Introducing the Edge Project
“To transform the core, start at the edge.” -- John Hagel and John Seely Brown
The Edge Project is part of Global Kids recent support from the MacArthur Foundation to expand the capacity of civic and cultural institutions to use new media as innovative educational platforms that engage youth in learning and promote youth civic participation. More specifically, the Edge Project is interested in civic and cultural institutions bringing cutting edge digital media into their youth educational programs. It is equally interested in where this type of programming - due to technology, its pedagogical implications or both - is a disruptive force challenging the educators and/or the institutional cultural to work on the edge of their comfort level. There is a balancing act they must undertake, being receptive to how new media challenges their current educational culture and practice while, in turn, challenging the educational potential of new media through interacting with that very culture and practice. At the end of the day, we want to better understand the following questions: how do institutions find their balance working on this edge and do different types of institutions respond in different ways?
Working from a strength-based youth development model, Global Kids' programs are designed not to address deficiencies but to build the capacities of young people. As such, we privilege the existing skills, knowledge and dispositions youth bring into a program. What we may do less successfully, however, is address and help youth think about where they are developing these strengths when outside our programs. They may navigate their distributed learning networks, moving from home, to school, to after school program, to personal media, and to home once again, without ever becoming aware of how any of these nodes connects to the others. While the Edge Project focuses on learning institutions, at the same time we want to look at similar issues from a youth frame of reference. How do young people understand and situate themselves within their individual learning ecology? Where do they view themselves as directing their learning and where as mere subjects to forces beyond their control?
Finally, bringing the frameworks together, we want to better understand how an educational program using new media can afford youth new opportunities to leverage their learning from other spheres. Is there something specific to new media tools, or the pedagogies they engender, that create more flexibility and openness for youth to bring in existing knowledge and practices? How can these forms of participatory learning programs support youth to strategically shape and navigate their learning network? Finally, how can civic and cultural institutions leverage and understand how youth learn across their personal ecology and how does that shape their own understanding of their institution's role within this network?
The design of this project is informed by and aims to contribute to the recent body of work funded by the MacArthur Foundation to understand youth learning through digital media in programs outside school time. Anne Balsamo's Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work offers a deep literature review of new media practices in museums and libraries. The unpublished Whitepaper Digital Media and Technology in Youth-Serving Organizations, co-authored by Becky Herr-Stephenson, Diana Rhoten, Dan Perkel, and Christo Sims, historicizes education within afterschool programs, museums and libraries, offers frameworks for categorizing current new media practices, and recommends areas for future research. Efforts are also currently underway in both Chicago and New York City to explore new approaches for developing learning networks, one centralized within the main branch of the library system and one distributed within institutions across the city. Finally, our work with Constance Steinkuehler and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin researched how the educational affordances of different virtual worlds affected the pedagogical practices of the program designers in different ways for two youth-serving after school programs.
The Edge Project will explore these questions over the next 24 months through a series of short-term educational projects developed and implemented in partnership with a variety of national civic and cultural institutions who are exemplars within their communities of practice. These demonstration projects are designed to challenge institutions to incorporate one specific form of digital media into their ongoing programs and to do so in a way that builds upon the organization's existing strengths and interests. In addition, the program designs are geared to address the specific needs of the organization and its constituencies, and to highlight how the organization serves as an leader within their professional networks whose work in this area can provide a model from which others can learn.
While there is a wide range of new media practice within civic and cultural institutions, The Edge Project has deliberately selected a common set of criteria for its programs which may distinguish it from other initiatives and contextualize our findings. The primary site of learning will not be online but in person, facilitated by an adult within the institutions. The programs will be informed by youth development and youth media pedagogies. Finally, the program designs will focus less on scale and breadth and more on innovation and depth with the understanding that developing good theory through iterative practice is just the first step towards scalable designs.
During its first year, these programs will educate youth and support:
We hope that by the end of this program, and through the [worked examples] produced by each seasonal program, we will have something of interest to share about how both youth and civic and cultural institutions are learning to find balance in our new digital age. Please follow the work at its start on the new site: EdgeProject.org.
