What Do You Think? Engaging Youth to Design Their Own Education Together

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

ENGAGING YOUTH TO DESIGN THEIR OWN EDUCATION TOGETHER JORDAN SHADE

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

ENGAGING YOUTH TO DESIGN THEIR OWN EDUCATION TOGETHER

JOR D AN S H AD E

Copyright © 2014 by Jordan Shade All Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Jordan Shade Photography credits: All photography created by © 2014 Jordan Shade except pages 7/8, 22 via LIFE photography archives, pages 15, 17 via Not Back to School Camp website, page 16 via the Purple Thistle website, page 18 via the Independent Project website, page 19 via Unschool Adventures website, page 23/24 © Jessica Boschen, page 43 © Liz Sanders MakeTools, pages 48, 55, 56, 58, 59, 81, 82, 92 © Yara Safadi and page 106 © Sloan Breeden All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced-mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photo-copying-without written permission of the publisher.

Cover photo by Yara Safadi Cover design by Jordan Shade Book design b y Jordan Shade Master of Industrial Design at The University of the Arts 320 South Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19102 First printing June 2014

Wh a t D o Yo u T hi nk?

Eng a g in g Youth to De si g n T heir O w n Educa tion Together B y J o r d a n Shade

A t h e s i s s u bm i tte d i n parti al fulfillment of the requirements for th e d e g r e e in Maste r of I ndustri a l Design in the school of Design T h e Un i v e r si ty of the A rts P h il a d e l p h ia, Pe nnsylv ani a M a y, 2 0 1 4 T h e s i s C o m mi tte e : Lead Advisor: Phil Holcombe, Education Design Consultant, founder of PlusUs Advisors: Je re m y B e audry, Director MID University of the Arts Sharon Le Fe v re , professor University of the Arts A nthony G ui do, professor University of the Arts

This work is dedicated to Vrouyr Joubanian forever my design partner, who shies away from no challenge it is dedicated to Brittany Overton, who first challenged me to trust myself and find truth in the world and it is mostly dedicated to Nathaniel, with whom I conquer all challenges, who makes all my dreams his highest priority.

Acknowledgments Thank you to Katie O’Connor, Heather Gray, Lisa Marchiano, Zoe Gray, Asha Larson, Paige Menton, Ned O’Connor, and all the inspiring people at Talking Stick Learning Center: without you this project would never have happened, and especially to the leaders in the organization: you motivate me as a woman to make change in the world. Thank you to all the UArts staff who have checked my carelessness and pushed me in my excited states of fervor especially Sherry, Jeremy, Chris, Mike, Meredith and Benjamin. Dare I call you my peers now? And thanks to my mentors: Alexandra and Kelly. And the utmost gratitude to my parents, who were my first teachers, and continue to keep learning experiences an ongoing tradition in our family.

AB STR A CT In order to ensure the interest and participation of young homeschoolers in educational group endeavors, this project employs a human-centered design approach to continually engage youth in new ways to generate feedback on the programs in which they are currently enrolled. Methods of self-assessment, self-reflection and documentation are used to form a feedback loop. The various forms of feedback gathered are then translated to inform immediate developments in the ongoing program.

Using Talking Stick Learning Center as a testing ground, various means of gathering feedback from young people are tested and further refined during a series of eight weekly sessions. The best practices for gathering feedback from adolescent youth in this community form a model that can be further tested and iterated in other specific contexts be they independent educational centers, or progressive public or private schools. The body of knowledge this process creates including the specific interests and preferred structure of learning by this community of young people is also documented.

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CO N TE N T S When Teenagers Go Back to School Creating Responsive Programming

THE CONTEXT FOR WHAT DO YOU THINK?: PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION, THE TEENAGE BRAIN AND THE ROLE OF DESIGN...4 How Does Design Fit Into the Practice of Education?

What is the Relationship Between Progressive Education and Design?

Who is at the Center of Education?

Progressive Homeschoolers What is the Progressive Homeschooler Scene Like?

CASE STUDIES: SUCCESSFUL PROGRESSIVE EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS...15 The Purple Thistle Not Back to School Camp The Independent Project Unschool Adventures

LITERATURE REVIEW: NATURAL LEARNING, COMPULSORY SCHOOLING AND THE 21ST CENTURY...21 TALKING STICK LEARNING CENTER: A COLLABORATIVE PARTNER ORGANIZATION...32 Stakeholder Map What are the Needs of Talking Stick Learning Center?

User Profiles How Can Design Have Impact?

So What?

The Power of Feedback A Line of Inquiry

EXPERIMENTING IN THE FIELD: COLLABORATING WITH YOUNG ADULTS...49 Project Overview The Testing Ground 21st Century Skills and Design Based Learning Learning Curve The Feedback Loop in Motion Using Photos to Prompt Reflection Reflecting Through Time CoDec: A Designed Tool What is a Collective Group-Learning Endeavor?

LEARNING TO BUILD A MODEL FOR DESIGNING GROUP LEARNING ENDEAVORS...71 Project Evaluation Quantitative Metrics: Charting Attendance and Engagement Qualitative Metrics: The Story of Sean in Photos Insights and Discovery Why is it Difficult to Accomplish Self-Led Learning as a Group?

Why Attempt to Design Our Own Education?

The Feedback Loop: What’s Missing and What to Build On A Projected Model of Collective Self-Led Learning

CONCLUSION...91 Recommended Further Research Unexpected Outcomes Measuring Impact Post Script to Thesis Defense

NOTES...97 APPENDICES...98

By age 16, 75% of homeschoolers undergo a change in lifestyle and enroll in school.

W HEN TEEN AGE RS GO BAC K T O S C HO O L As homeschooling children grow into young teenagers, their educational needs begin to change. A cohort of homeschooled youth shrinks as the young people grow older, to only a quarter of its original size by traditional high school ages. In order to provide continual educational programming to these homeschoolers as they grow up, in their existing communities, progressive learning centers must understand the changing interests and needs of specific cohorts of youth. Adolescents are particularly difficult to engage in gathering input, as they lose interest in adults in their community – who are often tasked with creating their educational opportunities.

There are many barriers to including young adults as direct participants in the design of their own education. These obstacles include the intimidating nature of this task and the underdevelopment of relevant skills.

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C RE AT I NG R E S P O NS I V E P R O G R A M M I N G To successfully and continuously engage the growing teenager population, homeschooling centers must leverage the social nature and needs of teenagers and work to include their ever-changing interests and learning goals in new programming. This is in line with many homeschooler philosophies that learning should be selfled and interest-led to ensure maximum engagement and encourage deep learning, understanding and knowledge retention.

Facilitators of educational experiences may use a feedback loop system, comprised of various methods, to better connect with young adults’ interests in content and form throughout the course of a program, as well as to create new programming which itself is more responsive to its participants.

Homeschooler supplies scattered on a path in Awbury Arboretum in Philadelphia.

To accommodate their social nature, young adults should work to design their experiences together in groups. Cohorts of young adults must not only be consulted in the design of new teenager programming, but participate in this design directly. To do this, young adults should be introduced to a design process, practice 21st century skills (such as collaboration, creativity, communication, critical and strategic thinking) as well as engage in reflective and projective activities. These activities include documentation and evaluation of past learning experiences. Gradually working in groups, they should develop new collective interest-led learning experiences. To facilitate this process, young adults’ design work should be supported by various semi-structured activities and guidance from adults and experts.

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Homeschoolers teaching and learning how to play chess at Talking Stick Learning Center.

“ CREATIVITY IS A TYPE OF LEARNING PROCESS WHERE

THE TEACHER AND PUPIL ARE LOCATED IN THE SAME INDIVIDUAL.

”

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— ALBERT EINSTEIN

TH E C ONT E X T F O R WHAT DO YO U TH INK?: PROG R E S S I V E E D UC ATIO N, THE TE E NAG E B R A I N AND T H E ROL E O F DESIG N H OW DOES D E S IGN FIT IN T O T HE P R A C T I C E O F E DU C AT I O N? The practices of design and education share a lot of DNA. A human-centered designer approaches the world with what is often called “a beginner’s mind.” She wants to be as objective as possible, to even de-familiarize herself with the status quo so that she might see new details, learn something new about a situation or problem, and imagine a new solution. A designer studies those she designs for – her users – so that she can more fully empathize with them and share their point of view. A designer rigorously experiments with different ideas, using the process of trial and error, synthesizing and analyzing results to improve upon an existing product or system, or design something new.

In progressive models, education refers to both learners and educators. It can be seen as a cyclical process – an iterative process – like design. In order to learn something new, one experiments with different ideas, using the process of trial and error, synthesizing and analyzing results to verify a piece of knowledge or understanding. The learner often educates herself and others – just as a designer includes the users of her design in the process of designing a solution. A progressive educator would say learning is about natural curiosity and creativity. A skilled learner/educator harnesses her natural curiosity to build on her knowledge base, understand the world around her and applies this to her passions. A designer harnesses her natural curiosity to always ask questions, to pick apart an idea, to dig under the surface and create something new. A great designer is obsessed with learning – it is one of her most prized skills – and so naturally, a designer may have an interest in education, especially progressive education.

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We go through the design process many times a day when we observe our surroundings, analyze what we see, and create solutions for simple problems, like scheduling a busy afternoon, or troubleshooting while cooking. When we run through this process we are also learning – some people differently than others – but our brains are recognizing new patterns and understanding more things to be true as we go. The process of learning and that of designing are deeply intertwined.

WHAT IS TH E RE L AT IO N S H IP B E T W E E N

P ROGRESSIV E E D UC AT IO N A ND DE S I G N ?

Progressive educators operate from the fundamental premise that humans are naturally curious, exploratory beings that without being stopped will absorb information, problem solve and try and try and try until skills are mastered. It’s seen as no great feat, but rather our greatest feature, our best state, what makes us what we are. This evolutionary trait is strikingly similar to the designer’s process: observation, imitation, trial and error, synthesis. If education is a method of learning, as is our natural curiosity, this is the common thread between the modern concepts of education and design.

But the desire to design is not the only natural impulse – we also have a natural tendency towards community – a collaborative design process. Our existence has depended on this collaboration many times. We depend on each other not only to design, but to learn.

Human-centered design at a systems level – the holistic design of processes and services – is something that strives to incorporate more “users” or “non-designers”, into the design of those systems and services they are a part of. A model of progressive education known as “unschooling” works to incorporate its “users” – youth – into the design of their own education. This is self-led learning.

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Talking Stick homeschoolers brainstorming and sorting ideas in a collaborative design session.

