#clequity

Teacher agency

Interest –powered

Peer-supported

Academically oriented

Production centered

Openly networked

Shared purpose

                              The changing social and technological landscape is up-ending what is effective teaching.   The “banking model” of education in which teachers deposit knowledge into students who are not meant to critically examine it, or create meaning for themselves is no longer relevant.    There are additional barriers in science education for African American and Latino students because science is presented in a way that does not represent their interests, their realities and their identities.  Most of science is taught either with examples and contexts that are not relevant to students in urban schools or presented in a de-contextualized manner. Furthermore, most of the media related to science does not show black and Latino scientists and engineers. These issues make it that much more difficult for black and Latino youth to imagine themselves as scientists and engineers of the future.    

         I found a school that set up a new model that allows students to follow their interests and passions in afternoon two hour studio electives. In an attempt to work to counteract some of the inequity I see in science education I volunteered to offer a studio elective called Engineering and Science Design.   On Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, students can either choose their own projects to work on, or work on some of the ideas I suggest.  On Wednesdays we do either a hands-on inquiry-based science experiment or an engineering challenge and then the students spend an hour reflecting and writing in their Design logs about their experiences.   I have specifically designed writing prompts to help them in applying their knowledge and skills from their making experiences as evidence of school wide competencies they must earn in scientific inquiry and habits of success” in order to graduate.   I encourage the students to take photos of their projects and write a few sentences about them in our class blog.  

              Many of the students have selected this studio because they did not earn the competencies they needed for graduation in their science class and are trying to catch up.  Some of them are in the studio because they enjoy making things with their hands.  Some of the students are there because they were deemed behavioral problems in other classes.  My hope was that they will see the power that comes from DIY projects and also make progress in creating their own identities.  

           The first Wednesday challenge I gave them was The Community Engineering Challenge,  in which student teams design a method that would move pool water out of the community recreation center pool, working within a set of limited resources.   I have one team of 3 students, one team of 2 students and a student working individually to design and build pinball machines from scratch.  I have one student creating a head scarf with an Arduino controlled circuit of LEDS. I have two students doing small crafts projects with plastics and one student experimenting and making skin care products.  On Wednesday the experiment we did was to design a way for some cheese business owners to improve the cost efficiency of their cheese making process in the Cheese Making Challenge.   The next design challenge they will be given is the Tissue Re-messaging Challenge.

     My  Reflections:

           When I was thinking about how this maker space illustrates the principles of connected learning I believe it demonstrates several of them, however still has some work to go before it fully applies them.  For me, this is an experiment that will go on after this class.  With my effort to reflect and evaluate on the mistakes I’m making along the way, I’m sure it will go through several iterations as I learn.

               Although I give the students engineering challenges, inquiry experiments and writing experiences once a week, students spend most of the time working on their creations which are student-interest driven.  I have ongoing individual conversations with students to see what they are interested in and then I help them try to find a way to pursue those interests. In this production centered class, students have been given the opportunity to tinker, experiment, explore, trouble shoot and problem solve.   They have been repositioned as producers and makers who are creating knowledge from their own experiences.  

           The equity comes from several facts.  The learning is based on student interest which helps them connect to their own lived realities and experiences.   Secondly, they are using the production processes scientists and engineers use to learn. This helps them see themselves as scientists and engineers.  This also makes them try to figure out what they need in order to be able to make or learn something. It changes their perspective of themselves in which they are the agent of their own learning.  They begin to see that their failures are stepping stones to deeper learning.  

            Another principle of connected learning demonstrated by this maker space is that students are publishing what they are doing through the class blog to a wider audience.  Sharing what they are doing and thinking about it with others in networked communities brings equity into education for the students. We have gone further than a blog yet but that is a goal. Most of these students are reading far below grade level and struggle with writing and mathematics.  However, the projects they are doing have embedded in them academic literacy practice.  By reaching out to authentic audiences, students will see their own                         power in being able to learn for themselves.  

             This maker space does not fulfill all of the connected learning principles to the extent that I had hoped.   The students have been helping each other on their projects, however it has been very difficult to get students to work in teams towards a shared purpose.  

  As I mentioned previously, an area to improve is also in social networking. I would like the results of the class blog to eventually connect with others with similar interests where students could interact and participate in a learning community.    

     Another area of needed improvement is the academic orientation of the class.  I am having them write and read and speak, however there needs to be more editing and revisions and more rigorous academic and critical literacy work built in.  

