Three All-day Gatherings in Four Days
Last week I was out of the office for four full days, all consulting in one capacity or another for Global Kids. It has been an amazing journey over these past ten years working to support NYC youth while developing a broad range of expertise in the process that a wide variety of organizations now know they can call upon.
Tuesday & Wednesday - Serious Gaming at the New York Public Libraries
For the first two days, my colleague Rafi Santo and I ran a two-day long training for youth or young adult librarians from three branches of the New York City Public Library system. Over the next few months they will incorporate our Playing For Keeps program into their branches, a 20-session program to support their youth to identify as global citizens, develop game design skills, and learn to combine the two into a prototype for a serious game design. The final designs will be presented in a competition format at our annual collaboration with area youth media and technology organizations - Emoti-Con - in June at the 42nd Street branch of the NYPL. These days brought together our expertise on serious gaming and game design while supporting civic and cultural institutions to implement curriculum that was once designed exclusively for Global Kids Youth Leaders.
Thursday - Exploring Professional Developed for Technology in Schools at the Cooney Center
This was one powerhouse of a meeting. The educational heads of WNET, WGBH and others gathered with the nation's lead teacher support organizations, and a few .com's like Apple, to explore the big picture for best supporting educators to use media and technology in their classrooms. This is the sort of meeting that might take me hours to get my bearings straight and determine my role: what do I have to offer to this discussion? On the other hand, the room was filled with people with whom we’ve had the pleasure of having worked: Shelley Pasnik from the Center For Children and Learning, Lynette Guastaferro from Teaching Matters, and Brigid Barron, fellow MacArthur grantee and Stanford professor, who authored an excellent piece of research to inspire the meeting and move the agenda forward, not to mention the Cooney Center. What impressed me most in reflection was that our previous relationships with each had little to do with the other as the projects were so diverse.
In the end, it was easy for me to see we were one of the few organizations at the table running programs in the informal learning spaces (after school in libraries, museums, community centers, etc.) and could bring that perspective into the room, as well as familiarity with the MacArthur Grantee research that underpinned the briefing (and excites me the most!). Global Kids has been around for twenty years and I am proud to represent our history and reach at a table like this, and little can jazz me more than taking part in bringing MacArthur grantee's ideas into other settings, normalizing and applying them, as it were.
Friday - Supporting Youth Voices at the iZone Conference
Friday I worked with my colleague David Velasquez to support about thirty youth from the ten iZone schools (some of the most technologically sophisticated public schools intentionally disrupting the nature of learning). While staff from their schools met in a different room, the youth focused on identifying and articulating what "good learning" means to them, how their schools currently innovate to meet those needs, and how they can improve further. It was an exciting day. At times it felt like a press briefing, as I had never led a training with so many cameras and flips wielded by the participants, recording my every move.
More importantly, these sixth and ninth graders were on point, so easily able to talk about how they learned best (in groups, listening to heavy metal, etc.) and how their school met their needs (differentiated learning with online language courses, games-based learning, etc.). I talk about this stuff all the time, and wonder how far digital media can push the norms within traditional schools, but here were actual youth living it and experiencing it every day, on the front lines, and it showed. By the end of the day we edited and showed a seven minute video of footage created completely by the youth over the course of the day. It was one of those races against time, with some content naturally dropped along the way, but the process seemed powerful for the youth in attendance and served as a good example of what these youth can do and how they think.
And in the context of this post, it's why I work at Global Kids. I loved everything I had done all week, but nothing could match working with youth like this, learning from them as I supported their voices through digital media to create work to influence education back in their schools. This event called upon what makes our work within the Online Leadership Program so great: our twenty year history as youth development experts addressing social issues and our ten year history using digital media in innovative ways to support youth voice (and often without a net!).