COLLABORATION CREATIVITY PROBLEM FINDING PROBLEM SOLVING CRITICAL THINKING TRIAL & ERROR ADAPTABILITY

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WHO IS AT T H E C E N T E R O F E DU C AT I O N ?

In the education sphere, progressive education is on the far end of the spectrum from traditional education. Traditional education is what we normally see in public schools over the past century – what has become known as the factory model of schooling – which was mostly developed during the Industrial Revolution following the implementation of child labor laws. Content is mostly rote fact memorization, students are segregated by age, moved from subject to subject by the ringing of bells, and importantly: the teacher is the center of the focus of the classroom. In a successful traditional learning environment, the teacher works for the attention of the students through her authority, discipline, use of entertaining or charming qualities, and essentially keeps the focus at the front of the room. The content of the learning is determined at a federal level so that in theory all students acquire the same knowledge and skills by graduation.

Progressive education, by contrast, is primarily student-focused, just as human-centered design is people or “user”-focused. Nearly all the content is derived from student initiative and interests.

Learning should happen through experimentation and application in real world scenarios, not only in a classroom. Teachers act as facilitators of learning, not instructors. It is certainly not necessary that every student acquire the same knowledge and skills. As Alfie Kohn points out, progressive educational models are actually more traditional in nature, if one goes back before the Industrial Revolution to when young people learned naturally, based on individual curiosities and the necessity of the life and work that surrounded them.

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THE CHARACTERISTICS OF PROGRESSIVE SCHOOLS • ATTENDING TO THE WHOLE CHILD • CREATING A CARING COMMUNITY • COLLABORATIVE WORKING-WITH MODEL • SOCIAL JUSTICE • INTRINSIC MOTIVATION • INVITING DEEP UNDERSTANDING • PROMOTING ACTIVE LEARNING • TAKING CHILDREN SERIOUSLY • INDIVIDUALIZED INTEREST-LED CURRICULA from “Progressive Education” by Alfie Kohn

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P ROGRESSIV E H O M E S C H O O LE R S In modern American society, progressive education is difficult to practice in most public and even charter schools. It is very different than the traditional model we have embraced, and stands in direct contrast to such initiatives as No Child Left Behind, Common Core State Standards and the standardized testing movement.

Many communities interested in practicing principles such as self-led, individualized learning in real world scenarios take advantage of a now government sanctioned “homeschooling” option (homeschooling was illegal in most states thirty years ago 1 ). The homeschooler community as a whole is a large and varied one. Some practice traditional school-at-home where as others are more progressive, and even radical. “Unschooling” usually falls near the radical end of the spectrum, as it allows for young people to learn entirely at their own pace, with their own style and motivations with very little impedance from parents or facilitators.

OTHER SUCCESSFUL HOMESCHOOLING TEEN PROGRAMMING FOR HOMESCHOOLERS

TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS

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PROGRESSIVE SCHOOLS

TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS VS. UNSCHOOLING COMPARISON

STATE-MANDATED CURRICULUM

CHILD DICTATES WHAT IS LEARNED & WHEN

LEARNING PRIMARILY HAPPENS AT SCHOOL, DURING AGES 6 - 18

LEARNING HAPPENS EVERYWHERE, AT ANY TIME AT ANY AGE

GOAL: TO CREATE WELL ROUNDED INDIVIDUALS READY FOR COLLEGE OR ENTRY LEVEL WORK

OTHER SUCCESSFUL

TEEN PROGRAMMING RADICAL FOR HOMESCHOOLERS UNSCHOOLING

TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS GOAL: TO PREPARE YOUNG PEOPLE FOR THE HARD WORK AND COMPETITION OF THE REAL WORLD BY HAVING STRICT RULES

GOAL: TO CREATE SELF-ACTUALIZED YOUNG PEOPLE WHO QUESTION AUTHORITY

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Talking Stick homeschoolers play “Fire Keeper” in Awbury Arboretum.

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“ ALL MEN WHO HAVE TURNED

OUT WORTH ANYTHING HAVE HAD THE CHIEF HAND IN THEIR OWN EDUCATION.

— SIR WALTER SCOTT 12

The “Maker” Room at Talking Stick Learning Center

WHAT IS TH E P RO GRE S S IV E HO M E S C HO O L E R SCENE L IK E ?

In the homeschooling community there are: people who practice traditional homeschooling, usually for philosophical or religious reasons, those who practice more progressive homeschooling with youth participating in a variety of homeschooler programs, and there are radical unschoolers as well. The number of homeschoolers has grown in the United States by about 75% since 1999 2, and there are roughly two million homeschooling young people in the country today 3. When looking at teenagers in this community, it’s apparent that many of these families work to strike a balance between interestled, self-motivated individualized learning and preparing for the young adults’ future.

Homeschooling doesn’t mean you have to stay home to learn. Several communities have procured physical spaces in which to gather and include a social element to their experiences. Some are more structured, five day a week programs where students choose from a variety of academic, soft skill, and technical still-based classes.

Others take a co-operative model and provide families with both a place for communal activity, discussion, as well as social and learning experiences for youth. For many homeschoolers, attending such programs fits into a modular education that is comprised of various classes, activities, visits, and even travel.

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Opposite page: All photos taken by homeschooling families for Home Research Kits (see appendix: design tools).

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Campers at Not-Back-toSchool Camp, a yearly unschooling gathering

CA SE ST UD I E S : S U C C E SSFUL PRO G RE SSIV E ED U C AT I O NAL P RO G RAM S To understand the elements of successful progressive programming, mostly “unschooling� programs, different organizations and events are profiled. These document the values of these programs, and what strategies are employed such as peer-to-peer learning, freedom of choice, and real world experiential learning. These values were used as a foundation for the project component of this thesis: the teen workshop series.

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PROGRAM PROFILE: PURPLE THISTLE, VANCOUVER, CANADA FOUNDER/DIRECTOR: MATT HERN

MODEL TYPE: Not-for-profit, Collective PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Democratic community public space run by teenagers-25 year-olds. Many physical resources available.

Completely free materials/service open to public.

VALUES: Peer-to-peer learning & Collaboration, Freedom of choice, Production/Creation, Activism, Real world application

RELEVANT ELEMENTS & ISSUES • Free of charge, funded by arts grants • Completely organized and run by teens • Emphasis on production/creation: zines, gardening, events • Promotes high levels of leadership and responsibility on a scale of decision-making members to participants • Interesting focus on activism and community engagement INSIDE THE PURPLE THISTLE SPACE

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PROGRAM PROFILE: NOT BACK TO SCHOOL CAMP FOUNDER/DIRECTOR: GRACE LLEWELLYN

MODEL TYPE: Camp, Educational Business PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Several sessions/year camp in Vermont and Oregon. 70-100 unschooling teens per session. Based on Llewellyn’s Teenage Handbook. Sort of “annual summit” for unschoolers - crux of national community

VALUES: Self-actualization, Peer-to-peer learning & Collaboration, Freedom of choice, Friendship, Adventure

RELEVANT ELEMENTS & ISSUES • Medium cost, “work-study” options • Focus on peer-to-peer learning and leadership • Spritual in nature • One-off experience, part of modular lifestyle • Freedom of choice absolutely essential • Many teens return year after year, build life-long relationships DISCUSSION CIRCLE

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PROGRAM PROFILE: INDEPENDENT PROJECT, MONUMENT MOUNTAIN REGIONAL HS FOUNDER/DIRECTOR: SAM LEVIN

MODEL TYPE: High School semester long program (pilot) PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: 9 students participated in self-led individual projects and group “collective endeavors” exploring the arts, sciences, and math in a high school course

VALUES: Peer-to-peer learning & Collaboration, Freedom of choice, Social impact, Real world application, 21ST century skills, Self-directed learning

RELEVANT ELEMENTS & ISSUES • Program designed and implemented by a high school senoir • Participants were from a variety of academic levels • Ran as incubated pilot in traditional public school • Program is widely known within education community and referenced on a national level • Methods of feedback and self-reflection integral to program PARTICIPANTS LEARN ABOUT SMOOTHIES

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PROGRAM PROFILE: UNSCHOOL ADVENTURES FOUNDER/DIRECTOR: BLAKE BOLES

MODEL TYPE: Social Entrepreneur, Educational Business PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Yearly 3 week international trips of +/- 20 unschooling teens plus facilitators. Inspired by NBTSC. Yearly writing retreat, one month, 26 unschooling teens plus facilitators.

VALUES: Real world learning/application, Peer-to-peer learning & Collaboration, Freedom of choice, adventure

RELEVANT ELEMENTS & ISSUES • High cost to teens, Boles recommends ways to fundraise • Stresses peer-to-peer learning and leadership skills • One modular element among many, as programs are seasonal • Independent learning structure, demands a lot of responsibility • Boles as facilitator/entrepreneur is heavily invested in unschooling philosophy and self-directed learning as a lifestyle NEW ZEALAND TRIP, 2013

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E MA IL INTERV IE W W IT H BL A KE B O L E S ,

F OUNDER O F UN S C H O O L AD V E N T U R E S How are teenage homeschool/unschool needs different than their younger counter part’s?

Same as other teenagers vs. their younger counterparts: they need more peer/social interactions, less parent-driven activity, more autonomy.

How does your program work to meet these needs?

We provide opportunities for teens to learn and grow with a group of like-minded peers in an environment of relative autonomy.

How does the balance of structured vs. non-structured programming needs change as children become teenagers?

Depends on what “structure” means. Their needs to be more room for personal choice. But that doesn’t mean throwing out everything that’s “structured”.

What continuing practices do you employ to keep your program relevant?

Never offer the exact same program twice! Every program is brand new.

How do you challenge yourself to measure and ensure teen engagement?

No metrics -- just eyeballing. “Are they engaged?”

What challenges and roadblocks have you faced in developing and/or executing your program?

Marketing to a nationwide, highly dispersed, highly diverse audience. Still working on that one.

Many of these values are also values and practices of design based thinking and learning. Are you familiar with these ideas and the overlap of these two ideologies?

Yes, via Tina Seelig and the Stanford d.school.

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LITERATURE REVIEW: NATURAL LEARNING, COMPULSORY SCHOOLING AND THE 21ST CENTURY This thesis project grew out of a problem area many are familiar with. An education reform movement has been growing in the United States for years, and after such policy failures as No Child Left Behind and the Standardized Testing Movement, many citizens look to alternative and 4 new ways for learning to happen. I wanted to know how the new Information Age – so rich in technological advancements, and yet demanding of new skill sets – would accelerate an educational paradigm shift. What I found was that people were 5 “hacking” their educations – piecing together learning experiences based on what they loved to do, in the real world. Many of these practices can be defined as progressive educational models, radical homeschooling, or “unschooling.”