        Overall, after evaluating the strengths and weakness of this model,   I believe it just doesn’t do enough to break through the structural issues getting in the way of equity.  It needs a more powerful shared purpose that involves action to change a problem that the students care about.  This could motivate students to engage in the critical literacy work they need to help them catch up in their academic literacy skills. Additionally, it could help student bring about changes that solve real problems they have.

            Having students doing work to solve real problems, such as through YPAR-youth participatory action projects that they have identified could help students to work toward academic excellence.  However, right now I have not built this kind of opportunity into the class. The closest I have come is to create a STEM program at an after school program at a City Recreation center near the school and have planned for my students to lead a workshop for the younger children.  Unfortunately I feel that this idea needed to have come from them.   From my experience putting young people in a leadership role helps them build their self-confidence, however it may still not result in academic excellence.  In addition to making things, I believe the students need to be doing research that involves reading, collecting and analyzing data that involves computing skills, and presenting their work which requires presentation and communication skills.  Including a more critical approach to the maker space would give students more power and to be heard in ways that would engage them as agents of change in their communities.  

           I know I am pretty hard on myself given that I was pretty much doing this all by myself.   More support from the school or a partnership with more experienced maker coaches would be one avenue to try.  Just today at a workshop I attended at the iTAGS conference I met the coaches of one of the maker spaces of a school which happens to be in the same building as the school where I am.  I thought how wonderful it would be to work in a school where these goals are part of the school institutional structure.  It was helpful seeing how they approached their maker spaces for social justice.   Through my connected learning networks, I will be on the lookout for ideas for more ways I can try to accomplish these objectives.    

I enjoyed the ED677, especially with giving us a chance to experiment and make mistakes and learn from them.  I liked the way we could take our own paths based on our own interests and experience.  I enjoyed our shared purpose and support of each other. We got to experience connected learning as we learned about connected learning-a good way to learn.    Thanks to you all who have made it possible.           

                                          Signing off,  

Excerpted compilation by Kathy Walsh, April 6 2015

1.  I have had the good fortune of working with one of my community partners, a local recreation center in West Phylly that has been teaching me so much about how important rec centers and the people who work there are to the community.  Every day the women staff at the rec center make it a safe haven for the children who are there everyday after school.   One of the staff, helps the children with there homework, answers their questions and helps them grow and learn.  Another woman is the IT specialist in charge of the computer room, which she has completely renovated into a beautiful, orderly space for learning.  She is now working on gutting and refurbishing the kitchen.  Each day the women prepare dinner for the children.  There is even a resident cat.  

2.   My role is that I provide a STEM science and engineering program one day a week.  I also have been lending out robotics and other computer fun things such as a Makey Makey to the IT woman.  She is going to have it all figured out in a little bit.  We have been talking about Maker spaces and possible ideas for more things she could do with the computers with the children.   Immediately when she said she was interested in this, I began dreaming of wood dowels, spray paint, and PVC cutters as I always love working with students in engineering design, however, her little room is mostly computers and so that's how its gonna be. We may go check out other Maker spaces together.  

3.  Working together to figure out how we can make this place a better learning environment and to living environment for the children is an example of the having a shared purpose by Jennifer Wooilven.  Rather than me just coming in and saying what I think, I am listening and trying to discern what is important to them.    This same idea can be applied to my students, as suggested by Jennifer Woolivern in Shared Purpose Leads to Civic Action.

4.  In my social justice class I am exploring the idea of doing a YPAR youth participatory Action Research project, whereby a group of students works together to find out about, critically thing about and do something about an issue or problem in their community or their lives.  I am still not sure what this will end up being about.  The important thing is to have it come from the students passions and interests.  

5. One area I am thinking about is Biology since I may be teaching that next year.  At first it was really hard to come up with ideas that would engage and interest students that also would have a social justice connection.  The more I have been examining my own biases and seeing the world through a social justice lens, the easier it has been to come up with ideas of how to teacher biology in a way that is relevant for students.  I want my students to feel that sense of shared purpose that makes learning biology purposeful for them.  

6.  As I think about connected learning and social justice, the best way to imagine a transformation to this model of teaching for me is to take the traditional biology curriculum I had been using and re-write it redesign it, re-imagine it in the new student driven way.  This is a project I will do in part this semester and then complete over the summer.   

