an authority that makes them immune to critique. How many times have we heard the expression, “look it up in the book,” when someone wants to authoritatively end an argument? Socrates was right; all of these things, as well as others, make writing a potentially manipulative and dangerous tool both for education and citizenship.
On the other hand, writing allows us to expand the number of people reached by particular ideas and arguments. It often provokes us to reconsider old ideas and think in new ways. Powerful writing can and does move us, inspire us, and change us. Good writing brings us into contact with new worlds, and enriches our common humanity.
In the same way, digital media has the potential to broaden the human conversation by including more voices over multiple formats and platforms. It can put us in direct touch with people, cultures, and ideas from around the world, and allow us to express ourselves in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. Like writing, digital media also has its downsides. It can be used to invade privacy, provide a megaphone for hate, and reduce complex ideas and arguments to 280 characters. So, what are we as civic educators to make of this innovation? How can we help young citizens use digital technology to enhance their participation in civic life?
The way we have approached writing in education provides important guidance. Virtually all contemporary Language Arts or English curricula in democratic societies promote a critical approach to literacy in general and writing in particular. They take seriously Socrates’s concerns about the power of writing to shape discourse and understandings, often in unexamined ways, and call for students to develop understandings and skills to use the medium both functionally (to read for information, for example), and critically (to understand how the medium works as a social enterprise). The middle level (grades 6-8) curriculum in Atlantic Canada describes critical literacy this way:
Critical literacy is the awareness of language as an integral part of social relations. It is a way of thinking that involves questioning assumptions; investigating how forms of language construct and are constructed by particular social, historical, cultural, political, and economic contexts; and examining power relations embedded in language and communication. It can be a tool for addressing issues of social justice and equity, for critiquing society and attempting to effect positive change.3
Critical literacy then, is not simply the ability to read and write; it is an essential aspect of informed civic engagement.
In my view, we should approach digital media platforms in the same way, helping young citizens to use them both receptively and productively in critical ways related to fostering informed democratic deliberation and action. Recently I have been asked to review sets of competencies proposed for digital citizenship and have been quite distressed. I notice that they focus on two areas: online etiquette and Internet safety. The former concentrates on teaching students to be polite in digital environments, the latter on mitigating the dangers of cyberbullying, luring, sexting and the like. While both of these are important, neither is related to civic engagement or takes a particularly critical approach to working with and in digital media.
Ken Osborne made the point years ago in this publication that good citizenship involves much more than being a nice person.4 Below, I suggest two dark clouds and corresponding silver linings for fostering a critical civic work in digital environments.
Our digital platforms know us well. They collect demographic and personal information about us, continually track our online activities, and target our newsfeeds, popups and advertisements to fit with our evolving profile. This can be quite efficient as we are fed news from sites that share what the relevant algorithm calculates we’ll appreciate. I don’t get ads for acne cream and my granddaughters don’t get them for senior living. A few years ago, in a book and TED talk, Eli Pariser warned about this phenomenon which he called “filter bubbles.” They can make life more comfortable and easier, but they are lousy preparation for civic life, which is centred on engaging with others who come from different perspectives and backgrounds. Filter bubbles, whether created by online formulas or our own voluntary sorting of ourselves into groups and neighbourhoods of like-minded people, create barriers to effective associational and civic life, and are often fostered by uncritical engagement with digital media.
The silver lining, though, is that while Google and Facebook think they know us, they do not control us unless we allow them to. Digital media allow for the possibility of hearing from myriad others who do not share our worldviews and perspectives. Young citizens can be helped to cast off their filter bubbles, and both engage with people and ideas from diverse perspectives and cultures as well as use digital platforms to share their own stories. Two of my colleagues in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick, Casey Burkholder and Matt Rogers, engage students in using film and cellphilms to narrate aspects of their lives.5 These include navigating complex identities as minority individuals in an aggressively monolithic society, as well as struggling to make sense of and handle things like family violence, racism, and sexuality. I am an educated person and have read a lot about all of these phenomena, but watching and hearing these young people tell their stories moves me in ways that are much more visceral. My empathetic understanding is always enhanced, and that is a critical aspect of democratic civic dispositions. Digital media can isolate and insulate us from engaging with difference, but it can also enhance perspective taking and empathy, and make it possible to connect with diverse others more deeply and meaningfully than ever before. Good civic education will foster understanding of the former and facility with the latter.
In December 2016, Edgar M. Welch charged into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., with several guns.6 He was there to liberate children being held as part of a child abuse ring. Except there were no children there, and the sex abuse ring was a figment of the imagination created by demagogues and widely distributed on the Internet by malevolent or ignorant sycophants. This was a particularly vivid example of the potential impact of so-called “fake news” that permeates the Web. People and “bots” spread false information about politics, social policy, medical treatments, relationships, and just about every other aspect of human life. This information is absorbed, manipulated, and passed on by many others. We know, for example, that in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, fake rallies were advertised as a ploy to bring opponents of particular policies or candidates into the street in droves and exacerbate already simmering tensions.
On the other hand, digital media allows incredible access to the best ideas in the world. In a very simple example, I regularly ask my graduate students to email scholars whose work they are encountering. More often than not, these academics write back and frequently establish an ongoing relationship that takes my students deeper into the research areas they are exploring. They become engaged in cutting-edge conversations in their fields. That is only one of the possibilities digital media has to enhance our engagement with new and evolving ideas and phenomena.
While the dark cloud of “fake news” is exacerbated by digital media, it is not really anything new. Critics of democracy in the days of Plato and Socrates worried that silver-tongued demagogues could manipulate the mob in dangerous ways through distorting reality or presenting falsehoods. Citizens have always had to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff in civic discourse; while the medium might be different in the digital age, the mission isn’t. Students can be taught to ask some of the same kinds of questions long suggested by advocates of critical literacy: Who created this source? What is/are their purposes? What inferences can I draw from this source? What perspective does this source ask me to assume? What viewpoint is presented in this source? What does this source omit or distort? How is my own response related to what is presented by the source?7
From the beginning, liberators and charlatans have been part of the democratic process. It has always been, and will continue to be essential that young citizens develop the critical facilities to separate one from the other and to use digital media and other forms to engage in work for the common good.
Civics education curricula around the world credit Socrates’s fellow citizens in Ancient Athens with establishing the first democracy. The trial and execution of Socrates, grounded, Plato argued, in the manipulation of public opinion, demonstrated it wasn’t perfect. Democracy has evolved considerably since those early manifestations, particularly with regard to who is included in the civic polity. It still isn’t perfect, and many of the challenges it faces are similar to the ones faced in Ancient times. The project of civic education in the 21st century is largely the same as it was in Athens: helping young citizens deal with the complexities, nuances, and shifting nature of power and politics in a world that often prefers simplicity and certainty. The mechanisms citizens use to engage have changed, but the underlying project is the same.
First published in Education Canada, December 2018
1 Plato. n.d. “Phaedrus.” The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.1b.txt.
2 Ferguson, Niall. 2018. “Social Networks Are Creating a Global Crisis of Democracy.” Globe and Mail, 2018. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/niall-ferguson-social-networks-and-the-global-crisis-of-democracy/article37665172/.
3 New Brunswick Department of Education, English Language Arts: Middle Level. (Fredericton: Educational Program & Services Branch, n.d.), p. 103.
4 Ken Osborne, “Political and Citizenship Education: Teaching for civic engagement.” Education Canada 45, no. 1 (2005): 13–16.
5 For more information about this project, see Casey Burkholder’s article, “The Kids are Alright,” in this issue of Education Canada.
6 Cecilia Kang and Adam Goldman, “In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns,” The New York Times (January 20, 2018), sec. Business Day. www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping-pong-pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html.
7 Adapted from International Reading Association, and National Council of Teachers of English, Standards for the English Language Arts (Newark, Delaware and Urbana Illinois: 1996), p. 15. www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/StandardsDoc.pdf?_ga=2.55023531.123604395.1532439582-324293061.1532439582
Starting with the idea of the Internet as a metaphor for the mind and the construction of identity, Dr. Sam Oh Neill explores how, in the digital age, “schooling must reach beyond its old purposes and… become education.”
THE DAY WE went to Marshall McLuhan’s house, I felt the respect my father had for his professor as they talked in front of the television. At age seven, I was oblivious to how well McLuhan foresaw the impact of media and technology on social development and citizenship. Even years later, writing an article about McLuhan in 1985 under an assumed identity,1 I was yet unaware of how meaningful McLuhan’s message would become with the rise of the internet.
McLuhan recognized that “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”2 He would be fascinated with how social media validates this statement. McLuhan saw any form of media as an extension or enhancement of our biological selves; as an expression of our being. The interconnectedness the Internet allows is a metaphor for the flow of information transmitted through neurons via synapses in the brain. Artificial intelligence, learning machines and the Internet of things intensify this metaphor, linking the extended mind to the extensions of the body that media represent. In this digital environment the information of the mind is given expression within the world of things. The mind, though, is often unreliable, resulting in “fake news,” conspiracy theories, the making of meaningless “memes,” and people “trolling” others. McLuhan admitted that the global village was not necessarily the best place to be.
There is more information on the web than a textbook could ever contain. We can even watch talks with Marshall McLuhan. Along with useful information, there is the stuff of nightmares – things most humans keep locked deep in our psyches. There are also believable lies.
What is the role of educators in this brave new world? How do educators respond to a digital environment that chips away at their viability as the providers of liberal education? How do they respond to an understanding of 21st century learning, defined as our interactions with and through the digital environment?
The standard response of schooling: embrace the new media and bring it into the classroom. Students develop websites, create blogs instead of essays, or create YouTube videos of Shakespeare with mashups of popular songs. We log in to Bill Nye for a lecture on science, David Suzuki on the environment, and provide online assignments with Internet links. School boards provide e-learning, making school buildings seem obsolete. Some schools provide Chromebooks and teachers use Google classrooms to recreate the world in which students live, better monitor progress, more readily comment on work and potentially teach 24/7. When you embrace this media extension it also embraces you, but it has longer, more powerful arms.
To understand the path through digital influence we must deconstruct the metaphor of mind to media. Our brains are primed and ready for learning. The learning process begins with perception: our senses drawing signals from the outside world into our brains. These signals move through the brain via neurons and synapses: inanimate, unintelligent bio-mechanisms. Connections in the brain are made stronger through association, via perception, interaction and reflection. Through this process we create meaning, and through meaning the mind emerges and forms identity. This biological process of learning has existed unchanged since our evolution.
We humans are the nervous system of the World Wide Web. Each user of a computer screen and keyboard, every thumb tap on a smartphone, is a synapse in the global brain. Synapses make the connections. We send the neural signals through the network. It has only just begun and we have much to learn, but the learning process has not changed. We make meaning through connections, change the world through action and then make new connections. If the medium is the message, then the message is this process of connection and its place as a metaphor for the brain revealing mind. We must understand the process that develops mind and that forms – or deforms – identity.
But we are caught up in the content of the web. We see this in the fear of missing out (FOMO) which has people checking devices every second. The brain is always on. We have little time to make connections as we struggle to keep up.
This fixation on the message and not the metaphor is typical of schooling. In the curriculum, content is everything. Teaching in schools is primarily focused on the acquisition of course content that must be covered to achieve a credit. We fund technology in order to get access to the content on the web. When we give students Google, they search and cut and paste. Schooling prepares them for this process by providing them with answers, or leading them to conclusions needed to pass a course. There is seldom emotional connection to the process of schooling, so meaning evolves in environments outside of school.