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world.6 Gatto famously resigned, after teaching and winning awards in New York City public schools for 30 years, and began writing a series of books and lecturing throughout the country, speaking to the oppressive nature of schooling and its goals to keep citizens along a consumer-driven, 7 state-dependent, politically apathetic path.

Examining schools in a social, political and economic light is the basis for much of the philosophy and ideology that supports unschooling and progressive education at large. These critical takes are nothing new – Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher, wrote about the dangers of a Western educational institution and its ties to perceptions of world poverty, economics and globalization as early as 1970.

Modern forms of alternative education, in practice, focus less on the political criticisms of these roots, and more on the “users” of education: the youth in our communities. I began researching “unschooling” – a more radical version of homeschooling – a practice of an interest-based, learnas-you-live in the real world lifestyle while looking into alternative forms of education. The more I began to understand this progressive learning model, I wanted to know why unschoolers and progressive homeschoolers believe so strongly in the success of interest-based, self-led learning.

I was aware of the growing movements of radical homeschoolers 8 who don’t imitate school at home, and more child-centered educational models,9 but only understood these practices from the individual experiences of others, not as highlevel concepts.

John Taylor Gatto, a staple figure in the unschooling community, subversively worked to cultivate a learning community specific to the needs of inner city New York youth in the 70’s and 80’s by allowing them experiences in the real

The most widely associated idea behind these practices is natural learning – the idea that curiosity drives humans from birth to watch, listen, experiment, explore and work to understand the world around us as a natural instinct. An

important resource for me in grasping this concept is Sandra Dodd’s Big Book of Unschooling, written by one of the leaders in the modern unschooling community. Dodd serves as a guide for many young curious parents looking for an alternative to mainstream educational institutions. Her book is exhaustive: a collection of insights and observations, words of encouragement and extensive examples of experiences from unschooling her own three children, now adults themselves.

Natural learning is about giving young people the tools to guide and expand their learning process, not dictating what they should be learning and when. Dodd stresses the natural ability of young babies, children and adults to seek out questions, answer them and learn multitudes along the way, when they are given the support, freedom and resources to do so. She emphasizes that a key element for this growth are concepts such as providing useful principles instead of concrete rules to young people. “Helping people learn to find their own answers [by applying principles] is vastly superior to distributing answers on demand [enforcing rules].10 ” Dodd also sheds light on the difficultly for many parents or educators when they think about the comparatively unstructured nature of unschooling and natural learning. Because many of us have experienced learning and education through a strict institutional model, the prospect of a child-centered, interest-led program or life-style seems unnerving. What will the young people actually learn if left to their own devices? Dodd describes this shift in point-of-view as the “de-schooling” process, and actually has developed a formula for the time it might take a traditionally “schooled” person to open up to natural learning.

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This concept continually inspires my thesis design work because of a simple idea. If the educational paradigm is to shift into a more progressive, adaptable model, a vast majority of the adults in charge of facilitating and planning this change were not educated in a progressive system themselves. Therefore, an empathetic approach to the work is critical: where educational developers and reformers must continually work to understand the points of view of the young people they are working for. Dodd is careful to speak to the point that one (as a parent or educator) doesn’t simply wipe away the implications our own education had on our own development, and that working in this new paradigm takes an awareness and a presence of mind to change our perceptions.

Cultural critic Daniel Quinn addresses the societal fears, doubts and criticisms of natural learning by questioning the general structure of schools: the changing periods and ringing bells, the lack of choice or input from the student body. In a speech to a group of Houston based homeschoolers in 2000, Quinn remarks that part of the social need for traditional schools is wrapped up in the “mythology of childhood” – that children must be forced to learn through teaching, instruction and schooling, and otherwise wouldn’t do so on their own.11 He points out that children are hardwired to learn genetically, and are in fact fantastic learners when left to their own devices, that defenders of traditional schooling use the performance of children in schools themselves – where learning has become an unwelcome chore – to justify the need for more compulsory schooling.12 Sitting at a desk listening to a lecture surrounded by peers of exactly your own age, about a subject you have little or no way to identify with certainly does not paint a picture of behavior I would consider natural ; but does natural learning based in interest help achieve deeper understanding and retention of knowledge and skills? Does natural learning by its design work better than compulsory schooling?

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To answer this question I turned to Alfie Kohn, one of the most well known champions of progressive educational models. In the article “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat but Also Hard to Find,” Kohn outlines clearly what “progressive education is … and what it isn’t,” although admitting that it can’t always be nailed down due to its very nature of resisting conformity and standardization.13 Progressive education in practice, as opposed to traditional education (schooling), embraces a child-centered, natural learning, interest-based, collaborative model.

Kohn responds to the question of the success of natural learning by arguing with the fact that if people learn skills and information in a context in which is holds value to them , they will learn and understand more completely and retain the learning much longer.

Daniel Quinn supports this argument form a biological standpoint.

“The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them – the things they need to know – and forget the rest.14 ” This is the heart of why progressive educational models work. If children are fantastic, natural learners, and people understand and learn most when that which is learned is important to them, then interest-based learning is tailored to the individual needs of the child, encouraging their natural curiosities, and allowing them the to lead their learning to a point of deep understanding and retention.

Beyond retention and understanding of interest-based content – the what – I wondered what the idea of self-led models of learning – the how – contributes to the successful learning by a person.

Essentially these models aim to achieve a certain skill set around process. Skills such as critical thinking, problem definition, adaptability, flexibility, and creativity encourage young people to answer the questions: What do I want to learn? Why? How? 15 These skills are what motivate young people to grow into life-long 24

learners, whose education doesn’t simply end because they’ve turned 18 or 22 years old. These practices of self-reflection and motivation influence the methods of feedback used in the project of this thesis. The feedback loop is meant to begin a cycle wherein both facilitators of learning and the young learners are continually self-evaluating, reflecting, and evaluating the program in order to stay engaged in the process.

These skills also allow these young people to succeed in the Information Age. In the book 21st Century Skills, authors Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel outline the skills that are needed in the ever-evolving landscape of the modern working world. Among these are exactly those listed as goals of a progressive education. People now need to be self-motivated, self-led, to continually learn new skills and see the world from new perspectives while working with others.

As I further grasped the value of interest-based

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learning and its potential, my attention shifted to the role of design, and therefore my role, in the realm of education reform. Why is the practice of human-centered design relevant to methods of progressive education such as unschooling?

From the outset of this research, overlap in the value systems, methodology and approach of design and progressive education as well as natural learning were apparent. Referring back to Alfie Kohn’s description of progressive education, some of the core tenants are: collaboration between youth and adults, deep understanding and exploration of material, and promoting active learning.16 Contemporary humancentered design thrives on the concept of collaborative work. Much of the success of design is attributed to including as many varied skills sets, points of view, and affected peoples as possible in a project or research.17 Just as a design team might include nurses, doctors, custodians, patients and administrators in the design of a new

hospital system, in an ideal progressive educational environment facilitators (“teachers”) rely heavily on the input of young people to co-create the content, format and style of learning therein. This collaboration would work to ensure the young people are learning content and skills of value to them, which then would be better applied, understood and retained over time.

While design can be aligned with the approach to education in a progressive model, i.e. how a program or classroom might be structured to involve the collaboration between teachers and students and promote individualized curricular solutions for each child, the goals and outcomes of a progressive education are also aligned with the skills used in design. Progressive education strives to teach young people how to think critically, explore, experiment, collaborate and work towards deep understanding.18 In their book 21st Century Skills, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel outline a set of new capacities required by the increasingly global economy and new Information Age. Among them include many of these exact skills that progressive learning settings work towards. Trilling and Fadel have been hailed by other educational professionals for outlining the ways in which schools must move forward into a new paradigm in order to serve their student bodies. In effect, the proposed methodologies such as “learning through hands-on, collaborative project approach; a real world problem and challenge that motivated individual and team learning” 19 suggest moving towards a more progressive model, as outlined by Alfie Kohn.

In their thesis project TRUSS, Kelly Babcock and Alexandra Visconti outline the relationship between Trilling and Fadel’s proposed model and what is known as “Design-based Learning.” Design-based Learning, DBL, refers to a curricula or learning process that incorporates the design process, methods and values, often through group projects, to promote the development of skills used in design such as: objective observation, empathy, critical thinking, collaboration and iterative and experimental approach. Babcock and Visconti argue that DBL develops the 21st Century Skills 26

described by Trilling and Fadel, and this inherently ties together design as a practice and progressive education.

The problem is that while progressive education works towards the skills needed in design and the new economic paradigm, and requires the input of the young people involved as well as the adults, it doesn’t rigorously employ a design methodology in the development of its programming, curricula, etc.

In addressing the general lack of progressive schools, Alfie Kohn cites several examples, most importantly that “progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well.” 20 It demands more of both the young people involved and the learning facilitators, than traditional education. Here is where design has the potential to play a critical and valuable role.

Facilitators or teachers must be comfortable with the uncertainty and unpredictability of this style of learning where young people aren’t simply “marching towards the correct answer.” 21 According to Kohn himself, naturally excelling at this type of “teaching” is not a common trait in many people. Sandra Dodd might suggest that this is due to most people’s own traditional educational upbringing – that without going through a “de-schooling” process, it is quite difficult to design and facilitate in a truly progressive learning environment.22 When addressing the goals of progressive education as a service or system through a design lens, therefore, the adults – developers, facilitators, etc. – need the input and interests of their “users” – students and young people – to successfully collaborate, empower, address the whole child, and promote natural, interest-based, self-led learning. By using the methods, tools and processes of Human Centered Design to gather this information and create knowledge, the goals of progressive education can be better achieved.

This brings up a new area of research: how are educators and facilitators currently gathering student input and feedback?

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Some suggested methods include various conversation methods ranging from focus groups to informal, spontaneous chats.23 But how many of these methods are actively practiced, during the primary school years? In “Through the Lens” Tara Jones addresses ways to engage young home-schoolers in their education, and how it differs from traditional schooling. Jones stresses the fact that many schools practice the consultation of young people – asking them what they think – but fail to act on this input. Jones attributes this lack of pure participation by youth to the societal view on children and teens as being in a state of “citizens in waiting,” not quite able to make decisions on what they should learn .

In the fields of interaction design and user experience design, specific studies surrounding the use of teenager and adolescent participation and input into the design of products and systems they might use discuss the difficulty in engaging this user group.

