#find5

Make, make, make, make, make, make (to the tune of Rihanna’s song, Work)!

Check out my Find 5 for this week:

Curriculum Lab in Landman Library! - The School of Education at Arcadia  has a sort of makerspace right on campus in the library called the Curriculum Lab. This is a space with a ton of great teacher resources that we have access to. If you are in the area, I definitely encourage you to check it out and make based on what you find!

“It’s about the meaning we can make” -  I really appreciated this quote from this article about the 4 myths of maker education which we were assigned this week. I think it’s important to remember that in maker education, it’s not necessarily about what is made but the connections created and the meaning attached to what is made. That is how true, lasting learning takes place!

Higher Education Makerspaces: Engaged Students, Hands-on Skills, Interdisciplinary Connections - This article, from Spring 2017, addresses the use of makerspaces in higher education, and how these spaces provide opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and application.

Makerspaces: The Future of Education (TEDx) - This video is from 2013, so it is a little old, but the speaker pushes for more makerspaces in order to innovate the way that we teach and learn in the 21st century. I also appreciate that the speaker brings up the benefit of using makerspaces as a space where students can learn to fail. So important!

Today’s find is all about empathy:

1. This is an interesting read which poses the question, should we develop empathy in higher education settings? It presents interesting points. For example, in the most selective universities economically advantaged students out number economically disadvantaged students 25:1. Does this make it harder for more advantaged students to empathize?

2. This resource describes the value of empathy as it relates to school culture and community. It provides steps schools can follow to foster empathy building, the first one being modeling (which I find to be crucial). It also poses realistic barriers to consider when doing this work. 

3. This is a book that I’ve worked with a little bit in my line of work. It is a leadership based text to teach emotional intelligence to college students. I have used it to help develop leadership programming, and I have partaken in workshops based on these ideas. It definitely ties in well to empathy and ways to teach and learn it. 

4. This resource, from Virginia Commonwealth University, provides 5 ways to incorporate empathy building into the classroom, using experiential learning and reflection as tools.

5. This guide is geared more towards traditional classroom settings, so I think it may be more helpful to some of my ED677 peers. It provides real activities that you can use to tie empathy building into already existing lessons and curriculum. I also see ways they could be adapted for use in a higher education setting.

The context that I have decided to explore this week is... 

Higher Education

1. This is a cool video that explore connected learning in a higher education context. 

2. I picked up this book, Sustainability on Campus, from the library by accident a couple months ago (I thought it was about something different). But, it turns out it’s actually really relevant to this course. It’s about how students, faculty, staff, administration, and community members worked towards the common purpose of increased sustainability. 

3. This is a link about a webinar that took place a while back. The description mentions discussing ways to infuse connected learning practices in college. Mimi Ito was on the webinar too, which is pretty cool, because we’ve explored quite a bit of her work for this course. 

4. There is one particular part of this ‘About Connected Learning’ page that caught my attention this week. The relationship graphic mentions that relationships help students persist through challenges and setbacks. This relates really closely to my inquiry question.

Very sad I missed my classic (and favorite) Find 5 Friday this week. Unfortunately I have been bed ridden with an awful bout of the flu for the past 3 days and now I’m playing a game of Sunday Catch-Up.

Anyway, I’m excited about this week’s theme of Shared Purpose because this is something that we explore a lot in leadership development settings and I have a few cool resources and ideas to share!

1. Start With Why by Simon Sinek is a book based around inspirational leadership. How do we inspire others to do their best work? He introduced the golden circle which places the “why” or purpose in the center of the leadership model. Unfortunately, I haven't read the entire book, but I’ve heard great things so I definitely want to in the near future. 

2. I recently attended a leadership workshop about common purpose, and the facilitator highlighted the success of the company Apple. They mentioned that Apple has become the most valuable company of our time because of the way they brand themselves on a common purpose and vision that their leadership, employees, and consumers believe in. It makes them successful because people stay invested and keep coming back for more. Here is Apple’s vision statement:

“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self- honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.” 

3. This may seem silly, but all throughout my younger years when I spent a lot of my time doing cheerleading, I always felt very invested and as though my team had a sense of shared purpose around our work. We always knew we had to show up and never give up because we were all working towards the same end goal and we were relying on eachother. We cheered for one another, cried with one another, caught one another when we fell, and we were constantly striving for an end goal which consisted of performing better than we had the time before. We always said practice makes “permanent” NOT perfect. I feel like that is a time I felt really connected to what I was doing in a group with a shared purpose. 