Metaphors make meaning through relationship. The physical process of perception takes information from outside the brain and, through meaningful connections, constructs knowledge. We are able to create meaning by connecting disparate content in unique ways. This is the essence of metaphor. Through metaphor, one thing becomes the other, and learning expands beyond the confines of rote experience. The metaphor of the World Wide Web as human mind reminds us that the web is an expression of the mind. The mind is the maker of identity. The digital environment is an electrical extension of the biological process of becoming.
As a metaphor for the mind, the digital environment finds identity through our interaction as we express our identity through it. Identity is how we author ourselves in the world; we are defined by our actions in society with others: people, places, things and ideas. The issue of identity resonates in the realization that gender and sexuality are socially constructed. It resounds in every issue of racial experience. It reverberates in how we understand nature: as an endless resource to be exploited, or a living system of which we are one interdependent organism. And identity – who we are and how we develop – is deeply influenced by this new medium which pervades the environments in which we live. It is through the meaning of the digital environment as metaphor that we find the direction for schools.
There is more to 21st century learning than working with kids in the cloud. Students need learning experiences that develop a critical awareness of social influences on how they create meaning in the world, so that their identities are not misted by cloud and cuteness. Magolda3 informs us that 21st century learning outcomes require the development of “internal values that shape our identities and relations with others.” She refers to this as self-authorship. Self-authorship requires reflection on experience and a critical evaluation of thoughts and feelings about what and why we are learning within a community of inquiry. This communal reflection is essential in a world dominated by technology and social connections that do not require physical proximity. Self-authorship involves a shift from meaning-making structures dominated by the uncritical acceptance of an outside authority, socialized via schooling, to meaning-making developed through encounters with divergent ideas. When students realize their ability to develop their own systems of knowledge acquisition, and to define their own beliefs and construct their own identities, they become independent learners.
Learning is no longer viewed as a process of knowledge accumulation. It is a biological process through which we discover how to author ourselves. This is essential for the coming century because it develops flexible minds able to adapt to the changes we cannot predict. Technology provides a means for greater connection in a larger community of minds. Those minds are still emotionally motivated organisms trying to discover their way in the world. New teachers must know how to lead them through that miraculous process. They must understand human connection and the need for autonomous being, especially as mediated through the World Wide Web.
Educators must be involved in social-emotional learning (SEL) and understand their role in the process of becoming. They must do this to bring their students to a place where they can adapt to their environments. The content of learning cannot be the focus of education if we are to adapt to the changes technology brings. We must focus on why and how people learn and develop the process so that learners can learn anything when needed.
The move toward this way of thinking is already occurring in our schools. This focus on meta-learning is embedded in the foundational philosophy of differentiated instruction and assessment (DIA). DIA focuses the attention of educators and students on how the individual processes information from the world. The educator then assesses from the perspective of the student and the developmental process, not the acquisition of content. Meta-learning is also inherent in learning communities, especially those that focus on method rather than numeric results, and in the recognition of the importance of social-emotional development to learning development. Viewing learning as a biological process through which we form identity, and learning how we learn, is essential in the digital environment. It is essential because it demands a critical stance from the perspective of self and social analysis. It demands that we understand ourselves in interaction with others, which is at the heart of civic involvement.
Teaching from this perspective challenges teachers to challenge themselves. They must not only understand what motivates students to learn but also what motivates their own desire to teach. They must understand the purpose of schooling and make changes when it does not meet the learning required to adapt to environmental change. They must be able to teach students how to express who they are and what they know without being massaged into complacency by content distractions. Finally, teachers must engage in the process of authoring identity, both for themselves and with their students. A self-authored identity defines who we are by how we act in society with others.
We are at a critical impasse and the curve ahead might end with a cliff. The issue of identity engendered with self-authorship is central to the solutions that will bridge the gap between being and technology. New teachers must be able to teach to this issue and expand beyond the context of schools. Technology is already taking us away from the school context and into a global society that requires individuals able to create the world they desire. New teachers need the capacity to work within a more personal developmental paradigm for education, rather than the old socially reconstructive paradigm of schooling.
We are citizens in a shifting global environment. The digital environment brings us into close proximity with others, extending our lived experience in a media village full of disparate thought. Schooling, the reconstructor of acceptable social behaviour, must reach beyond its old purpose and grasp the metaphor of becoming that the digital environment represents. In so doing schooling becomes education, forming a society whose citizens embrace diversity and engage in critical conversations, even those mediated through small glowing screens.
First published in Education Canada, September 2018
1 S. Zero, “Misunderstanding Media: Towards a critique of high-tech culture,” Cinema Canada, February 1 (1985).
2 M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
3 M. B. Magolda, “Self-authorship: The foundation for twenty-first-century education,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 109 (Wiley Periodicals, 2007).
Makey Makey is an invention kit that can be used as an assistive technology that overcomes barriers and increases motivation because of its playful and user-friendly possibilities.
A number of years ago, I was teaching a class to enthusiastic certified teachers who were working on obtaining specialist qualifications in special education. One of my students had quadriplegia, and he insisted that I must look into a product called Makey Makey. I did look it up online, but did not feel motivated to investigate further – until I did. While teaching a series on iPads to group home support workers caring for, and teaching, adults with complex physical and developmental disabilities, his words came to mind. I looked more – and purchased it, and learned how to use it.
21st century teaching and learning highlights the constructivist value of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) inquiry: makerspaces, coding apps (like Scratch) and invention kits such as Makey Makey, which has garnered a steady stream of rave reviews in the STEM educational market as one the best tech toys.
What is Makey Makey? It is a deceivingly simple, hands-on tech tool created in 2012 by MIT graduates Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum. It’s an invention kit that “convert[s] physical touch to a digital signal, which is interpreted by a computer as a keyboard message.”1 Makey Makey Original, Classic, and Go all have the same design premise: teachers, parents and students can construct interfaces that turn conductive objects into computer keys and buttons. Alphabet soup becomes a drum kit, bananas transform into piano keys, and measuring cups turn into game controllers. “It’s a different way of connecting the physical world with the computer,”2 says learning expert Mitchel Resnick. Using Makey Makey as a standalone STEM or invention activity presents endless possibilities for student learning – and more! As it enters the mainstream, possibilities appear not just for curriculum and instruction, and but for accessibility.
How can Makey Makey change and improve the world of accessibility? Picture a student who has difficulty with pressing and clicking traditional keys. Or perhaps an adult with a hand tremor or visual disability finds it difficult to manipulate the tiny keys on a laptop keyboard.
Stephens, Chalaye, and Parkhouse (2014) used Makey Makey in a segregated school for students with complex needs.3 They saw improvement in areas such as cause-and-effect, trial-and-error problem-solving, interpersonal contact, and person-to-person contact. Lin and Chang’s (2014) study in a self-contained Kindergarten environment showed that Makey Makey could overcome barriers created by the students’ physical disabilities, such as waning interest in using traditional switches, and that the novel interface motivated children to increase their physical activity – both important attributes for this type of resource.4 Rogers, Paay, Brereton, et al. introduced Makey Makey to a group of retired individuals to empower and enable them in the world of technology.5 Their project focused on the power of interactive learning, playfulness, and exploration – experiences that learners of all ages can appreciate.
Makey Makey has few parts: a specialized circuit board, colourful cables, and small alligator clips. Users connect the circuit board and cables with clips. Then, the circuit board plugs into a computers’ USB port. Next, the other ends of the clips are fastened to items with a small electrical charge. You will be amazed at what you can use! Try chocolate, bananas, gelatin, tape, aluminum foil or:
These objects take on the role of “up” and “down” computer keys or other inputs, such as touchpads or mouse clicks, allowing navigation of the online world using almost anything in the “in real life” world that has even mild conductivity.
While accessibility applications are an “off-label” use of the invention kit, the Makey Makey website includes an assistive resource guide that offers many possibilities.
For example, a wheelchair can be used as the interface by its movement over two inputs. First, connect tin foil to a coat hanger hung on the back of a wheelchair and connect it as the ground on the Makey Makey device. Next, place two large tin foil squares on the floor and indicate what the function of each square is (e.g. up/down arrow keys, W A S D keys, or other inputs). Then, connect each square with the alligator clips to the inputs on the Makey Makey device. Now as the wheelchair is moved over each of the squares, the keys are controlled. Another example is found in Silver and Rosenbaum’s demonstration video. Makey Makey Classic is clipped to large chunks of play clay. Essentially, this clay makes large, pliable buttons for children or adults with fine motor difficulties or other motor challenges. From directional head movements, head tilts, shoulder shrugs, forearm or hand movements, or torso leans, using Makey Makey as an assistive device can open up a new way of interacting with technology so that new, exciting, experiences can be enjoyed. Another possibility: If a child is not motivated by or is unable to access traditional augmentative communication devices, MakeyMakey could be set up to widen communicative opportunities, by linking spoken words or short phrases to specific items.6
Always keep the voice and interests of the Makey Makey user in mind! Some further considerations include:
Makey Makey is a lower-cost alternative to other custom assistive technologies presently on the market. It has built-in novelty for the user since the input material can be changed easily and it is compatible with many web games and apps. This invention kit is hands-on, intuitive, creative, and encourages innovation. To learn more, check out the Makey Makey website, the vast number of demonstration videos on YouTube, or follow on Twitter at @makeymakey.
Photo: Makey Makey
First published in Education Canada, September 2018
1 Chien-Yu Lin and Yu-Ming Chang, “Increase in Physical Activity in Kindergarten Children with Cerebral Palsy using MaKey-MaKey-Based Task Systems,” Research in Developmental Disabilities 35 (2014): 1963.
2 Tom Cheshire, “MaKey MaKey: Who wants to use bananas as a computer keyboard?” Wired (blog), November 12, 2012. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-magic-fruit
3 Liz Stephens, Clare Chalaye, and Charlotte Parkhouse, “Exploring the Use of a ‘MaKey MaKey’ Invention Kit with Pupils in a Special School,” SLD Experience 20, no. 1 (2014): 10-14.
4 Lin and Chang, “Increase in Physical Activity in Kindergarten Children.”
5 Y. Rogers, J. Paay, M. Brereton, et al., “Never Too Old: Engaging retired people inventing the future with MaKey MaKey,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2014): 3913-3922.
6 Stephens, Chalaye, and Parkhouse, “Exploring the Use of a ‘MaKey MaKey’ Invention Kit,” 13.
Makerspaces are informal community or in-school learning spaces that offer tools and resources for community members and students to tinker with a mix of traditional technologies – such as cardboard, wood, recycled plastic, or fabric – and more cutting-edge technologies – such as 3D printers and scanners, robotics, laser cutters, open-source computers, microcontrollers, and sensors. Makerspaces can be found in community centres, libraries, schools, and other public spaces, including pop-up Makerspaces setup for single day events and mobile Makerspaces that reach remote populations. While definitions vary, there were an estimated 1,400 Makerspaces worldwide in 2016: 14 times as many as there were in 2006.
Evidence suggests that Makerspaces help develop practical skills that increase student engagement and prepare children for the 21st century job market. Whether repairing an old radio, knitting with embedded wearables, or building a robot, Makerspaces allow students to explore their interests, develop their passions, and thrive in the classroom and beyond.