For instance, there are many methods developed for engaging children in user testing and generative research, and countless methods and tools for engaging adults, but teenagers are described as being especially difficult subjects.24 Jones outlines the use of visuals for gathering feedback, asking young people to take photos, printing them out, and then discussing the narrative of the photos to gain insight on their perspective.

This use of visuals to engage youth in reflecting on and describing past activity became the foundation of the documentation and feedback developed in this thesis.

Other studies in the field of human computer interaction, suggest prototyping activities with adolescents in a low risk way as a means to get insight. They suggest that no activity should be longer than 15 minutes, in order to maintain high levels of participation.25 The feedback loop used in this thesis project kept activities to a limited time, and also tested various methods of young adult interaction such as brainstorming onto post-it notes with low-risk content before inviting participants to engage in the same activity with more 28

self-reflective and evaluative content (see feedback method “Name This Workshop & Skills”) The difficulty in engaging teens in generative design research and self-reflective educational feedback might hinge on their specific stage of brain development. In her TED Talk, “The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain,” Sarah-Jayne Blakemore speaks to the ever-changing opinions, moods and interests of teenagers in the context of their highly intensive brain development. According to Blakemore and new research made possible by HMRI technology, adolescent brains are changing as much as toddlers’ – but in vastly different areas. Blakemore, a neuro-cognitive scientist and professor at University College London, describes their rapid acquisition of new social skills which many adults take for granted, their riskreward behaviors, and how unbelievably susceptible to their environment teenagers are. All of these qualities can create a disconnect or misunderstanding between adults and young people as well as make a collaborative process between them extremely difficult.

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30

MAP OF STAKEHOLDERS

TEEN WORKSHOPS & THESIS WORK

LOCAL BUSINESSES

CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS

COMMUNITY RESOURCES

TALKING STICK FACILITATORS

TALKING STICK

PHILA SCHOOLS

TALKING STICK COMMUNITY

KEY HOMESCHOOLING PARENTS & TEENAGERS

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MT. AIRY CO-OP

MT. AIRY CO-OP COMMUNITY

TALKING STICK LEARNING CENTER: A COLLABORATIVE PARTNER ORGANIZATION In Philadelphia, Talking Stick Learning Cente r is a non-profit organization that provides school-hour day long programming two days a week for homeschoolers in the greater Philadelphia community. As with the previously listed groups, Talking Stick provides above all a social and group educational experience for its attendees. The structure of Talking Stick is loose but based in four fundamental areas: writing, nature, world studies, and a maker studio with a S.T.E.A.M. foundation. Their classrooms are located in the Awbury Arboretum, where they have access to the rich natural landscape.

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Outside the Cope House at Awbury Arboretum, home to Talking Stick Learning Center programs for 1015 year olds.

WHAT ARE T H E N E E D S O F TA L KI NG S T I C K LE A RNING C E N T E R?

As the population of homeschoolers at Talking Stick ages into young adults, several new issues and needs arise. A chief concern for many parents is college preparation and admission. While this can be a stressful time, there are ways for homeschoolers to receive a high school diploma and many colleges are making changes to their admissions requirements and even seeking out homeschooled youth.

A major issue is the matter of content and form for group educational experiences. As young people grow, their interests become more complex and varied; their skills become more refined as well.

Therefore educational programming needs to be more complex and address these interests as collective endeavors in order to keep people enrolled and engaged at Talking Stick.

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Reasons such as college prep, anxiety, lack of diverse learning experiences, and sometimes simply boredom all contribute to a staggering drop off in the number of young people who homeschool into their teen years. By high school ages (13-18 years old), 75% of an original cohort of homeschoolers will have changed lifestyles and enrolled in public school.26 Interests & Skills As young people grow, their interests become more complex and varied; their skills become more refined as well. Therefore educational programming needs to be more complex and address these interests as collective endeavors in order to keep people enrolled and engaged at Talking Stick.

Challenging Environment As young adults refine their skills and their body of knowledge grows, they often suffer from what one parent named “I don’t know what I don’t know” syndrome. When a teenage homeschooler is interested in algebra, they might never have heard about calculus, and therefore struggle to feel challenged in their work.

Structure

The Garden Classroom at Talking Stick Learning Center - pictured during the Fall preceding this thesis project.

Katie O’Connor, the founder of Talking Stick, and lead facilitator, observes the phenomenon in which young adults simultaneously don’t want to be told what to do, and yet do crave direction and guidance. Other parents at Talking Stick talk about the delicate line between when a young person doesn’t want to learn something new because of disinterest, and when they feel intimidated by the unknown. The issue of how to structure programming for teenagers: should it be “free time,” pre-set activities, or a mix of both? Without some guidance young people might quickly feel that they aren’t accomplishing much grow frustrated or bored. Too much control, and they will disengage. The structure, or form, of teen programming is crucial to its success.

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Young adults in the Cope House during the Maker program at Talking Stick

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USER PROFILES

NEVA: TEEN HOMESCHOOLER

Neva is fifteen years old and would nearly be finished with her sophomore year if she attended high school. Her interests range from marine biology to playing ukulele, but many are founded in the arts: screen-printing, sculpture, and acrobatics – she wants to go to the National Circus School of Montreal one day for college. Last year she visited one of the more progressive schools in Philadelphia, (although still not so progressive) the Science Leadership Academy, and was put off by how much of the learning was done on the computer. Neva’s father is a designer, and through this exposure she’s gained an appreciation for approaching problems and brainstorming solutions. When reflecting on her education she’s quick to point out the difference between little kids and older teens – little kids don’t need much direction – their imagination is endless. As teens, she says, people start to need constraints to work since “boundaries build creativity.”

practicing them. Her experience supports the hypothesis that young homeschooling adults must be eased into new activities using familiar content.

After gaining trust in a design process and practicing relevant skills, self-reflection, evaluation and ideation of future learning experiences will come more easily.

When exposed to design activities during teen design workshops, Neva engaged quickly and with confidence, voicing ideas, interviewing her peers, and communicating her point of view. Neva demonstrates that once familiar to the concept of design, or design methods and activities, young people will feel more and more comfortable

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USER PROFILES

N E D : TA L K I N G S T I C K T E E N

Ned, thirteen, prefers lounging around his home in a robe and will often remain quiet for 10 minutes before slipping a wry joke to a group conversation. His mom brought him up in the interest-based self-led tradition, and he has been homeschooled his whole life. His biggest gripe with Talking Stick now is that he doesn’t have the trust of his adult counter-parts to learn in his own way, at his own pace all of the time , and – dose off for an hour or two if the mood strikes him. He truly doesn’t think that any person should be forced to do something they don’t like and sees his future with a sort of reckless confidence. He doesn’t see the need to attend college: “…I would want to just skip it and you know, get a loft apartment, and if it doesn’t work out then that’s fine . I did what I wanted to do.” He feels anxiety about his mom always asking him what he wants to do with his future, and feels constant pressure to make decisions.

Ned’s self-directed learning has led him to many places – online massive computer games such as League of Legends , real life role-playing and adventure games, and game creation, drawing – and in many of these areas he takes on a leadership role within his peer group.

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Opposite page: All photos taken by homeschooling families for Home Research Kits (see appendix: design tools).

Ned presents one end of the homeschooling spectrum in that he doesn’t see the immediate need for adults to be involved in his education, and therefore isn’t always forthcoming with his opinions and interests. He exemplifies how a young, smart person can be very frustrating for a facilitator to reach out to. His affectations are often that of extreme boredom and disinterest.

This thesis’ goal is to create experiences that are youth-oriented, not led by an adult, with built in scaffolds that might make decisionmaking and reflection on Ned’s current and possible future situations easier. How can the involvement of a group of Ned’s peers make him more comfortable sharing his opinions and giving feedback that his facilitators can use?

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USER PROFILES H E AT H E R : T S PA R E N T

Heather, as a mom to Zoe, a home-schooling twelve year-old, is Talking Stick’s greatest champion and one of its most active community members. She serves on the board and writes blogs for the website, contributing many of her myriad skills for free because of her deep belief in how the programs have served her daughter’s education.

She beams with pride when describing watching Zoe develop into a self-confident, self-directed leader and learner among her peers.

Heather attended a progressive high school, and a Montessori school as a pre-schooler. She went to college but didn’t graduate. Heather’s personal slogan on her Google profile is “what don’t I do?” and she lives that philosophy – adding being an aspiring facilitator at Talking Stick as her newest project. However, as a self-described introvert, Heather, like many of the Talking Stick facilitators, struggles to engage young people who aren’t her daughter, and finds many of them intimidating, bossy and rude.

Recently, she had begun developing Talking Stick’s first teen program: a class where participants would write, film, edit, direct and post videos to the internet. It seemed that interest was high among the Talking Stick teens, but the class never went through due to lack of an internet connection in the classrooms. She 39

wants to keep working towards a new teen class but understands the risk of not having enough interested participants or too many bored ones.

When she has conversations with young adults besides Zoe, the responses to her proposals of new class ideas are often superficial, flat, and comprised of few words.

Heather’s experiences pointed to a new goal of this project – to develop activities and objects

that facilitate conversations between unfamiliar adults and teens, which yield results without the adult having to participate directly. Facilitators like Heather will be able to introduce an activity to a group of young adults, and then stand back as they self-document their interests and goals so that she can be more informed without asking them awkward questions.

The current structure of Talking Stick reflects its self-led, self-directed educational model: as a facilitator, if people want to start a new class or program, it is up to them to take initiative and move the idea forward. Without excessive support from the other staff and board members, creating a new class can be difficult, or even held back by a simple logistical problem such as Heather’s lack of internet access. The data gathered by methods of feedback in this thesis will scaffold this program-development process, informing new classes as to the content and format, so that new facilitators like Heather can focus on keeping new projects alive, and that, eventually, the young people will be creating the classes themselves.

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USER PROFILES SEAN: TS TEEN

Sean is not inclined to do what he calls “sitdown work” – reading, writing and being quiet. The first day of the Teen Workshops, he opted to move around the room taking funny digital photos rather than interviewing one of his peers. He often dodges direct questions from adults, but listens to his peers, and shares his opinion with them readily. He lives for humor, giggles frequently – “my life is a comedy sketch.” His sense of humor lives near the absurd, he is very creative and will suggest self-described nonsensical ideas for the effect of his peers’ reactions, always trying to one-up their statements with jokes. His preferred learning style is highly experiential and open ended. He wants more free time at Talking Stick, and really sees it as a practical necessity – “ it’s [Talking Stick] for the portfolio [how homeschoolers track their learning for state government regulations]!” At the same time, he can be highly critical of programming where he sees little being achieved. When recalling a Talking Stick program that was canceled due to low interest he said “remember that one week we just drew a map?”

