S. Craig Watkins joined us for lunch today to talk about learning environments which cultivate critical social vision. Craig teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig has done a lot of research on youth culture and hip hop. His most recent project, The Young and the Digital, is a book and companion website about young people’s activity on social networks. He’s also part of the MacArthur Connected Learning initiative.
Craig started out by telling us the story of his research of young people and media technology over the last ten years. In recent years, he has been involved in the MacArthur Foundation initiative on Youth Digital Media and Learning. He pointed us to the wide variety of projects which MacArthur is funding in the area of youth and media. That started with Henry Jenkins’s work on Participatory Culture and more recently Mimi Ito’s book on Hanging Out, Messing, around and Geeking Out. The connected learning initiative carries that interest further as mobile devices become more common.
Craig is particularly interested in questions of digital equity and youth. Instead of talking about the digital divite, Craig wants us to talk about the digital edge– talking about the greater diversity of young people using technology. More young people might be using new technologies, but not all media ecologies are equal. Out of this conversation are coming projects like Quest to Learn in New York and YouMedia, in the Chicago Public Library. For the MacArthur Foundation, education programs and creativity centers provide a tangible center for experimenting and imagining how this diversity can play out.
Craig comes to these issues as a sociologist who tries to understand how young people are using technology. He hopes that his research offers a “critical design perspective” for the design of youth programs. He talked to us about the idea of a “civic opportunity gap” between students who are placed on low-track trajectories or high-track trajectories in school– their entire path through schools reinforces a fixed notion of their destiny. According to Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh at the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group, students placed in low tracks aren’t offered the same opportunities to participate in democracy.
Although Craig has typically worked in schools, he encouraged us to see after-school programs as opportunities for greater flexibility and experimentation. He is curently working on a middle school game design summer school for design literacy. The goal for the summer school is to create a learning environment where learners can develop design thinking. This brings together a bundle of techniques from design, research, experimentation, prototyping, and evaluation.
Craig thinks that students need to cultivate “critical design” and a “critical disposition” in order to connect their learning to the world outside. He argues that education has often been focused on making good and obedient citizens, but that we need to focus education on cultivating critical citizens. This is especially important for young people who live on the margins of society. People like Jenkins have highlighted that young people are producers of media and content, not just consumers. Craig wants us to move beyond celebrating that activity to encourage young people to create content to apply critical vision and re-imagine their communities.
In Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change, Keri Facer argues that public discourse about schools — STEM for example– focuses solely on global economic future. That’s a limited vision of the role of schools. Instead, we should imagine a larger mission for education. People aren’t just workers. We’re also citizens. Keri writes:
“schools have both a responsibility and an opportunity to intervene. They have a responsibility to tip the balance of socio-technical change in the direction of sustainable, equitable, and positive futures for their communities.”
What might a future learning space look like? The first thing we have to realize is that school is just one node in a broader network of young people’s learning spaces. He pointed us to Charles Leadbeaterand Annika Wong’s Learning from the Extremes” report. Looking for future models of schools, Charles looked at education in low income areas of Brazil, Africa, and Asia (Charles Leadbeater’s TedTalk on this research). How do people learn when they face drought, war, and famine, in places where routines and institutions aren’t always possible? In these schools, education is more work and making oriented.
With this in mind, the summer school will bring together 15 young people, provide them with design technologies, and organise them around the issue of childhood obesity. They’re hoping to work together to build a digital media campaign around these issues, involving their students in civic life.
Question: What involvement will students have in the design of these courses and educational environments?
A) At the high school where we currently work, we have roundtable discussions with a handful of young people to discuss the design of the summer school. This has been a constant source of conversation — how much do we build ahead of time and how much can kids come in and have a role in designing, make their mark on the materials we use, the platforms we use. We hope to engage the students in discussions of design and for input. It’s a 2 week project, so we need to develop some of this ahead of time. We’re consulting with curriculum experts to build a space that is very student centered.
Topper Carew brought up the project he’s working on: Learn to Teach: Teach to Learn. In this program, MIT gradstudents suggest for urban young people to learn– and then the young people teach them to each other. As a result, young people who might not have contemplated technology as a life pathway are now going to college. Topper emphasized the importance of providing young people with the resources they need to create innovations for community empowerment.
Craig responded by talking about the day to day challenges that make schools such a difficult place to learn. Craig thinks we have some answers about youth use of technology. For example, we know that black and latino youth are very engaged with mobile phones. But we still know very little about the context of their use. It’s not enough to picture the future of learning; we need to consider who the future young learners will be.
Nick Grossman talked about the shift in power that might result as education moves more towards networks and away from hierarchies. He wanted to know how institutions are responding to this shift.
Craig responded that most public schools are resisting this change. This is most visible with standardized tests. Even though teachers hate the current environment of assessment, they often still block the networked world– in some case actually cutting off access to the Internet from schools. Young people are certain to misuse social media, but Craig thinks that this offers a chance to think about ethics. (see his Huffington Post article, Ian Condry asked, how can we think about the social dynamics in a more nuanced way than broadcast versus networks. He pointed out that 60-70% of Japanese high school students have no confidence in the system or themselves. To respond to this, some Japanese educators went beyond peer relationships and authority relationships to look for “diagonal” relationships with mentors from other places.
Craig emphasized the value of involving recent graduates in student projects — people who can offer technical support and mentorship within creative projects.
When Jim Paradis asked what Craig has learned from the Quest to Learn project, Craig emphasized the value of curriculum design. He pointed us to Jane Margolis’s book, Stuck in the Shallow End about technology rich and curriculum poor schools. Good curriculum design needs to accompany new technologies in classrooms.
Rahul Bhargava asked Craig to contrast the development of replicable models versus acknowledging and respecting the innovation that teachers are already doing in the classrooms. Craig thinks that in the schools that he’s been in, connected learning hasn’t happened. In cases where it does, that innovation has been isolated.