Davidson, A.-L. (2017). You too can experience the “maker scream. Concordia University. Retrieved from www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2017/05/03/maker-scream-education-professor-saltise-winner-ann-louise-davidson.html
Davidson, A.-L. (2017). On Focus. Retrieved from www.linkedin.com/pulse/focus-ann-louise-davidson/
Davidson, A.-L. (2017). This Easter, Conquer the Impossible with Your Kids. Retrieved from www.linkedin.com/pulse/easter-conquer-impossible-your-kids-ann-louise-davidson/
Andersson, P. (2015). Digital fabrication and open concepts: An emergent paradigm of consumer electronics production. (Bachelor thesis, Umeå University). Retrieved from www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:822484/FULLTEXT0
Davidson, A.-L., Price, D. (2018). Does Your School Have the Maker Fever? An Experiential Learning Approach to Developing Maker Competencies. Learning Landscapes, 11(1), 103-120. Retrieved from www.learninglandscapes.ca/index.php/learnland/article/view/926/918
Lou, N., & Peek, K. (2016). “By The Numbers: The Rise of the Makerspace.” Popular Science. Retrieved from www.popsci.com/rise-makerspace-by-numbers
Fleming, L. (2015). World of making: Best practices for establishing a makerspace for your school. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Peppler, K., Halverson, E., & Kafai, Y. (Eds.). (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Volume 1). New York, NY: Routledge.
Peppler, K., Halverson, E., & Kafai, Y. (Eds.). (2016). Makeology: Makers as learners (Volume 2). New York, NY: Routledge.
Sheridan, K., Halverson, E. R., Litts, B., Brahms, L., Jacobs-Priebe, L., & Owens, T. (2014). Learning in the making: A comparative case study of three makerspaces. Harvard Educational Review, 84, 505–531.
Do you recall the unprecedented demand for technology “how to” sessions in the 1990s? I remember training sessions that were often packed over-capacity. Participants would even pair up and share one computer station while being guided through a demonstration of how to search the worldwide web or how to create electronic slide show presentations.
Fast-forward almost three decades. Training sessions are replaced by YouTube videos and other on-demand learning options. Technology is mobile and more accessible than ever before. Does this mean contemporary learning designs with technology now provide appropriate and meaningful learning experiences for students? Are we there yet? I don’t think so.
Recently, I was invited to unpack the term “technology-enhanced learning environments” (TELEs) and suggested TELEs can be defined as “complex learning environments that enable appropriate use of technological resources in order to continually enhance the conditions conducive to learning.”1 The emphasis is on appropriate use of technology. What is appropriate use?
Imagine the following scenario: The students are going on a field trip and will use technology to prepare a slide show to share highlights from the field trip and to demonstrate their learning. The slide show will be shared with the school community and other students who were not able to experience the field trip or learn about the given concept. In other words, the students will create slides to document and share their learning. At first glance, this may seem like a technology-enhanced learning environment, with technology being used appropriately. But let’s consider how this scenario could be improved.
When designing learning experiences, teachers may find it useful to consider the following five questions, drawn from the “Teaching Effectiveness Framework,”2 as a lens for strengthening technology-enhanced learning environments:
How might an expert in the field document experiences from a field trip? Consider how the curator, museum, operator, scientist, would use technology to document their findings or experiences in the field? Perhaps students could video record the fieldtrip while on location to create a virtual or augmented reality artifact, or a time-lapse representation of the experience with audio narration.
How can this work foster creativity, collaboration and innovation? How might the students combine their multimedia artifacts of the experience for others to use? How might the creations support learning for those who were part of the field trip, for those who were unable to attend, and even for audiences from other parts of the world that may be interested in the experience? Perhaps students could work together to capture multiple images for stitching, photogrammetry, or developing a photomontage that could be shared beyond the classroom.
How can a TELE support formative assessment to help improve the work while the learning is occurring? The teacher and peers can provide feedback on draft versions of the multimedia creations and seek guidance from experts (professional or amateur) in the field, such as videographers, photographers, fieldtrip personnel, etc. Might students also seek guidance from experts to develop criteria for high-quality work, and then use these criteria for assessing their work?
What might be a cause for students to deeply invest in the work, both emotionally and intellectually? Perhaps students could discuss the purpose for sharing the work and create a multimedia experience to take an active stance about a related issue that needs attention.
How does this design demonstrate the appropriate use of emerging technologies for learning and how these technologies are used in today’s world? Perhaps teachers could look for ways forward with learning designs beyond the slide show presentations from the 1990s. Next time you are designing or re-designing a lesson, consider how you might use the five questions provided as a lens for strengthening technology-enhanced learning environments.
First published in Education Canada, March 2018
Picture this: Eva, six years old and just starting Grade 1, is fascinated with the human body and how it works. Why, she wonders, do some people have a different eye colour from their parents? Why do the tiny hairs on her arm stand up when it gets cold, and why does skin swell and itch after a tiny mosquito bite? Why do her parents love the taste of seafood, when she hates it?
What is Eva’s teacher to do with all these questions? Many are simply too complicated to explain to a young child at a level she can comprehend (like recessive genes resulting in different eye colours). And as a recent immigrant to Canada, Eva still finds explanations in English tricky to understand. This makes personalized learning even more of a challenge for her teacher.
We, as formal or informal educators, have all faced obstacles in our teaching, from having the knowledge to accurately explain a wide range of topics, to having the patience required to continuously respond to those “yes, but why?” questions, and perhaps most challenging, to creatively illustrate meaning at an individual’s level of understanding.
Technologies – such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality – that have for decades been described in science fiction are now emerging in a way that may soon make this kind of individualized and infinite learning possible at any grade level and indeed throughout life.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) and Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) are two sets of buzzwords that often seem to be used interchangeably. However, AI is not the same as ML, and similarly, VR is not the same AR; it is worth clarifying their differences before we imagine their possible impact on the future of learning.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider “smart.” An example is the way your smartphone keyboard predicts the word you are typing based on the first letter and from the average frequency and proximity this word has to the other words you previously typed.
Machine Learning (ML) is an application of AI based around the idea that rather than teaching computers everything they need to know about the world and how to carry out tasks, it might be possible to teach them to learn for themselves, by giving them access to large data sets and letting them identify patterns on their own. So rather than creating a rule that tells the computer that the letter “t” in a word at the end of a message is most commonly used for “thank you,” you tell the computer to find patterns in an individual’s typing habits. This might indicate the person is actually more likely to write “thanx.” With the advent of the internet and the vast increase in digital information being generated and stored, computers are now able to delve into, extract and analyze (aka “mine”) this data and come up with structures and patterns that we, “smart humans,” may not even see.
Both AI and ML are methodologies that computers use to analyze data.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), by contrast, are means by which we can convey information represented by a digital reality (a sensory experience that mimics physical reality).
Mixed reality is the blending of the physical and digital worlds. Mixed reality is a spectrum; on one side, which we currently refer to as Augmented Reality, visualizations are overlaid on top of the physical world – think Pokémon Go. At the opposite side, Virtual Reality presents a digital environment that completely occludes your vision of the real (physical) world and transports you to a different virtual (digital) world.
In their most recent incarnation, AR/VR are presented on head-mounted displays: wearable devices that make users feel as though they are truly present in the virtual world. Head-mounted displays seamlessly replace the surrounding real environment with the rich sights and sounds of a simulated three-dimensional world. Coupled with auditory stimuli and haptic feedback, VR experiences are truly immersive and elicit perceptions and behaviours similar to those one would observe in real life. Users view and engage with content that has been created using software and special cameras to create a graphically rendered virtual world.
In its infancy, AR/VR were used primarily for military training (flight simulators), entertainment and gaming, and more recently in the media sector. As VR equipment has become increasingly affordable and available, there has been an incredible explosion of interest around the development of VR technologies and content, and now these are being implemented across various sectors, including healthcare (for things like phobia treatments), and also in education.
Imagine that as Eva grows older, she excels in biology, takes an interest in the health sciences, and decides to pursue a degree in Nursing. In order to graduate, Eva must complete a clinical placement – but local opportunities are limited and highly competitive. Travel is difficult as she also works part-time and provides care for her elderly grandmother. In the past it would have been very hard for Eva (and many others like her) to balance her responsibilities and complete her degree. In response to these growing challenges, and to give emerging healthcare professionals the opportunity to “practice before they practice,” post-secondary healthcare programs have started to invest in simulation as a part of their curricula.
Professors from the School of Nursing at York University have applied for funds to develop a Virtual Reality simulated Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment, to enable health-care professionals to practice and gain in-situ experience. VR technologies are of special interest to clinical education as they can effectively simulate experiences and afford controlled manipulation, which allows users to engage realistically yet under safe conditions. VR also overcomes some limitations of more traditional simulation methods (such as live actors), which are more costly and time consuming. With VR, one can create a wider range of clinical scenarios (e.g. hospital ICU, out-patient clinic, long-term care setting) that can be exposed simultaneously to a greater number of students. Furthermore, VR simulations can be repeated as many times as required to create the desired level of familiarity and appreciation of the different roles, skills and scenarios.
In another simulation project, the professors are working on a VR training simulation platform called “ScrubXchange” that helps build empathy and understanding for the different clinical roles and responsibilities in healthcare. It’s intended to help nursing students “live a day in the scrubs” of another professional or in another setting – perhaps in Eva’s case as a nurse practicing in a clinic in Botswana.
Imagine now that Eva dreams of working for Doctors Without Borders. It would good for her to have the opportunity to understand how her education in Toronto may differ from her future work environment; how the tools at her disposal may be different and how to best use them, and how the cultural and professional norms in another country may impact how she works and interacts with others. Through VR, she can be transported into a virtual but realistic clinical setting in Botswana. She will be immersed in a clinic, staff and equipment on the other side of her world.
In the last ten years, education has benefited from a real revolution – most schools and universities now have a functioning virtual learning environment like Moodle, Sakai, WebCT or Blackboard, and their benefits have already been well documented. In short, in addition to helping students (and educators) develop a skill set that is needed in the current marketplace, virtual learning environments can improve equity of access by providing greater curriculum choice, flexibility, breadth of experiences, and opportunities for every student to excel, including the geographically isolated, the disengaged and vulnerable, the gifted and talented and those with special needs.
Machine learning brings additional benefits and furthers those already afforded by virtual learning environments. However, the greatest impact ML would bring to education is one-on-one personalization: the ability to customize and adapt curriculum to the current knowledge, learning abilities and preferred pedagogical style of individual students, and do so time and time again so that students have continuity.
At York University, educators are looking to combine an existing e-learning platform, Daagu, with the power of machine learning. In its current form, one of the aspects that makes Daagu unique is that it encourages students to tag moments, elements, emotions, or conversations that have created a shift in their understanding, leading to an “aha” moment. With a large enough data pool, machine learning could build off Daagu’s embedded tags and pair up students who have similar or complimentary learning styles. The long-term goal of the initiative is to better understand how, and in what order, content and experiences should be presented for optimal learning, and to do so on an individual level. In other words, to begin to customize and deliver content to students in a way that provokes personal reflection and pushes them towards their own “aha” moments.
For example, let’s suppose Eva is learning about stitches. To help her learn which types of sutures and seams are ideal for different types of wounds, the program could first present Eva with a visualization of a quilt she made with her grandmother when she was a child. Showing how different thread and patterns are ideal for different materials, depending on their elasticity and the desired strength or flexibility, the program could then draw parallels to different surgery incisions and wounds, and which areas of the body need greater flexibility to account for increased movement. Finally, if it appeares that Eva has understood the basic idea, but is best able to cement a concept through emotional experience, the program would generate an interactive movie in which her grandmother trips in the kitchen and requires stitching around her knee. Eva is challenged to describe the motion of the knee, the type and size of wound and to suggest the most appropriate suture and seam pattern. For Eva, this approach is meaningful and memorable. Another student might be better taught in an entirely different way. This ability to learn from the users and provide personalized curriculum is the true power of AI.
For all its potential benefits, AI also creates opportunities for new kinds of misuse, and so we should proceed with caution. Where there is ubiquitous technology and a captive, perhaps naïve, audience, there is the threat of abuse. One obvious risk is the potential for privacy and security breaches, and of user data being mined and mishandled.