On the other hand, when given the task to strategize changes for Talking Stick he took the work quite seriously. He continuously

wrangled the small group in to take a vote, or examine the most requested elements.

Sean represents a different style of learning that the teen workshops needed to address.

If a progressive model is to be focused on the individual, then most importantly the form of the programs involved should bend around these learning styles – more physical, highly imaginary, and social in nature.

USER PROFILES A S H A : T S FA C I L I TAT O R

Asha is one of six main facilitators at Talking Stick Learning Center, and leads the S.T.E.A.M. Maker studio for kids age 10 - 15. She feels a serious responsibility in this work, and that she and others should be developing fundamental skills. She worries about the fifteen year old boys she sees around her who can’t “write a sentence,” and wonders what their futures will be like. Asha mostly works to find the balance between structured activities and self-led projects, and feels that she has a very narrow window of opportunity for keeping the attention of the young adults in her program. She cares greatly about what her participants think and what they enjoy, and has expressed her interest in methods that would help her communicate more directly with her participants about what they like and don’t like, what their interests are, and how their expectations are or aren’t being met.

Asha already employs some methods of designbased learning in her program, including the examination of everyday objects for re-design opportunities. She documents her class rigorously, although none of the photos she takes are displayed or explicitly shared with the participants of her program. Her Maker program consists of giving young people access to a multitude of physical resources, tools and Maker challenges.

HOW CAN DESIGN HAVE IMPACT? To gain perspective on young adult interests, therefore, is tantamount to successful teen programming, and Talking Stick’s future. Human centered design research methodology relies heavily on discovering the needs (interests, passions, etc.) of users – in this case the homeschooling teens – and turning them into useful, actionable insights – which here, would directly inform teen programming.

In design research, activity-based, participatory, generative methods work to penetrate the user’s mind-set and explore what is most important to them and how to achieve their goals. For example, Liz Sanders, creator of MakeTools, uses paper-based activities to serve as a conversation starter with her stakeholders. One such tool is a time line where people use cut out words, images, stickers, etc. to describe the high and low points in their lives in regards to a relevant subject, such as a health condition, or time of change. By observing the person go through the activity, and asking them questions about it afterward, the design researcher gains insight into the person’s goals and mindset that can affect the design at hand.

Generative research tool © 2013 Liz Sanders

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Talking Stick young adults, including Sean and Ned engage with generative research tool during a design session.

They place stickers portraying various activities on a scale to indicate how much they enjoy each activity.

SO WHAT? This line of discovery leads directly to the initial hypothesis of this thesis. I propose that by using variations on generative design research methodologies in current teen programming we can create a feedback loop of interests, goals, and relevant input from the participating teen participants, that will help facilitators create more successful teen homeschool programming. The success of these programs includes lasting participation and engagement of the teen participants, word-of-mouth marketing by the participants to recruit more attendees, high return rates of all participants in terms of attendance, and a feeling of ownership by the young adults over the program itself.

THE POWER OF FEEDBACK In the theory of cybernetics, which can have many definitions,27 a feedback loop is a mechanism that allows for more accurate communication and understanding between two entities. As messages are transferred back and forth, they become less consistent with the original meaning or intent, as the message is re-interpreted by different bodies. The need for feedback in everyday life, in computing, in having a conversation, is the same as the need for feedback in education. On a very basic level, if young people do not get feedback for what they say, or asked to give feedback themselves about what they do and think, there will be no clear message, or meaning to their education. “Providing a platform for children to be heard, which takes into account their position as stakeholders in their education, represents a commitment to their entry into their culture as well as recognizing their right to participation.� 28 When we ask others what they think we are fundamentally saying we value their response, and when we act on their feedback, we demostrate this even more so. When our thoughts and feelings, opinions and ideas are valued, we gain confidence, and feel 45

empowered to share these opinions. In order to promote this confidence and empowerment, and also encourage a deeper reflection as a part of giving feedback – thinking and analyzing in order to give an opinion – the request for feedback, the feedback loop itself, must be continual and engaging.

The methods and tools used to create the loop aren’t particularly effective in creating empowerment and encouraging reflection in their most common occurrences. For instance, end of year worksheets and multiple-choice questionnaires – or the more common exit interviews or verbal methods – do not offer much in terms of engagement from students or usability in terms of feedback information gathered.

This thesis uses interactive methods of giving and gathering feedback, methods which are both visual and have built in documentation elements which allows the information gathered to be put to good use. Interests, passions, learning-styles and goals uncovered using this feedback loop can help facilitators develop content and activities in their programs on a weekly basis. Likewise, the information gathered builds a body of knowledge that can directly inform new programming to be implemented for specific age groups of homeschoolers. For Talking Stick specifically, because this knowledge is being documented via photographs, observation sheets, in a blog, and by the young adults themselves, it can be referred to at any point in the future. This is the major difference between the feedback methods used in this project and those used in traditional schools.

G STICK TEEN PROGRAM FEEDBACK TALKIN LOO P

TEENS (USERS)

TALKING STICK PROGRAM FACILITATORS

TALKING STICK TEEN PROGRAM

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Teen workshop participants create food sculptures on the last day of the workshops.

A LINE OF INQUIRY After a deep dive into the history of progressive homeschooling and unschooling, a study of successful adolescent progressive programs, no fewer than five parent and facilitator interviews and five young adult interviews, as well as a cultural probe sent home with five homeschooling families, a hypothesis for a feedback loop was tested in a project space.

This project was developed in partnership with an established progressive homeschooling community because the value of interest-based and self-led learning is pre-existing and serves as an authentic testing ground for developing a genuine feedback loop between facilitators and young adults. The project needed no fewer than six participants for the feedback loop to be tested in a homeschooler program.

In order to rigorously document the outcomes of the project on a week-to-week basis, a detailed after action report was written each week and sent to the thesis committee members, along with strategy for the project moving forward. These “communiqués” were then commented on and sent back to the researcher.

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EXPERIMENTING IN THE FIELD: COLLABORATING WITH YOUNG ADULTS PROJECT OVERVIEW To test this hypothesis, I designed an eight week-long series of free workshops as a pilot program for homeschooling teens in the greater Philadelphia area. While hosted by Talking Stick, the series was open to any homeschooler over the age of twelve, from any point on the homeschooling spectrum.

The workshops included continual and evolving methods of creating and maintaining a feedback loop between myself, as facilitator, and the youth participants. Each week I tested various feedback methods, with the content of the workshops being largely supplied by the participants themselves.

I broke the feedback methods into three categories: evaluative, reflective/projective, and descriptive.

I also employed observation and documentation as feedback mechanisms. My immediate goal was that by utilizing these methods, I could measure the various activities and structures of the workshop sessions, create content based on the group’s collective interests, and ensure high levels of participation, engagement, and attendance.

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“ THE CREATION OF

SOMETHING NEW IS NOT ACCOMPLISHED BY THE INTELLECT BUT BY THE PLAY INSTINCT. — CARL JUNG

”

Teen workshop participants test the game they designed during Week Three of the workshops

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WEEK

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GOALS

WORKSHOP OBSERVATIONS

1

INQUIRY: DISCOVER GROUP INTEREST

HIGH INTEREST IN GAMES AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. GROUP IS VERY SOCIAL

2

FINE-TUNE: TEST INTEREST IN SHORT ACTIVITIES, GENERATE DATA ABOUT INTEREST

INTEREST IN GAMES IS CONFIRMED. GROUP WANTS TO WORK TOGETHER - COLLABORATE

3

DESIGN I: REVIEW DATA, BRAINSTORM AROUND INTEREST AREA, IDEATE, DECIDE ON PLAN, FIRST TEST

GROUP CREATES ROUGH PROTOTYPE OF OUTDOOR, PHYSICAL GAME, PLAYS ONCE, VERY POSITIVE REVIEWS OF GAME & PROCESS

4

DESIGN II: DOCUMENT PROCESS, EVALUATE DESIGN, REITERATE, TEST, REPEAT.

GROUP SUCCESSFULLY ITERATES GAME, IMPROVING ON IT UNTIL SATISFIED WITH THE RESULTS. SENSE OF CLOSURE FOR “PROJECT.”

5

EVALUATE, REFLECT & CREATE LEARNING GOALS: UNCOVER NEXT COLLECTIVE INTEREST AREA

GROUP SUCCEEDS IN REFLECTING, STRUGGLES TO PLAN NEW GOAL. TWO NEW INTERESTS FOR FUTURE PLAN: FOOD AND LEAGUE OF LEGENDS.

6

DESIGN I WITH NEW GOALS AND INTEREST

GROUP IS AWAY DUE TO SNOW DAY, FACILITATORS DESIGN NEXT EXPLORATION

7

DESIGN II: EXPLORE NEW AREA WITH PLANNED GROUP ACTIVITIES

GROUP IS HIGHLY ENGAGED IN CURATED DAY OF FOOD RELATED LEARNING ACTIVITIES.

8

EVALUATE & REFLECT: CELEBRATE ACCOMPLISHED LEARNING

WEEK REMOVED DUE TO SNOW DAY: GROUP CELEBRATES WEEK 7

THE TESTING GROUND To implement and test a feedback loop model, I conducted a series of eight workshops, once a week, for two hours, in a Talking Stick classroom.

Originally, I had planned to plug my feedback methods and loop system into an established program – Talking Stick was planning to pilot a new video blogging class, which would rely heavily on the internet to be successful. When the internet wasn’t going to be ready in time for the class to start, I was tasked with both facilitating the class and deciding on the fundamental content as well as running the feedback loop.

This structure had its advantages and disadvantages. As the facilitator of the class and designer of the feedback loop, I had the ability to directly implement results of the feedback into the program without consulting other facilitators.

At the same time, I was synthesizing and analyzing the feedback input I received much more informally and internally compared to if I had been sharing the results with others on a weekly basis. This made it more difficult to clearly show how I was making decisions about the structure and content of the workshops as they developed.

21ST CENTURY SKILLS & DESIGN BASED LEARNING

Another result of myself leading the workshops is that the foundational content was design – design in the most open-ended sense of the word. I felt I had enough expertise in this field, and knew

from my meeting with the Talking Stick teens that they were very open to design-based activities.