7.  From being in so many different educational environments and schools I really get the idea of context driven education.  I really loved this quote by Antero Garcia in the Teaching in The connected Learning Classroom,  "The best practice for my classroom is going to be different both from a classroom anywhere else and from my classroom a year down the road".  I, along with my students will find what is best each year and in each situation.  By keeping this in my mind, I can be a more responsive teacher to my particular students.  

I have been working with the idea of memes this week.  I created my first ever meme and realized that it was rather dry. It was not very humorous at all.  But it was something I have been thinking about and dealing with in a science and engineering program I have been doing at a middle school.  The disparities in resources are pretty stark between two different schools housed in the same building.  

 So this is my first ever meme.  So then I was learning about how teachers might use memes in the classroom and I thought Meme Inspired Writing activities by Mindy A. Early a great way to try it out. The only problem I had was when I went to the informal portrait websites she suggested to find background pictures my students could use for their memes.  Most of the portraits were of white people, the way most of the media is also. 

The other day when I was teaching a Panning for Gold Lesson in an Urban Philadelphia classroom, we had to put down some newspaper the teacher had in class, and it seemed like the way the pictures of white people everywhere in the news paper seemed so out of place, unhelpful and irrelevant there.  So for a meme activity that involved students to write their own memes, there was a need for more options that showed people of color.  So I went and tracked down some for my students to use to fill in themselves.  I did one as an example. 

My example:   young graduate 

Here are some other templates I created that my students could use and fill in their own words.  

This week as I think about making in my everyday life, I realized that I am a Maker and have a Maker mind.  I consider fixing things to be like remixing them so they are also makes in my mind.  I make things almost everyday in one form or another so I decided for my S7S to think about my makes over a week.

1.  Last Sunday I figured out how to use Tumblr to make a blog for my Seek 7 Sundays.  

2. On Monday I met with the organizer of the iTags group about YPAR at the Educational Design Studio in North Philly. I worked on formulating my ideas for a possible Youth Participatory Action Research Project. 

2.  On Tuesday, for a class I wrote a journal blog about my own personal anti bias development and what I was going to do about it in the classroom. 

3. On Wednesday, I brought over resources for the Grade 9 science teacher and connected her with my science supply company representative.  That afternoon I had a flat tire so I changed my tire and kept on driving.

4. on Thursday during school hours I ran a Panning for Gold lab at Beeber Middle School. Students answered analysis questions I had created for the lab.   I met teachers in science, engineering and the maker studio at SLA. (Science Leadership Academy).  On Thursday after school I ran a STEM program on Ramps and Pathways for an after school program. I guided the children in their making of ramps and pathways for a rolling ball.

5. On Friday morning I created a survey for the middle school students in my STEM program to gauge their mid-program progress.  On Friday afternoon I wrote a film documentary review about A Class Divided for a class.

6. On Saturday morning  I wrote a status report on the outcomes of a grant I have been using to bring STEM activities to a middle school.  I decided to write about some of these ideas from my report in my blog for this week.  "Having Fun in Middle School Science".  I posted that earlier today.

7. On Saturday afternoon and evening, I wrote a grant to try to get funding for my summer STEM program. I created a name for the program:  STEM for All Summer Program. 

As it turns out, I am making things pretty much every day. The big problem I have is that often I don't feel I have time to make use of the information I come across or specific suggestions for what to think about, what to read and what to make in this class. To me that is where curating comes in handy. Due the great amount of information that gets to me, I simply can't use it all in time before more information comes rushing in.  So what has happened, is that I just lose the information before I have the chance to make use of it.   How I have solved this problem is to keep a book of lists of important information. Some of the different lists I keep are the following:  Contact information for people and organizations, Ideas for STEM activities I have done over the years and ones I plan to do in my summer program this year, Project ideas to do with students in my future jobs and my business, Digital tools and apps that I might use with future students or for my own personal use, Urban community resources, Biology social justice and bioethics topics, connections and resources, Observational anecdotes from my visits and observations of classrooms, Questions that emerge in my dealings with people, To Do lists, Songs I like, Movies I want to see, gifts I want to give.  Thanks to all my classmates for your great ideas.  Many of them have made it to my lists. I do plan to try them out, especially once I am full time in the classroom. 

While I have a great deal of respect for Scratch as a forum and a platform for visual programming and creation, I haven't done that much myself in it as a creator. So I figured I would start with a remix during this week of remix and play in ED677 ... Here it is: "Save Mr. Frog & Ms. Cat: A Mini-Figs Remix"