A big risk is for any country, system, organization or company to wield too much control over people’s education and learning techniques. Even subtle ways in which history is taught, what is included or omitted, can have grave impacts on society and politics. The fact that virtual education is easily scalable allows for more scalable misinforming. With machine learning computers, only a handful of content creators can have immense impact over many people. The more we learn about how the brain works and understand how people form biases, the more we realize how vulnerable we are to targeted presentations of inaccurate or biased views.
Finally, there is a valid concern that individuals will no longer know how to effectively communicate in person, or be empathetic towards the needs of other (real) people. Some argue that society is changing, the need for in-person interactions is decreasing and therefore the ability to foster what we traditionally recognized as deep relationships is no longer as important. However, if we collectively believe that there is something valuable in building face-to-face connections, then we have full control to design future tools to help improve the skills that are on a downward spiral. Much like the shift to improve the bedside manner of physicians, we need to make the teaching of communication skills a priority, alongside programming, math and sciences. We should thoughtfully design the next set of technology-based teaching tools so that they encourage rather than dilute our abilities to have meaningful conversations in person. If we focus on building AI and AR tools that encourage longer and more complex communication, incorporate visual, auditory, and sensory interaction (what AR/VR actually contribute), and provoke self-driven exploration and experimentation (what AI is able to generate), we have the ability to reverse the current trend.
Despite the risks, it is undeniable that we are entering an age of revolutionized education. With little imagination, one can easily see a future similar to that described in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel, The Diamond Age. The story features a young protagonist, Nell, who at the age of four acquires an interactive AI “book” whose sole purpose is to steer its reader (with whom it bonds) intellectually towards a more interesting life and to become an effective member of society. The AI book is designed to react to its reader/owner’s environment and teach them everything they need to know to survive and develop, personalizing every interaction to reflect their life, preferred interests, and learning style, and it does so without bias and with infinite patience and support.
We can look forward to the day when students have a truly personalized education experience that helps to drive both their professional education and personal development.
Photo: Valentin Russanov (iStock)
First published in Education Canada, March 2018
On Wednesday mornings, my usual spot used to be at a little table sequestered in the back of the library. I hid there because I meant business – the business of getting through stacks of sticky, half-soggy, kid journals. There I would sit, surrounded by the teetering piles, furiously racing to read, grade, and correct my students’ writing. One morning, a colleague found me in my grading fort as I was nearing the end of the marathon. As we chatted, I noticed that I was missing a few journals, which sparked the inevitable, “there has to be a better way” conversation. Well, as we would discover, there is in fact a better way: digital journals.
In my second year at a new school, I made an abrupt about-face and ditched the paper journals. Since making the switch, I have had the time to actually enjoy my students’ writing, taking pleasure in reading about an elderly character with hair only on the “east and west sides of his head,” or about the joys of a vacation on the “sky blue planet” of Uranus. It beats rummaging through sticky backpacks during recesses, searching for long-lost journals.
1. I made a post on Google Classroom entitled “Digital Journals,” and clicked the button, “Make a copy for each student.”
2. Students were then able to simply view the post (on any computer in the world!) and write in their very own Google Doc journal.
3. On journal due-date, I simply had to sit at my desk (not race the halls with an overflowing clunky bin and my two class checklists) and click on the post to scan each student’s document.
For the first few weeks, some students continued to write in their paper journals. I went old-school and graded theirs by hand during the transition.
Once we solved the most basic (but mind-bendingly stressful) issue of getting students’ work submitted, the unexpected magic happened. Gone are the days when the students simply scan their paper for a grade and maybe a sideways glance at the shiny R2D2 sticker they are gifted, disregarding my painstakingly specific suggestions for improvement. When reading journals, I simply highlight a section and make a “Comment” on their work. Before my students write a new journal entry they have to “Resolve” all comments made by me (as well as comments by their peers, if you are the kind of teacher who has figured out the elaborate dance that is meaningful peer feedback). They are accountable to correct all of their journal entries, and as a result, they are learning from their mistakes – and the proof is on the page!
My comments include basic grammar and punctuation corrections, vocabulary alternatives (tailored to their ability level), rephrasing suggestions and (here’s the kicker) links to grammar lessons. For example, I sent one of the boys a lesson on the difference between their, there and they’re and to another student, a Youtube link about how and when to use brackets (he has an aside for everything). I have also made comments as enrichment, explaining that the word “octogenarian” is another way to say “83 years old.”
Do my students delete four weeks of work in one haphazard keystroke? Yup. You will undoubtedly become well-versed in the “See Revision History” feature (and may get relieved hugs from 11-year-old boys when you magically make their work reappear with one mouse click!).
Do all parents love new-age digital journals? Nope, not all. But over time I won them over. For me the biggest payoff was during portfolio conferences. The students sat one-on-one with their parents and their iPads. First, they taught their parents how digital journals work and reviewed comments from the whole year. Then they took the time to read one piece aloud. Parents did not flip through their phones absent-mindedly while their children read; rather they were actively engaged in their child’s year-long writing journey.
This year, paper journals are not on my supply list. On Parent-Teacher Information Night, I will teach parents the wonders of digital journals right out of the gate. I plan to have last year’s parents give testimonials on the ease of using digital journals, so that this year’s parents will be ready to nix the excuse of, “I can’t do my homework, I left my journal at school.” Nice try, but not this year!
• Use the quick keys to create “Comments” (Ctrl + / for Windows/Chrome OS or Option + ⌘ + M for Mac).
• Use the “Topic” feature to tag your post as “English Journal” so it is easily searched by students.
• “File” / “See Revision History” restores all previous drafts of the text (including revealing the time the work was completed, perhaps 15 minutes before class started!).
• “Resolve” comments allows students to read your suggestions and to then fix the errors themselves.
• The “Comments Thread” reveals all comments made on a document so you can review all of your hard work throughout the year with one mouse click, even if comments have been “Resolved” by students.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, December 2017
Social networking sites such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram have changed the way students engage with each other and the world around them. A 2013 survey conducted in Ontario by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) found that 80% of students in grades 7-12 visit social media sites on a daily basis. While we need more research to determine how social media and mental health are related, 47% of students who reported using social media for two or more hours per day were also more likely to:
Helping children and teenagers build a safe and healthy relationship with social media means guiding responsible use of these powerful social media tools. Threatening to take away or ban mobile phones and devices has proven ineffective in helping students deal with online conflict and stress, and achieve a healthy online/offline balance. Instead, encourage critical thinking and moderation using the following strategies:
Jaimie Byrne. “Normal Teenage Behaviour vs. early warning signs of mental illness.” Friends for Mental Health. http://www.asmfmh.org/resources/publications/normal-teenage-behaviour-vs-early-warning-signs-of-mental-illness/.
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (2015). “Social media and student mental health: What’s the connection?” http://www.camh.ca/en/research/news_and_publications/CAMH-Discovers/summer-2015/Pages/Social-media-and-student-mental-health.aspx
Steeves, Valerie. (2014) Young Canadians in A Wired World, Phase III: Trends and Recommendations. Ottawa: MediaSmarts. http://mediasmarts.ca/ycww/life-online
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (2015, June). “Association Between Daily Use of Social Media and Mental Health Among Students in Ontario.” CAMH Population Studies eBulletin, 16(2).
Lin, L. y., Sidani, J. E., Shensa, A., Radovic, A., Miller, E., Colditz, J. B., Hoffman, B. L., Giles, L. M. and Primack, B. A. (2016), Association Between Social Media Use and Depression Among U.S. Young Adults. Depress Anxiety, 33: 323–331. doi:10.1002/da.22466.
Kross, E., Verduyn, P., Demiralp, E., Park, J., Lee, D. S., Lin, N., … Ybarra, O. (2013). Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults. PLoS ONE, 8(8), [e69841].
NORC at the University of Chicago (2017, April). “New survey: Snapchat and Instagram are most popular social media platforms among American teens: Black teens are the most active on social media and messaging apps.” ScienceDaily.
Boak, A., Hamilton, H. A., Adlaf, E. M., and Mann, R. E., (2015). Drug use among Ontario students, 1977-2015: Detailed OSDUHS findings (CAMH Research Document Series No. 41). Toronto, ON: Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Woods, H.C. and Scott, H (2016). #Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Journal of Adolescence, Volume 51, p. 41-49.
Ndasauka Y, Hou J, Wang Y, Yang L et al. (2016). Excessive use of Twitter among college students in the UK: Validation of the Microblog Excessive Use Scale and relationship to social interaction and loneliness. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 55, p. 963-971.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) recently declared “post-truth” to be the 2016 Word of the Year. According to the OED, “post-truth” relates to or denotes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
In recent years, we’ve clearly seen the confusion that results from so-called “fake news,” and the at-times devastating effects of misinformation. In December 2016, for instance, the spread of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory (which has been proven false), related to U.S. Democrats’ supposed involvement in a child-sex ring, eventually culminated in a man opening fire in a restaurant that was supposedly linked to the ring; the full account of the spread of the lie is traced on the Pizzagate Wikipedia page1 (note that Wikipedia articles are crowd-edited – this page was accurate as of February 8th, 2017, but may have been updated since then). Unfortunately, social media often acts as a vehicle for spreading lies; in particular, racist, sexist, and homophobic posts circulate freely and are legitimized by those who share them.
The digital spaces in which our students live, learn, and play are not immune to or sheltered from hateful posts and images. Consequently, today, perhaps more than ever before, we as educators have a serious responsibility to address social justice issues in online spaces – even if the resulting discussions are uncomfortable or controversial.
As teachers, we know that if misbehaviour isn’t addressed, students will quickly learn that the behaviour is acceptable. The same goes for the false or hateful content that kids find in the digital world. If no one speaks up, children will have no reason to question the hurtful things that they see – and no reason not to join in. When it comes to social justice issues, silence is complicity.2
Of course, educators can’t be present in every online space, but we can model ethical, justice-oriented behaviour in the digital spaces we do occupy, which could mean anything from posting about current social justice issues on a personal blog to sharing articles or resources that promote equity on a class Twitter account. We might also bring online spaces into the classroom for critique and comment, perhaps by screencapping a problematic Facebook post and working as a class to construct an appropriate response. Without these actions, we risk raising a generation of young people who have neither the skills nor the desire to fight back against injustice or to work toward a better world.
Digital literacy, and in particular the ability to discern whether an online source is trustworthy and accurate, has always been important, but as the Pizzagate example shows, it is even more critical in a post-truth world because the consequences of believing falsehoods can be dire. Misinformation and fake news can be used to perpetuate hateful and/or hurtful actions toward particular groups; for instance, the fictional “Bowling Green Massacre”3 was used by the Trump administration to justify banning all refugees and immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries. Additionally, as Garry Kasparov tweeted, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” That is, sometimes the spread of fake news is intended to tire us out to the point of no longer questioning what we are told, which can be exceptionally dangerous (look into the Milgram Shock Experiment4 for clear evidence of this).
Thus, as educators, we must learn how to evaluate and verify digital sources so that we can teach our students to do the same. This involves learning about and then teaching students tips and tools that can be used to identify problematic or false content,5 and bringing digital articles and images into the classroom for critique. For example, students might be asked to fact-check a list of terror attacks that U.S. president Donald Trump has claimed were not adequately reported by the media,6 in order to determine the veracity of the claim (hint: there are several major issues with the list).7 Of course, in order to bring these ideas into the classroom, it is necessary for educators to seek out, explore, and hopefully address these issues in online spaces themselves.
In a post-truth, digital world, it’s no longer acceptable for educators to sit on the sidelines claiming to be neutral. Hateful, hurtful misinformation can no longer be left unexamined and unchallenged. Rather, as teachers, we have the responsibility to fight back and to show our students how to do the same.