This content would eventually greatly inform the results of my project. I knew that practicing design-based activities would make the feedback methods easier to implement, as they were based on methods used in design research. What I didn’t expect was how the relationship between the design-based learning practices, 21st century skills, and feedback methods would all work together towards my larger end goal: to empower youth to design their own educational experiences.

LEARNING CURVE The workshops got off to a rocky start. I experienced a sharp learning curve as I figured out how to insert myself into each group of young adults that showed up that week. Most of the time they were nearly all boys, and everyone was always between the ages of 12 and 15. I learned right away many lessons that more seasoned facilitators could speak to: stay away from too many similar activities in a row, include a lot of physical activity to balance writing and critical thinking exercises, find the sweet spot between speaking loudly and yelling.

I had a very loose, vague structure planned for the overall flow of the workshops. I knew we would begin with a process of inquiry to discover a theme or concept to then work with in some way. The workshops were designed to be very malleable and develop in line with the feedback that was received.

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A workshop participant adds a sticker to the Timeline marking something he learned in the past. Opposite: YA’s fill out stickers while reflecting on past learning experiences for the Timeline.

One young adult creates a “Frankenstein banana.”

Opposite: YA’s examine the contents of their ingredient kits in preparation for the food “cooking” competition.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP IN MOTION The tools and methods used for feedback evolved as the workshops progressed. At first, they were simple visual scales with two opposing qualifiers on either end. These were based on the typical issues I had found in research and interviews that reflect the fine balance of progressive homeschooling. An example would be: was today too structured (one end of the spectrum) or too open-ended?

As I advanced through the weeks I realized that the main benefit of these scales wasn’t necessarily where the dots were being placed on the spectrum, but rather how much of a consensus the dots represented.

In other words: were the results skewed all across the line, indicating that the young people had all had a variety of experiences? Or were they condensed in a mass, showing that the individuals had experienced more as a group? Of course, if the mass of dots had been too far in either end of the spectrum, I would have known to adapt to the situation accordingly.

The “public” or shared quality of the scales and surveys undoubtably affected the nature of the feedback provided. A benefit of this strategy was that the YA’s had more fun with the feedback and reflection, and completed the task with more energy than when writing down responses alone. They were also able to collaborate and confer with each other – making the feedback here almost “group-reflective.” These types of activities could also be taken less seriously, however, and used as a way to be funny or impress one’s peers instead of giving genuine input. But this silly feedback still has value – it works to describe the culture of the group and what they see as worthy of humor or critical assessment.

The feedback tools evolved past the simple spectrums to other forms. After presenting the first two weeks of sessions to my thesis committee, the director of the program asked how documentation could act as a form of feedback. This led directly to my using the documentation boards I had been creating each week as another part of the feedback loop. I began asking the participants of the workshops to choose the photos that would represent the previous week’s session, and give them captions. This was accompanied with a segment about documentation as a concept in the week’s presentation.

Workshop participants engage with a feedback board during the final session. They are writing captions to photos taken earlier the same day.

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The final slide show presentation: recapping what the YA’s accomplished during the workshops and sharing with them exactly what the facilitators understood from feedback, and how that shaped the sessions week to week.

USING PHOTOS TO PROMPT REFLECTION Each week I would begin the workshop with a presentation on a projector. The presentations were highly visual, and consisted mostly of building a narrative over time of the previous weeks’ work using photos of the young adults in action. The visual and narrative nature of these presentations was key to closing the feedback loop with the participants. In order for them to be aware of the effects of their input, those effects must be reflected back to them as a story beginning with Week One.

Documentation boards also used photos from previous weeks to prompt reflection from participants.

REFLECTING THROUGH TIME As the weeks went on I began incorporating the feedback methods more directly into the content of the session. In Week Five, for instance, the young adults built a group timeline of past and future goals, interests, passions and needs. This activity served a dual purpose. One could be for the facilitators of these young adults – the finished timeline included many different areas of interest that the young adults could potentially study. The other was for the participants to reflect on their past experiences and project their goals into the future. This activity was meant to directly inform their task later in the session: to design an educational experience that would be the content and form of the final two sessions of the workshops.

Other feedback methods such as the documentation as well as the presentation element served as a primer for this activity. By first seeing visuals of a previous experience, reflecting on that experience and choosing how to represent it, the young people are practicing how to imagine their learning process – what it looks and feels like to them – and can then imagine this happening at other times in their personal history.

A close up of the “past” section of the Timeline created by the group of young adult participants.

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THE VALUE AND MEANING OF GAMES The workshops used games for many purposes. The decision-making game, CoDec, the interest in games, the design of one, and the general atmosphere of learning through play were all important elements of this project. Games are so critical to the model that is the outcome of my thesis in that they can facilitate so many of the complex needs in self-directed learning as a group. Games are social, they encourage people to problem-solve together by their very nature. Games are familiar, they are something so woven into the fabric of our society that they become welcoming and comforting.

Games can also be challenging, and in the case of this project, they should be. They combine familiarity and social elements as scaffolding to allow people to learn and grow as they work to accomplish new goals. In this project games were the vehicle for the young adult participants to not only feel confident in their work, but confident in design activities, working together and finding their own personal stake in the weekly sessions. This is the power of interest-led learning: when young people understand the value of the learning as something of immediate value to them they engage and participate willingly and with enthusiasm.

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CODEC: A DESIGNED TOOL After the first two weeks of the workshops the young adults expressed the desire to work together as a group and design a game. a few week earlier, I had spoken with several Talking Stick parents and teachers about the young adults working together on planning an event at another local homeschooling center. As they described their planning process it was something like Loudest Voice in the Room Wins, Then We Have a Democratic Vote. I wanted to challenge the participants of the workshop, most of whom had been a part of the event planning, to work more constructively together and have dialogue about making decisions.

To facilitate this process I developed a game myself – a decisionmaking tool I named CoDec (“co-llaborative dec-icion”). Role playing games are nothing new in the design world, but I thought one would be especially relevant to this cohort of young adults who love live action role-playing, video games, and card games such as Magic which use various character roles as part of the play.

The game had five roles, each with its own particular parameters and goals. The roles worked together to evaluate different ideas, question them and the logic used to evaluate them, keep everyone on task, and record the final decisions. The game works in multiple rounds so that ideally, everyone can have a turn at different roles.

CoDec worked better than hoped. Different personalities among the group gravitated towards different roles and people were able to both be challenged by certain roles, and find comfortable places in the process as well. The more controlling types were given permission to tell others to shut up and pay attention through the Keeper of the Peace role. Those who didn’t want to directly contribute to making the decision were more comfortable as Silent Watchers.

CODEC: HOW TO PLAY DECIDER ROLE YOU ARE A DECISION-MAKER FOR THIS ROUND. WITH THE OTHER DECIDERS GO TO THE WHITEBOARD AND LOOK OVER THE IDEAS IN YOUR CATEGORY. USE THE RED AND GOLD STICKERS TO MARK IDEAS YOU LIKE (GOLD) AND DON’T THINK ARE SO GREAT (RED). ANSWER CHALLENGES FROM THE QUESTIONERS TO DEFEND YOUR THOUGHTS WHILE DISCUSSING WITH THE OTHER DECIDERS. VOTE AND DECIDE FOR YOUR CATEGORY AFTER FIVE MINUTES.

KEEPER ROLE THIS ROUND YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE THE DECIDERS DON’T ARGUE, GET TOO LOUD, OR ALL TALK AT THE SAME TIME. USE YOUR NOISE-MAKER TO GET THE ATTENTION OF THOSE TALKING AND THEN ASK THEM TO SPEAK ONLY ONE AT A TIME. YOU CAN CALL ON PEOPLE AND GIVE THEM A TURN TO TALK IF NEEDED. HELP PEOPLE HAVE THEIR VOICES HEARD AND HAVE A PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATION.

RECORDER ROLE SILENTLY OBSERVE THE DECISION MAKING THIS ROUND. AFTER FIVE MINUTES THE DECIDERS WILL VOTE. WRITE THEIR DECISION IN THE CORRESPONDING SPOT ON THE GAME PLAN SHEET. WRITE DOWN THE DECISION.

QUESTIONER ROLE THIS ROUND YOU ROLE IS TO CHALLENGE THE DECIDERS AS THEY DISCUSS THEIR OPTIONS. THINK ABOUT IF THEIR CHOICES MAKE SENSE WITHIN THE STRUCTURE OF THE GAME YOU ARE GOING TO DESIGN. IS THERE SOMETHING THEY ARE FORGETTING, OR IGNORING? USE THE QUESTION PADDLE TO ASK THE DECIDERS A QUESTION ABOUT THEIR IDEAS.

WATCHER ROLE FOR THIS ROUND OF DECISION-MAKING YOU ARE A SILENT OBSERVER. YOUR ONLY JOB IS TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WHAT YOU SEE MIGHT INFLUENCE YOUR OWN DECISION MAKING. THE WATCHERS ARE IN CHARGE OF BREAKING A POTENTIAL TIE AMONG THE DECIDERS.

ER TION S E QU

CHER T A W

DECIDER

KEEPER

OF THE PEA CE

REC OR DE R

Prototype role cards for CoDec

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YA’s run through CoDec to make decisions about the game they are designing during Week Three.

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WHAT IS A COLLECTIVE GROUP-LEARNING ENDEAVOR? Homeschooling youth regularly practice many skills and explore many subjects in the course of their daily lives.29 Interaction with family is key and parents and siblings often serve as a support system and learning guides. Homeschooling youth seek social interaction outside of home as well. Centers and organizations such as Talking Stick provide the opportunity for young people to learn both among peers and with peers in group-learning endeavors.

When a group of people collaborate on a learning goal that they define and create together, and hold each other accountable for the progress towards that learning goal, this is a group-learning endeavor. In a progressive pilot program run at Monument Mountain Regional High School called the Independent Project, students embarked on a three week Collective Endeavor, which can be classified as a group-learning experience. Qualities of the Collective Endeavor included careful consideration of the impact and outcome of the endeavor, focusing the learning goal to be relevant to the community of people participating, collaborating on the work involved, and designing or implementing something as a part of the endeavor.30

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LEARNING TO BUILD A MODEL FOR DESIGNING GROUP LEARNING ENDEAVORS Many of the metrics used to measure the project’s success and failure were qualitative in nature – they were based on observations and quotes made by the young adults. Others were quantitative, such as the number of returning and new students over each session.

QUANTITATIVE METRICS:

MEASURING ENGAGEMENT & TRACKING ATTENDANCE ENGAGEMENT FROM OBSERVATIONS 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

12:45

1:00

1:15

1:30

Each line represents one week of the workshops.