4. This is a group of fifth graders who came together with the shared purpose of collecting enough bottle caps for their school to get a recycled bench, but they ended up being so committed and doing so well they collected enough to get a picnic table and a bench! I also love this video because it’s only the students talking, so you can really see how much ownership they feel over their project.

This world is lucky to have some really, really amazing youth making a difference in their communities and spreading some positivity!!

March for Our Lives - Check out these amazing youth and this incredibly successful movement they have started! I am inspired by their meaningful work.

Kid President - Although this a little old I think he is awesome. I especially love this video because its about awesome girls, and today is international womens day. Yay!

SUBOG @ the University of Connecticut - This is an incredible group of student leaders who completely oversee programming for the undergraduate population at their school (over 20,000 students!!), and they are full time students themselves. I am in awe of them.

Grace Vanderwaal is a singer/songwriter who won America’s Got Talent when she was only 12 years old!! She is incredibly talented, grounded, and she writes her own music. I have been a huge fan since she was on America’s Got Talent 3 years ago.

This week’s focus related to my budding inquiry is..

Resilience

Here we go...

First, let’s define resilience. Resilience is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change, according to Merriam-Webster.

Next, this page explains Why Resilience Matters, particularly for college students (which is my population of interest for my inquiry).

In my next find, Peter Gray, PhD explores Declining Student Resilience. This article is really interesting because it mentions quite a bit that students in this day and age are super uncomfortable with mistakes and failures, but in fact I have found these are often the best ways to learn.

This article suggests 5 Ways to Promote Resilience in the Classroom. I feel like this is important to include because it offers usable strategies for teachers that I feel can be applied across all levels of education. 

It’s Friday... you know what that means!

Here’s what I have for this week with a focus on P/W/F and supportive communities:

Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World - this was a source presented in “What it Means to Pose, Wobble, and Flow.” The title sounded interesting to me, so I decided to read the abstract/summary of it and it sounds very interesting. The idea that using skills such as reading and writing as a foundation to make positive changed is something that I feel is overlooked. While this isn’t a person to connect with and help me when I wobble, finding sources and books that people write which challenge my thinking really inspire me to continuously learn and grow through the wobble. 

NOT about an endpoint! I loved this important idea presented in What it Means to Pose, Wobble, Flow. There is no endpoint in any realm of professional development, especially in any profession that deals with people! There is always going to be changes, new personalities, and things to learn. Sometimes we might be able to face the wobble before it even happens to us by working with our networks which leads me to..

I really loved Jullette’s Find 5 which is focused on mentors and networks. I am sharing a professional network that has really helped me through my ‘wobbles’ in regards to applying to graduate programs and summer internships for higher education. It’s actually a Facebook group with professionals, graduate students, and prospective students who want to go into higher education. It’s been such a great resource for me at this point in my life, through all my wobbles, thank you Jullette for making me realize what a great resource this truly has been for me!

City Fit Girls is a group that I recently got involved with which is helping me through my wobbles on my fitness journey. Right now, I am training to run a 15k, so it is really important for me to stay on my training schedule. When I’m feeling really un-motivated, and like I will never reach my “flow” I connect with people in this group over social media and it encourages me to keep pushing forward and provides me with tips and advice to progress in my journey.

Happy Find 5 Friday! Here are my picks for this week:

Elizabeth Ellsworth’s - Places of Learning, Chapter 3: Pedagogy’s Time and Space - In this chapter (which I coincidentally had to read this week for my capstone course), Ellsworth explores Play and the “figure of the rigid, imposing, preemptive presence” among other things. Ellsworth insists that play is an integral part of the process of learning and finding personal interests. The “figure of the rigid, imposing, preemptive presence” is one who forces their own desires on a child - overshadowing the interests of the infant/child so they are not able to explore and find what interests them. She argues that this figure stunts creativity spaces and transitional spaces.

‘Art Inside Out’ at Children’s Museum of Manhattan - this is an older exhibit, but it was actually mentioned as an example of a pedagogical space for play in the Ellsworth chapter I mentioned previously. It was an art exhibit that welcomed and encouraged children’s active participation and play.

The best kindergarten you’ve ever seen - This is a link to a TED talk which discusses an amazing Kindergarten in Japan where the building is constructed in a way that encourages children to run, play, exercise, appreciate nature, and make mistakes in order to learn in a more engaging and meaningful way. Super cool!

18 Ways Universities are Using Video Games To Learn - This is an interesting pick that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include. Many people describe play as something without a real end goal, so I wasn’t sure if these colleges utilizing video games as a platform for learning really constitutes as play. But, I decided that these initiatives are a step in the right direction to re-engage college students in a more fun and playful way.