For more information about the EdCan Network’s Educator Well-Being: A Key To Student Success Symposium
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2017
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
2 http://katiahildebrandt.ca/in-online-spaces-silence-speaks-as-loudly-as-words
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Green_massacre
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
5 www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/05/503581220/fake-or-real-how-to-self-check-the-news-and-get-the-facts
6 https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/828768074031587328
7 www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/white-house-terror-attacks-list-isis-media-ignored-donald-trump-covered-widely-reported-bowling-a7566951.html
It started with a conversation about a couple of highly vulnerable learners whom we felt we could do better by. It led to a year of exploration that has not only sustained itself, but propelled us into another year of learning and celebration as we see the impact it has had, not only on the students, but also on the participating teachers.
In the 2015-2016 school year, I facilitated a Case Study Inquiry project for teacher teams (consisting of one learning services teacher and one classroom teacher) from each of our district’s eight schools. Supporting the project was myself, as District Principal of Learning Services, our SET-BC (Special Education Technology – British Columbia) District Partner (a learning services teacher who helps coordinate referrals and services from SET-BC), and our Technology Education Resource Teacher. A SET-BC Consultant also helped us to facilitate some of the training sessions.
• To put an extra lens of care toward highly vulnerable kids to increase their success with academic learning and improve their overall social-emotional well-being
• To engage the teachers in developing strategies that would benefit all of the learners they support.
Over the course of the year, teachers participated in ongoing collaboration, anchored by four structured sessions, where they explored whole-class instructional approaches as well as ways to personalize learning for individual learning tasks. We began in late October with an information session where we outlined the goals of the project and the expectations of participants. Four additional half-days were scheduled for November, February, April and May.
The evolution of the individual teams was really interesting to watch. Over the course of the year, the emphasis of the conversation shifted from a focus on what the students couldn’t do, to a celebration of their strengths and knowledge of themselves as learners. (See Figure 1.) There was never a moment where we “decided” to change our lens. A strength-based approach just grew.
What was responsible for this shift? How did these teams grow to know their learners so deeply, and move them so far, over the course of a single school year?
The conversation in our initial gathering was challenging. The planning team noticed that most of the data focused on poor student engagement and the challenges the teachers were having to adapt the curriculum in a way that met their students’ needs. We had very little data describing areas of strength that we could use as a springboard for further work. At the same time, it was clear that the teachers had chosen their focus students because they were actively seeking new ideas and strategies. These were hard kids to figure out, and their teachers were concerned about them. Helping the teams find a way to engage these vulnerable learners and include them in the classroom community became the most important place to start.
For our first full afternoon together, the Case Study team explored the ideas of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and differentiated instruction. Our district had been working with Shelley Moore,1 a consultant who is passionate about inclusion. Shelley talks about beginning at a place where everyone can access the learning, rather than teaching to the middle and adapting from there.
Using some of Shelley’s templates, as well as our own model, we introduced the concept of “all, most and some” in developing unit and lesson plans. Jolin Olson, Case Study participant and classroom teacher in a multi-age (8-10) program, explains:
“Planning in a multi-age classroom was almost overwhelming in the beginning, however if I structure my lessons according to Shelly Moore’s idea of “all, some and few,” the teaching becomes very fluid and all of the students feel involved and successful.”
Our goal was to provide whole-class instruction in a way that included all students, not in an adapted or “sit-with-an-education-assistant-at-the-back” kind of way, but in a “we-picked-a-starting-point-everyone-can-launch-from” kind of way. (See Figure 2.)
When we checked in with teachers a few weeks after our initial planning meeting, they reported that they were more aware of ways to include all students in lessons, but that they needed some tools to be able to do this in a seamless and sustained way. When we met in January, we split into three groups, and each facilitator modelled a whole-class lesson using the differentiated planning templates in combination with instructional strategies and technology tools. Our goal was to demonstrate how whole-class lessons could be moved into individual student work in an inclusive way. Strategies and resources were selected based on the feedback and questions we’d received after the first session. One group focused on reading response, a second on intermediate mathematics, and a third on secondary mathematics.
Three weeks later, the teams completed a survey to identify which tools were being used successfully and which needed more support or adjustment. The facilitators then joined planning conversations and visited the classrooms of the individual teams, to provide additional coaching.
Like most long-term projects, we hit a bump in the road. As we approached our April session, several teams were concerned they would have little good news to share. Some of the students had started off well, but had not sustained their high levels of engagement or success. The teams had jumped in enthusiastically with their initial changes, but we were working with structures and strategies that were new, and lessons hadn’t always worked as successfully as they’d envisioned.
Fortunately, these dedicated, empathetic educators weren’t stepping away from a challenge. We offered additional training and support, and the teachers tweaked and adjusted their approaches.
Our conversations continued through the spring, and for our final session in May, the facilitators moved from a focus on whole-class lessons to a focus on personalizing the tools for individual students. Participants were looking for ways to add additional layers and options for their classes. They were once again excited to share the progress made by their focus students. We had come through the period of frustration and worry, and now had much to celebrate.
“I have seen students become more in charge of their own learning… We introduced new tools to ALL of the students without suggesting which students should use which tool. We let them decide what would help them the most. There were so many ways that students accessed these tools, and this changed depending on what the assignment/task was. This is such an important step in them becoming more reflective about their own learning. It put them in the driver’s seat!”
Each session was designed to address the questions or concerns raised by the participating teams. At each gathering, we engaged in reflection and problem solving, and prompted participants to consider specific questions in terms of identifying students’ strengths and lagging skills. We explored teaching strategies and resources to support their focus students, and encouraged teams to work together.
“There were many students that this case study project benefitted in our school. In fact, students who were not even on our “radar” use the tools that we introduced on a daily basis. These tools have supported both their academic growth and their overall self-confidence in their own learning. It helped to create a voice for each student – as each student learned something about themselves as learners.”
Personalizing learning for the adults allowed them to personalize it for their students. For me, this is the true benefit of this project. We began with a conversation about meeting the needs of a highly vulnerable group of individual students. Today, we continue to celebrate and deepen our capacity to provide personalized, differentiated learning for all.
For more information about the EdCan Network’s Educator Well-Being: A Key To Student Success Symposium
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2017
1Shelley Moore, Blogsomemoore: Teaching and Empowering all students. https://blogsomemoore.com
One of the perennial challenges confronting small, rural and remote high schools is the provision of a curriculum program comparable in breadth and quality to that available to students in larger schools.1 Traditionally, the programs and courses that a school can provide are dependent on the number of teachers employed in the school and their professional qualifications, experience, and expertise. The low enrolment of smaller schools means there are fewer teachers on staff, and this limits the number of courses that can be offered to students.
In the smallest schools, the curriculum may be the bare minimum required for students to graduate, with few if any specialized courses in the arts, foreign languages, or skilled trades. In such schools, teachers will often have an increased workload and be teaching outside their areas of expertise – a math teacher, for example, may take on an English course or vice versa. In the smallest schools, teachers may have to teach two or more courses in a single instructional period. And although rural teachers are dedicated and work exceedingly hard to provide the best they can for their students, it is hardly an ideal educational situation.
The curriculum challenge is exacerbated for small, rural high schools situated in remote and isolated places. Living and working in a remote community is not for everyone. These schools have always had difficulty recruiting and especially retaining teachers in the areas of math, science and foreign languages. New math and science teachers are generally in high demand, and most prefer not to go to small, isolated places. When they do, they often stay only for a year; they see the remote school merely as a “stepping stone” to a more urban appointment. The high teacher turnover in such schools and the resulting lack of continuity is not good for the school, the community or (and especially) the students.
Newfoundland and Labrador is a province of small rural schools. In the 2016/17 school year there are only 262 schools, with an average enrolment of 255. The 165 schools classified as rural have an average enrolment of 144. Forty of these rural schools have less than 50 students, and half of them are all-grade schools providing instruction for students from K-12. The senior high school cohort of these all-grade schools is commonly less than 12 students per grade.
Student enrolment has declined dramatically in the last 25 years, from 130,109 in 1990 to 66,800 in 2016. During that same time period, the government has pursued a persistent program of school closure and consolidation. Despite strong community opposition and heartfelt resistance, 281 schools have been closed – the vast majority of which were small rural community schools. The rationale used for these closures was the purported enhanced educational opportunities available at larger schools – opportunities which, the government claimed, were worth the long and often dangerous bus rides students might have to endure.
These recent school closures simply continue a trend that dates back to the publication of the Warren Royal Commission Report in 1967.2 Clinging to the questionable belief that “bigger is better” when it comes to schooling, various governments have closed almost a thousand schools, mostly rural, since 1965.
However, one group of schools has frustrated education officials’ quest to totally eliminate small schools. These are schools situated in such remote and isolated rural places that busing students to a larger school in another community has not been possible. Some of these schools exist on islands with limited ferry service. Others are simply too far from the next nearest school.
Warren despaired that high school students in these remote communities would ever have access to a quality education. He suggested that the government consider creating residential boarding schools for them – an idea, thankfully, that was never acted on. Subsequent government reports3 recommended that a program of distance learning be developed as a way of delivering an enhanced curriculum to rural and remote schools.
By the late 1990s, the government had come to the realization that there were few small rural schools remaining that could be reasonably targeted for closure. A significant number (93) of “small necessarily existent” (SNE) schools would continue to remain open because it was not feasible to close them, given their remote locations. These schools had to be provided for as long as people continued to live in these communities. It was also clear that enrolment would continue to decline for the foreseeable future and that rural schools would continue to lose teachers.
In August 1999, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador announced the formation of a Ministerial Panel mandated to examine the current education delivery model and to investigate and recommend “alternative delivery strategies.” The premier of the day, Brian Tobin, stated his government’s commitment to “doing everything possible to ensure that all children in this province, regardless of where they live, have access to a balanced and high quality education.”
“Most alternatives,” the Panel would determine, “involve a form of distance learning… delivered by various forms of electronic media via what has come to be known as the “virtual classroom.”4
The Ministerial Panel report, Supporting Learning, was published in March 2000. It recommended that the government create the Centre of Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI). CDLI would function as a virtual school and would be responsible for the development and delivery of high school courses via the Internet to rural, remote and isolated schools. These web-based or eLearning courses would offer programs and courses that small rural schools were not able to offer on site because of insufficient teachers or teacher expertise.
Previous to this, the province had offered a very limited distance education program using an audiographics delivery system. The vision for CDLI was to be much more inclusive and eventually make available the complete high school program via the Internet. Any student who did not have access to a course in their brick and mortar school on site would be able to take it online in the province’s virtual school.
The Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI) piloted its first ten web-based courses in the 2001/02 school year. By 2004/05, CDLI was offering 35 courses with 1,500 student enrolments from 95 different schools.5
Since its beginnings, CDLI has developed its technology, eLearning pedagogy and course offerings. Today, it has a staff of 46, including program and IT specialists, a guidance counselor, and 29 e-teachers.
Currently there are 1,105 students registered in one or more of 42 senior high school courses that cover advanced and academic mathematics, sciences, English and French languages, technology education, social studies, skilled trades, French first language, and fine arts (both music and visual art). CDLI courses are delivered to 110 schools in the province.
CDLI has been judged to be successful by students, parents and educators. Students in rural and remote schools now have access to all courses offered by the Department of Education. The online courses are identical in terms of content, outcomes, and assessment to those offered in the province’s face-to-face schools, and the academic achievement of online students is generally on a par with those in the province’s traditional brick and mortar schools. Thousands of students have successfully completed online high school courses and qualified for post-secondary education.