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1:45

2:00

2:15

2:30

MEASURING ENGAGEMENT To measure engagement, this worksheet was handed out to co-facilitators of the workshop to organize their observations into meaningful documentation. Using these sheets in combination with the lead facilitator’s observations and After Action Reports, the chart on the opposite page was created to track engagement of the participants.

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WEEKLY BREAK DOWN OF RETURNING AND NEW PARTICIPANTS 12

12

13

6

WEEK ONE

WEEK TWO*

WEEK THREE

*THIS WEEK THERE WAS A GROUP SKI TRIP

FIRST TIME PARTICIPANT

** THIS WEEK 3 YA’S CALLED IN SICK, ONE WAS ON VACATION

RETURNING PARTICIPANT

WEEK FOUR

WEEKLY BREAK DOWN OF INDIVIDUAL ATTENDANCE

WEEK ONE

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WEEK TWO*

WEEK THREE

WEEK FOUR

17

10

2

WEEK FIVE**

WEEK FIVE**

WEEK SIX

WEEK SEVEN

WEEK SIX

WEEK SEVEN

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QUALITATIVE METRICS:

THE STORY OF SEAN IN PHOTOS One way to evaluate the workshops and the feedback loop is to track the actions and engagement of one individual through observations. Using photographs to tell a story of one young adult’s experience is a qualitative way to measure how responsive the workshops were to the needs and interests of the attendees, and how effective the feedback loop was as a facilitation of the responsiveness. By following Sean throughout the course of the workshops, the feedback loop proves valuable in addressing his specific learning style and role in the collective group.

This is Sean – he’s a hyperactive, often distracted, non-engaged young adult. He usually speaks loudly, over his facilitators, or finds his Play Station and removes himself from the program.

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You can see him here on the first day of our Talking Stick workshop: he’s crossing his arms, and seems generally unimpressed.

A few weeks prior to the Workshops, he participated in a pilot where I tested some generative activities with Talking Stick youth.

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While he was generally goofing off and somewhat distracted by the fun of post-it notes‌

During most of the Teen Workshops he was disengaged, uninterested and couldn’t find his personal investment.

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…he got really involved once he found his own personal reason to be invested in the activates – that we were talking about what new teen programs could include.

Here he’s the only one not watching a presentation.

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When he did participate, he often joked around excessively compared to his peers. In the Timeline activity, he wrote mostly absurd nonsensical answers.

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But after five weeks of gathering feedback and iterating the workshops to suit more types of teens, the format changed drastically the last week to more active, creative, performative activities. Sean thrived. He solved logistical problems the group was having, he led others in the final activity.

He took ownership of his role in the group, as a leader, and found his own investment, showing his new empowerment and confidence.

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INSIGHTS & DISCOVERY A major insight from this project is the clear difference between self-led individual learning and self-led learning in groups.

Originally, the workshops were imagined so that participants could work alone or in various sized groups according to preference.

However, the overwhelming interest by the young pre-teens and teenagers in attendance was to work in either two large groups, or as a whole, collectively. As the workshops developed to address this interest, some successful collaborations were achieved, as in the case of CoDec, but prompting the YA’s to directly participate in the design of the workshops was met with frustration and lack of genuine participation.

WHY IS IT DIFFICULT TO ACCOMPLISH SELF-LED LEARNING AS A GROUP?

When leading one’s own education, self-evaluation is critical, as is the use of documentation to see growth, and appreciate one’s process.31 When working as an individual subject matter can change without much interruption of process, and one can follow the subconscious synthesizing and analyzing happening internally – often felt as a sort of gut feeling – and move on to new ideas or leads without having to justify or even verbalize these decisions.

When learning in a group, a self-led practice gets much more complicated. Simply arriving at a common interest or goal to pursue is difficult, especially amongst teenagers who are experiencing rapid brain development and changes in opinion. It is also important to note that relationships with others developed during or previously to group-learning can also work to initiate, maintain, and sustain interest in the work.32 When asked to brainstorm ideas for a grouplearning endeavor, the YA’s in the workshop only came up with two themes: food and popular online game League of Legends . While these two interest areas in and of themselves were genuine and of the majority of the group, the lack of variety of interests 83

...ideasgenerated generatedWeek whenFive the ...ideas YA’swhen were asked to design the remainer of the workshop. remainder

demonstrated the uncertainty and fear of failure in the group when faced with an unknown activity.

The skills required to participate in a group-learning endeavor include collaboration, communication, and empathy. To design a group-learning endeavor, and then see it through is nearly impossible without practicing a wide variety of additional skills, experiencing failure, and having the confidence and ownership to continue.

Ideas generated during Week Three to design a new game compared to...

These concepts surfaced during the workshop when in Week Five, the YA’s were invited to design the remainder of the workshops – two week worth of content and a loose structure or form to work within. The group struggled to stay cohesive as a collective body and work out their differences, or take each other’s ideas seriously.

They often joked to relieve the stress of having this new responsibility, and to ignore the fear of attempting something so new and overwhelming as this task. In the end, the participants were not comfortable enough to design a group-learning endeavor because they had not experienced failure, or had enough practice at critical 21st century skills and the design process.

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WHY ATTEMPT TO DESIGN OUR OWN EDUCATION? To retain the participation of young adults in progressive homeschooler programming the young adults themselves need to not only be consulted in the development of such programming, but be direct participants in the design of their educational experiences. This goal is at the heart of why self-led learning is so valuable. Most feedback methods and educational programs merely consult participants in the design of their education. The workshops were meant to serve as a platform for the young adult participants to participate more directly in the design and evolution of the workshops themselves. By offering young adults the opportunity to practice design and experience “failure” in social groups and then building on those experiences, confidence will grow, and young people will be more empowered to directly design their future educational experiences.

The engagement levels of the young adults in the workshops grew overtime as the structure and agendas of the sessions became more responsive to their feedback. By Week Seven the form of the workshop: a series of semi-structured activities presented in an a la carte fashion with a variety of physical and human resources at hand, in combination with the chosen content: food, was the most successful session, and the closest the YA’s were able to get towards achieving a self-designed group-learning endeavor.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP: WHAT’S MISSING AND WHAT TO BUILD ON The feedback loop as it was developed in the workshops succeeded in that it gave tremendous insight to the facilitators of the program: it allowed for them to genuinely consult the YA’s and include their input directly into the development of the program.

However, the feedback methods needed to be used in a more systematic way. They were often employed as single activities or installations, and would have been more powerful when paired in groups or sequences. For instance, asking the YA’s to fill out the survey, followed by reviewing the results out loud with the group, paired with then a group discussion of the results would have achieved more in depth insights. These sequences would have also worked more in the YA’s favor. While they got value from the feedback simply by being asked for their opinions and feeling empowered, in sequence they would have been encouraged to practice more self-reflection, evaluation and made connections to new learning goals.

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FEEDBACK METHODS AND TOOLS TALKING STICK TEEN DESIGN CLASS FEEDBACK FORM: WEEK ONE

1/20/14

reflective method

evaluative method

descriptive method

Circle the activity you enjoyed the most today, and draw an “X” over the one you liked the least.

INTERVIEW GAME

INTERVIEW & PORTRAIT ACTIVITY

PAPER FEEDBACK FORM

SORTING PORTRAITS ACTIVITY

This feedback method was never used. It was built into the assumption that the day’s workshop session would follow a strict agenda (it was Week 1 - there was a lot to learn). Not only were they too specific, the forms resembled worksheets and seemed like just that - more work - to the participants. This tool’s biggest draw-back is that it wasn’t created with the specific cohort of YA’s in mind.

THINKING

THINKING

DOING

DOING

THINKING

THIN THINKING KING

DOING

DOIN G DOING

What was missing from today’s workshop? What would you like to see next week?

DOT SCALES These scales asked participants to rate the day’s activities on a continuum of extremes such as “very productive” to “a waste of time.” These acted as introductory methods - they were interactive, and required no writing. The Talking Stick facilitators said they were “a golden beginning” to a conversation with the YA’s. The results impact of these scales could have been more explicitly shared with the YA’s.

Mark a point on the line of the scale to denote how you would describe the workshop today.

GROUP SURVEYS

TOO STRUCTURED

TOOsurveys OPEN ENDED These prompted the YA’s to reflect on their personal comfort level with design and various activities of the day. They were done “publicly” - participants could see what others had written. The Talking Stick facilitators said that this allowed the YA’s to feel “empowered by their choice.” These surveys were often rushed at the end of the day and could have been more built into the day’s agenda.

GROUP CONVERSATION Feedback methods such as the Dot Scales and Group Surveys were used as spring-boards into group conversations about the workshop. Without these prompting activities, group discussion does not happen as organically or with as much engagement from the participants; when it does it can be very insightful and yield a lot of the YA views.

DOCUMENTATION BOARDS These boards served as a record of our activities from week to week. Half way through the workshops the participants were invited to select the photos that would serve as documentation for the previous week and write captions. This served to include them more directly in the process and build a sense of ownership. However, the medium for these boards could have been something more relevant to the YA’s.

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NAME THIS WORKSHOP & ITS SKILLS This method was the first to be strategically built into the flow of the day’s session. After reviewing the previous weeks’ activities, the YA’s were asked to brainstorm ideas about what skills they thought they were practicing and what the workshop was about, as well as what it should be named. The brainstorming with post-its and a white board was by now very familiar, and participation h

TIMELINE ACTIVITY This activity was successful in that it was also built into the agenda of the day, and allowed the YA’s to share with each other - leveraging their social nature. Each wrote answers on stickers reflecting on their past education and future goals. The responses were anonymous (no names on them) which allowed the YA’s to be share, but with low risk.

VALUE CARD SORTING This activity directly addressed previous research about homeschooling teens. Values of successful programs were written on cards, and the group worked together to arrange them from “most” to “least important.” The activity itself - sorting as a group - prompted interesting discussion and collaboration among the YA’s. The subject matter could have been more tailored to this particular group.

ACTIVITY FEEDBACK BOARDS These were used on the final day of the workshop to evaluate, describe and reflect on specific activities of the day. The agenda was very free-form, mingle-and-choose-an-activity style, so these big boards, which in real time were updated with photos, immediately asked the YA’s to think about what they had learned or enjoyed during the day. They also prompted discussion amongst those standing around the wall.

AFTER ACTION REPORT This self-reflective tool was used by the facilitators of the workshops. They are highly effective when filled out immediately after the day’s session and used to externalize what was observed during the day, what were the successful and unsuccessful moments and what they mean for the development of the program. The Talking Stick facilitators wanted this tool for immediate use themselves.