There are a number of reasons for this success.
CDLI, as a small virtual school, enjoys the advantages that all small schools and organizations have. Most virtual schools, especially those in the U.S., are fairly large organizations. CDLI is focused exclusively on rural students in Newfoundland and Labrador; only students who are enrolled in a provincial high school can access the eLearning courses.
CDLI’s eTeachers are first and foremost subject matter specialists, many with Master’s degrees. They also have extensive training in eLearning pedagogy. Equally important, they are experienced teachers who are familiar with rural students and rural schools. They are in constant contact with their students and are able to develop an intimate knowledge of their needs and abilities. This kind of personal relationship is not possible in larger virtual schools, whose students may be anywhere in the world.
One of the most important and distinguishing features of CDLI is its substantial use of synchronous interaction between eTeachers and online students. CDLI’s virtual classrooms are delivered in two formats: synchronous (sometimes referred to as “online”) and asynchronous (sometimes referred to as “offline”). During the synchronous classes, students and teachers interact in real time.
One way this is done is through web conferencing. Blackboard Collaborate™ (sometimes abbreviated as eLive) is the web conferencing tool used by CDLI. It is the students’ online classroom, where direct instruction/interaction takes place between the e-Teacher and students. CDLI teachers deliver the curriculum mainly through this method and monitor student interaction, participation and progress in real time.
Depending on the course, students can expect to spend anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of their class time using this tool. Synchronous interaction makes an enormous difference to online pedagogy and closely emulates face-to-face instruction.
The asynchronous features of CDLI also contribute to student success. A class can, for example, break from the large-group session for independent or small-group work. Work on written assignments can be scheduled independently by individuals or teams. Thus the students enjoy a degree of flexibility in their activities. Students use CDLI’s learning management system, Desire2Learn, to coordinate group work, as well as to:
• email their classmates and instructors
• post comments and opinions to the discussion forum for the course
• access and submit written assignments
• interact with learning content, both in the form of web pages and multimedia
• view grades.
Finally, rural schools that are part of the CDLI family are required to have a team or teacher to provide support and assistance to students taking online courses. They work closely with the eTeachers to help students in any way they can. CDLI also provides its students with both synchronous and asynchronous academic tutoring.
For more than 30 years, researchers have claimed that technology-based distance education has the potential to make the size and location of a school irrelevant in terms of access to a broad, high-quality curriculum. The Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI) has made that promise a reality by providing rural students in remote schools online access to any course they need or desire.
Quality education, however, is not just a matter of access or delivery. The success of CDLI is tied to the pedagogical support provided to students, the quality and commitment of its eTeachers, and the appropriate mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication and interactions. With these features, it serves as a model of how a virtual school should function.
En Bref : Grâce au développement de la formation à distance en ligne de qualité, la taille et le lieu d’une école n’importent plus pour déterminer sa capacité d’offrir aux élèves ruraux des programmes et des cours essentiels. Cet article décrit comment, par le cyberapprentissage (E-learning), l’école secondaire virtuelle de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador (CDLI) donne accès au curriculum du secondaire de la province aux écoles rurales et éloignées.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, June 2017
1 This is a universal issue for small rural and remote schools.
2 P. J. Warren, The Report of the Royal Commission on Education and Youth (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1967).
3 F. Riggs, Report of the Small Schools Study Project (Government
of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1987); L. Williams,Our Children Our Future (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1992); R. Sparkes and L. Williams,Supporting Learning (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2000).
4 R. Sparkes and L. Williams, Supporting Learning, 9.
5 M. K. Barbour, “Portrait of Virtual Schooling,” Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy 59 (February 11, 2007).
6 Two main sources for information about CDLI used for this article are: www.cdli.ca (the CDLI website); and Michael Barbour, State of the Nation: K-12 E Learning in Canada (2004-2016). http://canelearn.net/research/state
“Today we begin dueling,” I said to my Grade 7 Science class on a cold February morning. Ambition, worry, and excitement swept around the classroom. I turned on the dramatic instrumental music I had queued up on YouTube and began explaining the rules.
Flashback to September, when my students take their printable Classcraft sign-up sheet home. They download the app on their phones and create and customize the avatar of their choosing. The app walks them through the entire process and by the time they are back in my class they’re ready for our adventure. They can use their character’s abilities on either a device after school or my SMART Board during class time. They complete quests and earn points to gain new abilities. In much the same way that Dungeons and Dragons offers a creative outlet for the imagination, my structure invites students to engage with the material in inventive ways every day.
You see, my classroom isn’t really a classroom. It’s a fantasy realm where my students are transformed into wizards, warriors, healers, and adventurers. I stand above them, the god of the game who rewards positive behaviour and chastises those who stray from the laws of my world. The portal to the game is the SMART Board, where my narrative advances and new challenges await.
In this case, each team chooses a champion to fight for them by answering skill-testing questions at the front of the class. For every correct answer, they gain experience to advance through levels for their character. However, leveling up means nothing without real-world consequences and benefits. Becoming a wizard means they get to cast spells during a test that give them hints. Warriors can go hunting, allowing them to eat in class, if they pay the price. Extra days to complete assignments, using notes during assessments, and now dueling, are some of the other benefits they can unlock and use.
These benefits go hand in hand with the threat of danger. Not handing in assignments, being disrespectful, or not trying are transgressions that can cause damage to their character’s health and/or kill the character outright. Sometimes I’ll catch students off-task and send a bit of damage their way. If they are a healer, they can to use their powers to regain some health. Otherwise, to resurrect themselves, my students must complete extra homework, go to math club, or do a dramatic reading from a textbook in front of the class – all penalties they try to avoid.
I always try to keep the game fresh with new concepts, such as today’s dueling. It is a simple review process that allows students to compete against one other to reinforce unit information. The kids love it. The imaginative frame of the game increases engagement exponentially.
Technology provides the filter to all of this: a backdrop that my projector can throw on the board, music to heighten tension, and a way to track and illustrate students’ progress. Gamification can be difficult to pull off if you don’t have the technology to log information about the game, the quests that the students are engaged in, and their characters’ progress as they advance. A simplified Dungeons and Dragons character sheet that the students manage themselves can track their character, but you, as the teacher, need to keep a running log or portfolio of their progress. I use apps and the SMART Board extensively. Apps such as Classcraft can log character stats and manage boss battles for you. ClassDojo tracks and rewards student behaviour over the course of a school year. Both are low maintenance and have free versions.
The key to using long-term narrative style or role-playing games in the classroom is that you never show your entire hand. Like real games, complexity should grow as the game progresses. I waited until February to begin dueling, right as student interest in the school year began to wane. Next month, a small adventure based around the Grade 7 Structures cluster will maintain that engagement. By the end of the year, all features are revealed to my students, and the game starts anew in the fall with a new grade and new quests.
For a simplified character sheet, see: http://bit.ly/2pcIRsA
And for how to create a character see: http://dungeonsmaster.com/2010/01/a-beginners-guide-to-dungeons-dragons-part-2/
To find out more about apps I use in my classroom:
En Bref : L’auteur décrit comment il tire parti des technologies et du cadre imaginatif d’un jeu de rôles pour accroître la participation des élèves dans sa classe.
Photo: courtesy Classcraft
First published in Education Canada, June 2017
With practical applications from the H’a H’a Tumxulaux Outdoor Education Program of B.C. School District No. 20 (Kootenay-Columbia)
This case study report examines how three key components of an Indigenous-centred program – land-based learning, spirituality, and the Medicine Wheel – have created a template for heightened student engagement and retention. Through these components, this report proposes recommendations for educators and administrators tasked with integrating Indigenous Worldviews into the classroom.
Developing a Growth Mindset in students and their teachers is perhaps the hottest trend in the education world outside of Canada. Originating in psychological science research conducted by Carol S. Dweck over thirty years of studies and continuing at Stanford University, it burst upon the education scene in 2006 with the publication of Dweck’s influential book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success[1] and has become a favourite topic in education faculty classes and professional development sessions.
The so-called Mindset Revolution, like most education fads, has also generated its share of imitations and mutations. Two of the best known are the Mathematical Mindset, promulgated by Math educator Jo Boaler [2],and a more recent Canadian spin-off, The Innovator’s Mindset, the brain-child of George Couros, a division principal of Teaching and Learning with Parkland School District, in Stony Plain, Alberta. While Growth Mindset 1.0, got little traction among Canadian policy-makers, the second-generation iteration dreamed up by Couros is increasingly popular among tech-savvy Canadian and American educators.
Legions of professional educators and teachers in the U.S., the UK, and Australia, have latched onto Growth Mindset theory and practice with a real vengeance. One reliable barometer of ‘trendiness,’ the George Lucas Educational Foundation website, Edutopia, provides a steady stream of short online videos extolling the virtues of Growth Mindset (or GM) in the classroom. The growing list of GM e-zine pieces @Edutopia purport to “support students in believing that they can develop their talents and abilities through hard work, good strategies, and help from others.”
Figure 1: The Fixed Mindset and the Growth Mindset (Carol Dweck, 2006)
Dweck’s theory of the Growth Mindset gained credibility because, unlike most educational ‘fads,’ it did emerge out of some sound initial research into brain plasticity and was tested in case studies with students in the schools. Leading education researcher Dylan Wiliam, a renowned student assessment expert, lent his support to the Growth Mindset movement when he embraced Dweck’s findings and applied them to building ‘feedback’ into student assessment. He adopted this equation: Talent = Hard Work + Persistence (A Growth Mindset) and offered this endorsement: “The harder you work, the smarter you get. Once students begin to understand this “growth mindset” as Carol Dweck calls it, students are much more likely to embrace feedback from their teachers.”
For much of the past two years, Dweck and her research associate Susan Mackie have been alerting researchers and education policy-makers to the spread of what is termed a “false growth mindset”[3] in schools and classrooms in Australia as well as in the U.S. and the UK. Too many teachers and parents, they point out, have either misinterpreted or debased the whole concept, reducing it to simple axioms like “Praise the effort, not the child (or the outcome).” In most cases, it’s educational progressives, or parents, looking for alternatives to “drilling with standardized tests.”
Dweck’s greatest fear nowadays is that Growth Mindset has been appropriated by education professionals to reinforce existing student-centred practices and to suit their own purposes. That serious concern is worth repeating:“It’s the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement.” In a December 2016 article in The Atlantic, she conceded that it was being used in precisely that way, in too many classrooms, and it amounted to “blanketing everyone with praise, whether deserved or not.”[4]
A “false growth mindset” arises, according to Dweck, when educators use the term too liberally and simply do not really understand that it’s intended to motivate students to work harder and demonstrate more resilience in overcoming setbacks. “The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them,” she reminds us. “It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter. “Far too many growth mindset disciples, Dweck now recognizes,reverted to praising students rather than taking “the long and difficult journey” in the learning process and showing “how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning.”
The Canadian mutation, George Couros’ The Innovator’s Mindset [5] seeks to extend Dweck’s original theory into the domain of technology and creativity. Troubled by the limitations of her model and its explicit emphasis on mastery of knowledge and skills, he made an “awesome” (his word) discovery that GM could be a powerful leadership tool for advancing “continuous creation.” In his mutation of the theory, the binary “fixed” vs. “growth” model morphs into a more advanced stage, termed the “innovator’s mindset.” In his fertile and creative mind, it is transmogrified (transformed almost beyond recognition) into a new theory of teaching and learning.
Figure 2: The Innovator’s Mindset (George Couros, The Principal of Change, 2017)
Taking poetic license with Dweck’s research-based model, Couros spins a completely different interpretation in his fascinating professional blog, The Principal of Change[6]:
“As we look at how we see and “do” school, it is important to continuously shift to moving from consumption to creation, engagement to empowerment, and observation to application. It is not that the first replaces the latter, but that we are not settling for the former. A mindset that is simply open to “growth”, will not be enough in a world that is asking for continuous creation of not only products, but ideas.”
Promising educational theories – even those founded on some robust initial research – can fall prey to prominent educators pushing their own ‘pet ideas’ and pedagogical theories. A 2016 Education Week report[7] demonstrates that Growth Mindset initiatives can produce mixed results and British education researchers are currently having a field day picking apart Carol Dweck’s research findings[8]. Having another version of her creation circulating in mutated form will make it even harder to assess her serious case studies being replicated around the world.
[1] Dweck, Carol (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.
[2] Boaler, Jo (2013). Ability and Mathematics: the mindset revolution that is reshaping education. Forum, 55:1, 143-152.
[3] Dweck, Carol, and Lewis and Virginia Eaton (2016). Recognizing and Overcoming False Growth Mindset. Edutopia, January 11, 2016.
[4] Gross-Loh, Christine (2016). How Praise Became a Consolation Prize. The Atlantic, December 16, 2016.
[5] Couros, George (2015) The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity. Kindle Edition. San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting.
[6] Couros, George (2017). A World that is Asking for Continuous Creation. The Principal of Change Blog, January 27, 2017.
[7] Education Week (2016). Mindset in the Classroom: A National Study of K-12 Teachers. Arlington, VA: Education Week Research Center.
[8] Didau, David (2017). Is growth mindset bollocks? The Learning Spy Blog, January 25, 2017.
Today’s youth face challenges in navigating a digitally infused world. Yet we often leave young people to make their own decisions about ethical, safe and responsible use of digital technologies, with minimal guidance. In schools, students encounter inconsistent expectations for using technology from one teacher to the next, while different rules again may apply during breaks between classes. They also have to contend with peer pressure to use the latest and greatest apps for communications.
It’s common for students to arrive at school tethered to a personal device, and then enter a classroom where the device needs to be turned off or turned in to the teacher. But when we ask students to disengage with their devices, we lose a critical opportunity to help them learn how to ethically, safely and responsibly use digital technologies, and to promote active and informed digital citizenship. Students are carrying powerful learning devices; they already search online for information, use videos for learning, take photos of assignments, access digital texts, spend time on content creation sites, and use devices to communicate and collaborate with each other and connect with teachers to ask questions about school work.1 However, learning opportunities for youth to develop a critical 21st century skill – the safe and responsible use of digital technologies – are often limited and overly structured, at the discretion of the classroom teacher or school leader.
We’ve all heard of cyberbullying cases where students repeatedly use technology to broadly share content intended to hurt others. With a single click, a text message with a mean comment about someone else can spread throughout an entire student body. A sexually explicit image or message can become publicly accessible within seconds. How, then, can we ensure we are providing opportunities for young people in school to learn how to ethically and safely use powerful learning and communications devices?
Make safe information sharing a part of everyday learning, and design lessons where learners can demonstrate their understanding. Invite students to explain what they do to protect themselves and others in online spaces. For example, discuss how personal information can be inadvertently shared through hidden identifiers (background images, location, etc.). Talk about ways to protect information that can be shared through images, video, text posts and tags. Focus on how to practice “safe sharing” of one’s own information.
Teachers and school leaders need to stay up to date on how technology is changing. Years ago, it was important to teach students to keep passwords secure, change them regularly and not share passwords with friends. Today, students also need to learn about fingerprint security and the risks in storing friends’ fingerprints on their personal devices.
Learning about citizenship in a digital age needs to be part of the daily learning environment at school. Inviting a guest speaker to talk to staff, students and parents once each school year is not enough, nor is discussing online safety only during Digital Citizenship Week. Collective and ongoing efforts are needed to make digital citizenship a part of daily learning outcomes in schools.
Share how students are using technologies for social justice and to help others. There are daily news posts about youth who are providing service and helping others locally and globally that can be used to foster conversations about student leadership and action campaigns.2
Look at guiding documents developed in your local context. For example, guiding documents from provincial ministries in Canada3 can be used as a starting point to help students develop responsibility in safely and ethically navigating online spaces. Educators may also find such guides helpful for ideas about how to protect students as they work in open, collaborative online environments.
En Bref : En cette ère numérique participative, nous devons donner aux jeunes les moyens d’être des citoyens numériques actifs, informés et éthiques.
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, March 2017
1 Project Tomorrow, Speak Up Research Project for Digital Learning (2015). www.tomorrow.org/speakup/index.html
2 For example, see the campaigns sponsored by the WE Movement. www.we.org/we-at-school/we-schools/campaigns
3 For example, Alberta Education, “Digital Citizenship Policy Development Guide” (2012), https://education.alberta.ca/media/3227621/digital-citizenship-policy-development-guide.pdf ; Government of Saskatchewan, “Digital Citizenship Education in Saskatchewan Schools” (2015), http://publications.gov.sk.ca/documents/11/83322-DC%20Guide%20-%20ENGLISH%202.pdf
Computers allow us to communicate with anyone at any time, and to work together with anyone in the world – at least in theory. But making truly effective use of the technology available for collaborative work does not come automatically. When the three of us applied for a Teacher Learning and Leadership Program (TLLP) project for the 2015-2016 school year, we considered ourselves comfortable with technology. What we were hoping to see through our year of study was how effective technology could be in collaborating when the participants work in different cities.
The TLLP funds that came with the project allowed us to have the release time to plan for our joint lessons. Whether we were travelling and meeting in person at a school or working together via Skype for Business, our outlook in the classrooms had changed from being isolated islands floating in the curriculum seas, to having a joint outlook on meaningful teaching strategies.
We met often through our TLLP funds and planned lessons that used Skype for Business videoconferencing and SmartBoard tools to enable our three classrooms to share ideas and answer questions back and forth, despite our distance. Through the year, our team was learning what worked and what needed more time than we had expected. For example, students who have never used programs like Office 365 or OneNote need lots of time to practice. The class itself needed to be taught how to use the online resources that we were provided with, and we as teachers needed time to think and plan for what we hoped to achieve.
My Grade 7/8 class, Laura’s Grade 6/7 class, and Shelley’s Grade 7/8 class had different needs and came from a variety of backgrounds. To simplify our approach to using technology for class collaborations, we chose to focus our lessons based on Math and Language. We started off simply, introducing our classes to each other by conferencing on Skype for Business, and then began to work through simple tasks where we could create joint anchor charts via Smart Notebook. Our three classes worked actively on lessons that ranged from discussing the Advent story to practical strategies for solving the Ontario Ministry’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) questions, to combining our input on what we interpreted from the figurative language in the book I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff. The students were excited to meet online, and we as teachers were pleased with the success that we saw. Students in our classrooms were using the knowledge gained from the online meetings, as well as applying the technology components of Office 365, like OneNote, to their daily classwork. Students had access to and used this technology at home, and they shared their work in a class folder that we teachers could access and send back to the students electronically. The students went from knowing little about online sharing to being confident and comfortable with the technology.
We chose to end the project with a culminating task that had students sharing their work via Office 365 and taking the peer feedback provided in the shared folder back to help them in their final submission process. Since Shelley had the largest class size, she opted to take the lead on this assignment and have her students share their work with the other two classes.
This was our first attempt at having students share their work individually with another student from one of the other classes. No one really knew how well it would turn out. Since this was the first time that our three classes were working on such a collaborative task, the expectations for student work were kept to a minimum. We wanted all students to find success with the task. The bonus of this activity was that our timing was flexible, so we didn’t need to be committed to a certain day to achieve our task.
Shelley’s class wrote a paragraph that they then colour-coded based on the expectations set out by Shelley. Her class had to complete the following task:
Your class has agreed to do some volunteer work in your school this year. Each student can work in an area of his or her choosing. Write a detailed paragraph explaining what you choose to do and why. Make sure to include the following:
Shelley’s class completed their task and shared it with students in the other classes via Office 365. After Shelley’s students sent their work, our students logged into the “Shared With Me” folder of their Office 365 account. As Laura’s students and mine set about the task, it only required a small amount of guidance and coaching from us. Our students were very comfortable with opening the files, and with the simple instructions about looking for grammar and spelling errors, and descriptive detail, in the written task.
Our TLLP Project was all about how we could use technology to collaborate in our classroom. By the time we were wrapping up our project in June 2016, we found that the technology we had available was useful to our students, applicable to our teaching strategies, and manageable within our means. For all the times that technology may have failed us in the past, we have now experienced first-hand how useful technology can be in our planning and teaching. It is indeed possible to work together with anyone in the world.
Tips in Applying for a TLLP Grant
Applying to Ontario’s Teacher Learning and Leadership Program is not a five-minute task. Here are some helpful hints for when you apply for your own TLLP grant. Most will apply to any similar grant application.
En Bref: Grâce à des fonds obtenus du Programme d’apprentissage et de leadership du personnel enseignant, Bill Gowsell, Laura Deeves et Shelley Casselman ont consacré l’année scolaire 2015-2016 à étudier l’utilisation des technologies en classe. Leur objectif consistait à déterminer la mesure dans laquelle des classes situées dans différentes villes pouvaient collaborer efficacement au moyen de technologies.
Original Photo: Courtesy Bill Gowsell
First published in Education Canada, December 2016
“There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing.” – Rebecca Solnit
IN MY YOUNG LIVES Research Laboratory,1 we design research projects that place the voices of youth at the core, so as to hear and see young lives in new ways. Doing so does not provide an easy recipe for the complete story or truth. Singular and collective youth voices always defy a complete picture, but we continue to invite, hear, interpret and share them. Voiced research opens up possibilities for educative experiences as youth actively write and tell their life stories. It makes for fascinating, imaginative and deep social analysis. But youth voice alone holds no guarantee of liberation. Our hearing does not end debates about how to fix education or how to better support young people. Rather, it could simply make us care.2 It is then up to everyone to act.
Our research focus on young lives means that the experiences, joys and struggles of young people are placed into holistic frames, surrounded by families, friends, schools, communities, society, and the natural world. Authentic voice does not fracture or reduce lives into small pieces, but rather invites open-ended and imaginative ways to frame, develop and respond to research questions. It invites participation, a critical aspect of the development of citizenship, empowerment and well-being of youth.
Most of the young people we work with and for are those who have been made marginal to society, their voices never heard or carelessly erased or ignored. Many struggle in school due to poverty and/or discrimination and/or mental health issues. Our goal is to design research with them that helps to hear what these young people are up against and what they dream for themselves. We employ the research process as an educative space, so that youth can learn while making their lives more knowable to those who teach and support them.
What follows are two examples of projects that invited and activated youth voice through conversation and artistic productions. These young people have created and shared powerful voiced artifacts that have affected the way we develop research and curriculum. Equally valuable are the discussions and relationships that evolved (and continue to evolve) through these creative processes.3
In 2015 we were honoured with an invitation to an after-school youth program on Lennox Island First Nation by the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of Prince Edward Island (MCPEI), which promotes and protects Mi’kmaq rights, culture, traditions and the development and well-being of P.E.I.’s Mi’kmaq people. We worked with them in designing a youth-centered participatory project about youth, wellbeing, mental health and technology.5 While the scientific literature tends to frame these concepts in terms of medical and psychological insights to develop digital applications (apps), there is a small but interesting literature on the challenges that digital media is creating for young people (e.g. Facebook depression, sexting, ringxiety).6 We wanted to know how young First Nations people would illustrate these concepts if they were given the space to do so. Was digital media helping or hindering? What does wellbeing mean?
One good way to frame a problem is to do it literally, in the frame of a photograph, video or painting. MCPEI immediately saw value in a filmmaking project as an opportunity for youth to a) have expressive outlets for cultural history storytelling, b) learn skills in filmmaking to preserve stories of Mi’kmaq elders, and c) take responsibility, rights and power in storytelling. Thus, we co-developed a decolonized and ethical project with the youth worker, Brent Chaisson, as an instrumental and supportive guide. Over one year and through six talking circles, four workshops, visual concept mapping, snacks, meals, chatter, and music, eleven young people worked with filmmakers and researchers to learn and apply digital storytelling and filmmaking.
Space does not permit the details, but suffice to say, it was a joyful, intense, creative cultural process. We considered and debated concepts, developed storyboards, learned to use GoPro and video cameras, workshopped the editing process, held critique sessions, and screened the films in the community. We worked with a talented filmmaker, Brian Sharp, who volunteered his time to workshop filmmaking and editing techniques with the youth. “Like any other artist, you are creating something and putting yourself out there; because this medium can be so difficult, [filmmakers] can receive positive feedback and accolades… for just getting it done,” he says. “Self-esteem can be boosted by just knowing you finished it, even if you’re not entirely happy with the finished product… Even if it is just a positive comment on Facebook you think: Yay, somebody liked it!”
The three digital stories provided (see box for links) are some of the final fruits; these short films speak for themselves. But the journey itself was as meaningful and rich in developing relationships, critical thinking, educative experiences, artistic skill, and contemplation of the paradoxes of digital media. Consider two of the youth voices from a talking circle:
Well, if I’ve had a horrible time and everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, I would first try to laugh it off… But if it so happens that it did get my spirits down then… jump on thegame, or jump on YouTube… it can always cheer you up. You can just, like, watch a funny video when you’re having a bad day. Get a good couple of laughs in… [or] make a video of yourself fooling around and trying to make other people laugh, brighten up their day… It brightens up my mood and helps me forget.
“Heavy use, like six to 12 hours a day… that’s like you’re pretty much ruining yourself… like that could be six to 12 hours learning how to draw, learning how to paint, to be a musician, going out and visiting an elder around your community, and being more in with the traditions of your community… instead of going on Facebook and being a keyboard warrior and just, friggin’ like, dissing someone’s life… Why not just get the hell out of the house… and be more of yourself instead of something that you’re not really?”
The young filmmakers described being in constant communication with peers via texting, instant messaging or video chatting – even when in the same room together! They described a daily routine where digital media is perpetual and ubiquitous, seamlessly intertwined with their day unless prevented or deliberately “unplugged.” Yet from within this “glass cage”7 an imaginative critical reflection was heard. The space to think, discuss, and reflect led to critical debates and developing important distinctions and concepts such as “keyboard warriors.” These insightful voices have informed the direction of our ongoing research.
Three of the digital stories created by Lennox Island youth can be seen here:
http://katetilleczek.ca/youth-technology/
I took my first 9,900 km journey to southern Chile in 2012, to meet a group of profound Indigenous people. I was invited by the Williche Council of Chiefs (WCC), who represent many Williche people of the province of Chiloe’s islands. We met to discuss and plan our new collaborative project: a unique intercultural school and curriculum that could re-engage the most marginalized youth and open new pathways to wellbeing and livelihoods. Most of the Williche youth with whom we work live on remote islands in the archipelago of Chiloe and have no access to suitable public schools in their communities. They had been learning informally through other traditional and modern experiences. Youth and elders were ready to re-ignite the fires of a new kind of formal education. Wekimün means “new knowledge” in Mapudungun, the traditional Williche language. It refers to the integration of traditional and modern ways of knowing in a respectful, collaborative and critical dialogue about what is best for youth from each culture and perspective. Thus, Wekimün Chilkatuwe is the official name of the new school we built and designed. To date, over 350 students have been offered a unique intercultural education embedded in the holistic lives, hopes and dreams of Williche youth and communities.8
A core goal of our shared vision is to incite, animate and value the participation of youth and the cosmo-vision of the Williche people. We began our school development with a collaborative inquiry in the five communities from which most students would come. Sixteen young people volunteered to come to the main island and work together for three days in the Chafun (the traditional sacred building with central fire pit that has now become the central heart of the school buildings) to attend workshops on anthropology and educational research. They debated ideas for the school and curriculum, and they learned to interview, audiotape, observe, write field notes, invite storytelling, and engage community. They returned to their communities after these three days, armed with a new sense of purpose, friendships, packsacks, notebooks and tape recorders to inquire about how elders, families and friends viewed education, well-being and Wekimün Chilkatuwe.
When they returned to the Chafun the following month, they shared many gifts with the group: feelings of a new and valued role in their community, feeling “like a journalist and someone with a job,” experiencing the joys and challenges of research, and the powerful and thoughtful stories from over one hundred of their youth, elders, families and community members.
The curriculum for Wekimün Chilkatuwe has been carefully designed around these voices, stories, hopes and fears, melding the knowledge gained through this process with that of official statistics and trends. Three teaching areas emerged as crucial:
In addition to suggested courses, the stories and observations provided in our youth-led community research emphasized the importance of the lives of youth, and the insistence on vast community input, support and collaboration in education. It also gave us two more lessons for school design:
1. It matters what you teach!
Two programs of study have evolved from these voices: Intercultural Health and Sustainable Development, and Intercultural Education and Sustainable Development. Classes in each program include the three subject areas listed above. Each is based in traditional practice with integrated lessons in modern “western” knowledge. Curriculum design is supported by Canadian university faculty10 with input from Wekimun educators, students and elders, who teach and provide traditional knowledge.
2. It matters how you teach it!
Our inquiry- and project-based pedagogy holds youth and the cosmo-vision of the Williche people at its heart. Ours is a school without walls. The school operates both on-site and in the community, so that when the students go home they continue to learn through educational projects to support their livelihoods. Our classrooms are a Chafun, an old growth forest, the seashore, an ancient tribal archeological site, the UNESCO award-winning Mapu Ñuke (Mother Earth) Health Centre – all on our near the school property – and the five interconnected communities.
In classes, we strive to teach in ways that use practices of care, practices of relevance, and practices of Wekimun as described to us by the community, elders and youth. The aim is to reclaim education and school as a joyful, sacred, caring space where new and old wisdom is integrated.
Four years later we are still building upon these early teachings, finding new and better ways to engage youth and communities in what we teach and how we teach it. Manuel Munoz Millalonko, a Williche lonko, anthropologist and Academic Director who co-leads the project with me, says it best:
“Wekimün Chilkatuwe is a space in which our identity as Indigenous people is strengthened, where students are re-enchanted by life. They look again toward the territory where Williche life and culture has developed for thousands of years… It is exciting to learn from Wekimün. The construction of new kinds of knowledge comes true every day. And a significant intercultural development is happening here that helps all Indigenous people, a dynamic model where the Williche worldview harmoniously interacts with other worldviews from a place of dignity and deep honouring of our Mapu Ñuke (Mother Earth). Our elders and the Canadian faculty support our community and students in a virtuous circle of knowledge that impacts our work in very distant places on the planet.”
THE MARVEL, HONOUR AND HUMILITY of intercultural and international collaboration in youth-voiced education has changed me. I have come to hear, see and care in different ways that are difficult to articulate in text alone. Young voices remind me that hope and lament are constant companions, while naiveté is always to be tested.
Education is at a crossroads when it comes to responding to contemporary youth problems; it needs to acquire more authentic ways to hear and respond. No quantity of video, story or film can alone alter the educational and political structures that daily reproduce social inequalities for young people. That is where journey, imagination and action comes in. It is from this place that we can care to make a difference.
En Bref : Le Laboratoire de recherche sur la vie des jeunes place la voix des jeunes au cœur même de son travail. Utilisant un processus de recherche mené avec, pour et par des jeunes, le laboratoire invite des jeunes qui, souvent, ont été marginalisés et réduits au silence dans la société, à apprendre tout en aidant ceux qui leur enseignent et qui les soutiennent à mieux connaître leur vie. Cet article décrit deux projets, entrepris en collaboration avec des collectivités autochtones, qui ont invité et activé la voix des jeunes au moyen de la conversation et de productions artistiques.
Photo: Courtesy Kate Tilleczek
First published in Education Canada, December 2016
1 http://katetilleczek.ca
2 From Solnit, cited in Tilleczek and Loebach, 2015
3 I concur with Gaztambide-Fernandez in “Why the Arts Don’t Do Anything: Toward a new vision for cultural production in education,” Harvard Educational Review 83 (2013): 211-236, and hope that these examples illustrate the power of both process and product.
4 The author wishes to thank and acknowledge the young people, scholars, artists, and funding bodies who make the Young Lives Research Laboratory possible. See http://katetilleczek.ca for details.
5 I would like to acknowledge the leadership of Dr. Janet Loebach on this project. See K. Tilleczek and J. Loebach, “Research Goes to the Cinema: The veracity of videography with, for and by youth,” Journal of Research in Comparative and International Education 10, no. 3 (2015): 354-366; J. Loebach, K. Tilleczek, B. Chiasson, and B. Sharp, “Keyboard Warriors? Visualizing technology and mental health with, for and by Aboriginal youth through digital stories (submitted to Visual Methodology).
6 K. Tilleczek, and R. Srigley, “Young Cyborgs? Youth and the digital age,” in The Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood A. Furlong (Abington, Oxon: Routledge, 2017).
7 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and us (New York: Norton, 2014).
8 Wekimun School Project is funded by Global Affairs Canada and made possible by an incredible Chilean and Canadian team. See website for project details, team, video, photos, etc.:
9 http://wekimun.cl/index.php/en/
10 See above website for listing of Canadian Faculty, Project Management team and volunteers. It is a collaborative project that could not succeed without all.
In What’s in your Space? co-authors Dwight Carter, Gary Sebach, and Mark White passionately argue for the re-evaluation (and physical renewal) of learning environments in K-12 schooling, predominantly at the secondary level. Aimed at teachers and school leaders in the field, the book begins with the many reasons why traditional spaces of learning are not conducive to today’s digital-embedded “Generation Z” students, or to the teaching of 21st century global skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, creation, communication, creativity, and innovation. The authors cite the building of Clark Hall (an addition to the Gahanna Lincoln High School) in Gahanna, Ohio as evidence of the critical teaching and learning possibilities inherent in re-envisioned spaces, both for students and their teachers.
The five sections that follow – referred to as Steps – each combine research, first-hand testimonials, images, and resources for further professional development (by individuals or groups) to guide educators through a process of rethinking, envisioning and implementing a space redesign. Step 1 entreats teachers to “Understand Generation Z,” especially its entrenchment in social media, gaming, and digital learning. Step 2 is to “Start Asking Questions” as way to understand the relationship between learning and school spaces. Progressing forward, Steps 3 and 4 (“Shift to a 21st Century Mindset” and “Teach Global Skills”) prompt teachers to reflect on their own practice and their allegiances to oftentimes anachronistic philosophies of teaching, relative to new approaches to learning that focus on global skills for a new world. Lastly, Step 5 urges teachers and schools to “Let Students Use Technology.” Each step offers robust suggestions, guidelines, and resources for teachers, school leaders, and their schools to begin to think about the spaces and places they inhabit.
The book serves as a good introduction to some of these complex issues. Having said that, it is important for all school practitioners to thoughtfully critique such terms as 21st century learning and global skills, and to be cautious about speaking of students in the broad brushstrokes of generational groupings. Students, similar to their teachers, are unique individuals whose diverse learning needs may be ascertained by speaking with them, not simply assumed as part of a generational profile.