OBSERVATION GUIDES This is a tool for the secondary facilitator to use during the workshops to allow for systematic observation of specific individuals as well as the group as a whole. Using this type of form makes it easier to put qualitative information into a quantitative graph; the graph of YA engagement was created using the observations recorded on these forms.

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COLLABORATIVE SESSION: FACILITATORS WEIGH IN After the workshops I presented all the feedback methods used to the Talking Stick facilitators who work with the 10-15 year old group. They were particularly interested in the documentation methods used as feedback in the workshops – the presentations and the Documentation Boards. They wanted to adopt the idea of showing the YA’s what they saw via photographs as a way to prompt self-reflection and self-evaluation. They imagine that these methods will be particularly valuable in that the photos and documentation will be able to speak for the facilitators to the YA’s that they feel aren’t as engaged or committed to self-directed learning. The image below is a mock-up of a documentation tool I created for the Maker class after brainstorming with the facilitators. In the table of feedback methods on the left and the previous page, facilitator comments are included in the descriptions.

NAME:

PROJECT:

INSPIRATION:

LAST WEEK’S PHOTO

FEELING STUCK

VERY PRODUCTIVE!

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A MODEL OF COLLECTIVE SELF-LED LEARNING In order to allow for an educational model in which young adults are participating in a social, selfdesigned group-learning endeavor, there must be provided or encouraged a series of experiences, support system, the practice of a design process, acquisition of 21st century skills, and eventual confidence, empowerment and ownership of the individual participants as a collective.

The feedback loop developed and tested in the project of this thesis is only one (crucial) component of a model to build the necessary competencies that allow a group to self-design its learning.

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• Confidence

A CRITICAL SHIFT

• Empowerment • Formalized peer-to-peer learning

21ST CENTURY SKILLS

• Practice & mastery of 21st century skills: Communication, reflection, critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, problem finding/solving, adaptability, documentation

• Group design process & projects

DESIGN BASED LEARNING

• Practice design activities, experience “failure” • Build motivation & ownership of program • Leverage social nature through collaboration

• Self & group reflection

FEEDBACK LOOP

• Self assessment • Program assessment • Generates group interest

• Resources & access to materials

FOUNDATIONAL SUPPORT

• Self-led learning program with 8+ peers • Parents who supoprt self-led learning • Young adult enjoys/has interest in self-led learning

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CONCLUSION RECOMMENDED FURTHER RESEARCH The feedback loop developed in this thesis should be further tested and iterated in various program and classroom settings. Special attention should be paid to how various methods can be used in sequence to achieve more in depth reflection and self-evaluation, leading to setting new learning goals.

The explicit connections between motivation, ownership, empowerment and confidence in groups of young adults should be explored and diagrammed using existing and new cognitive studies to verify or refute the outlined model for self-designed group-led learning endeavors.

UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES The most challenging part of this project was working as a single designer. While I had the input, insights and critique of my thesis committee, peers in my academic program, and facilitators at Talking Stick, directing the project, organizing its development, and gathering materials each week became an overwhelming task. I am satisfied with the outcomes of this thesis, but would not work alone at this capacity again. Along with understanding my strengths and weaknesses as well as those of the project and process, I worked to have an awareness of myself as a researcher and designer. During the workshops it took a week or so of working with the young adults to realize how academic my approach was in some activities. Separating my own interests and working style from this approach took deep reflection on my part, and was greatly aided by the practice of After Action Reporting after each workshop.

Once I was able to better consider my role as a designer and facilitator, I found that building trust with the young adults was much easier than anticipated. Employing an absolute policy of transparency with the teens, continually sharing with them what I had understood as their input, and giving value to that input, were all critical to this trust-building.

On another logistical note, six weeks for this project (eight planned) was not enough. Ideally I would have planned for twelve workshop sessions minimum, after the experience in this project. I could not have anticipated how the unusually brutal winter season would have impacted the general psyche of my participants, and more importantly, their parents, who in all cases were in charge of driving their children to these workshops – some from 40 miles away.

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Speaking to this particular group of young adults and what I learned: these teenagers were acutely aware not only of the stigma surrounding homeschooling, but also the general rhetoric and jargon surrounding progressive homeschooling in particular. This landscape and its vocabulary, including the concepts of being “free to learn,� real world experiences, and socialization (which has a particular connotation for many homeschoolers), is something that these young adults grew up hearing about and internalizing, which inevitably affects their world views and personal values in some way.

The group was amazingly quick to take to visual and design activities, such as brainstorming on post-its and then sorting the post-its into thematic categories. This was unexpected as most of my personal experience with facilitating design activities is with adult participants, who are generally more resistant and skeptical to the value of such activities. However, explaining the value of more abstract concepts such as feedback and documentation proved difficult. The most effective way of demonstrating these concepts was through highly visual examples. This point references the brevity of the workshop as a series: with more time, I believe the young adults would have been able to experience the effects of the documentation and feedback loop more first hand.

Lastly, the teens in this project were not as interested or initially excited about the idea of formal peer-to-peer learning as I had anticipated. Research, including the case studies of other successful homeschool programming, showed that peer-to-peer learning was a fundamental value of many of these programs. But this group, both in feedback methods and conversation, expressed a limited interest in this idea.

As for the feedback loop and methods, there was a disconnect between the interest the young people showed for games and the potential interactivity or design of these methods. The feedback should have tested leveraging more elements of the games: the fun, the play, the social nature, even the use of large objects and 92

performance. The interests of the young adults themselves can be used to inform the feedback loop and what it looks like – what experiences it allows.

MEASURING IMPACT This thesis set out to leverage the empowering, democratic approach of human-centered design to support a progressive, homeschooling educational program, and in that, it was successful. The workshops responded nimbly to the ideas and interests of the young adult participants involved. The “curriculum” of the workshops fundamentally relied on what the design methods and tools could generate in terms of content and form. The project not only asked the young people what they think and believe, but pivoted and adapted to their insights and ideas with minimal “adult” editing or criticism.

As for impact, and how to measure it, the project was short, and so the best ways to see impact are small moments or stories, as seen with Sean (pg 86). The last day of the workshops felt like a party – a culture had been developed amongst the participants and the facilitators, it was social, but educational, the young people shared their opinions freely, and the mood was relaxed and yet electric.

No one wanted to leave; parents came inside to pick up their kids and ended up hanging around, watching and asking questions.

Talking Stick is running a two part teen program next year: in the morning there will be a completely social, anything goes “teen hang out” for socializing and sharing ideas, in the afternoon, Heather Gray (pg 50) who attended most of the workshops and helped facilitate, will lead a “world-building” program where she talks of using a game to help the YA’s choose an area of interest to pursue.

One of the first young adults to enroll who does not normally attend Talking Stick, came to most of the teen workshops, including the finale. He was introduced to Talking Stick through this thesis 93

project, and now chooses to continue to learn with his peers in this new environment, as a part of his modular homeschooling education.

While Asha (pg 53), a Talking Stick facilitator for the 10-14 year-old group already includes some design inquiry into her Maker program, she has asked for a template for the After Action Report that was presented to her after the workshops as a way to reflect upon her own experiences after each day of programming.

As design and education continue to become intertwined as practices, fields, and concepts, it becomes clear that they share many goals. This thesis shows that not only are the 21st century skills associated with design fundamentals for a 21st century progressive education, but that human-centered design skills empower young people, and can give the confidence and courage to be active participants in their learning, in their futures.

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POST SCRIPT Sharing the process and outcomes of this thesis with the design, homeschooling, and education communities in a formal presentation allowed for public feedback and served as a forum for discussion with my thesis committee and other experts. Much of that discussion centered on the future possibilities for the feedback loop – both how it might evolve as well as other areas wherein the system might be employed.

The feedback loop itself, and the tools and methods of which it is comprised work most directly for the facilitators. While the output of the loop is for the benefit of the young adults, more tools could be created which include the young adults and allow them to participate in the synthesis phase of the loop – when the content of the feedback is translated into ideas for the future states of the programs or classes at hand. The documentation methods in particular could work to connect the facilitators and YA’s: for instance, keeping a record of how the feedback specifically has changed the course of the classes, in a format which is accessible and interesting to both groups, or even curated by the young adults, could work to demonstrate even more explicitly how the feedback loop is working in the program.

Other suggestions made during the presentation were directed towards the scale-ability of the feedback loop. While in its current state it is designed specifically for the workshops in which it was tested, I believe it has the possibility to live in other types of educational models. Not only could these tools and methods be tailored to different types of schools, they have potential in third space learning places, such as after school activities, extra-curricular educational experiences, and social spheres – such as a YMCA teen meet-up.

The difficulties of implementing such a process in a public school seem daunting. To accomplish such a shift in process (in terms of 95

how curricula is designed), the feedback loop should be further iterated and edited with a group of educators and administrators first, then used in a classroom, then again iterated with students, and perhaps parents. However, it is clear that the inherent progressive nature of some homeschooling communities, like the one surrounding Talking Stick and Mt. Airy Co-op, allowed for this method to be developed and tested quickly, and without any real resistance.

It was pointed out during the presentation that various educational models currently use more progressive ways of creating curriculum, such as the Sudbury model, or Waldorf schools. However, working to self-design education, specifically as teenagers in such a social and collaborative way is not always the priority of these programs.

Additionally, there are not so many distinct tools, such as the game CoDec (developed during this thesis), to scaffold this process when it does exist.

While there was an appreciation for the advocacy of such types of progressive homeschooling and the specific community of greater Philadelphia, I was warned in terms of creating a system too dogmatic, too strict, in that this would be inherently against the philosophy of such progressive styles. This is again where I see the potential for the young adults in these communities to work towards gaining even more independence, and taking more of a lead in their education, so that they might themselves dictate the “rules� or hold each other accountable, with little and less influence from adults, designers, researchers, or education experts.

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NOTES 1. See “Keep it in the Family” from The Economist via economist.com 2. “Number of Homeschoolers Growing Nationwide.” Lawrence, Julia. educationnews.com 3. “Keep it in the Family.” The Economist.

4. Green, Penelope. “The Anti-Schchoolers.” New York Times. 18 October 2008.

5. See TED Talk “Hackschooling Makes Me Happy” by Logan LaPlante 6. See The Underground History of American Education by Gatto 7. Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1992. Print.

8. See bloggers/vloggers CW Kennedy, Idzie Demarais, and “On the Unschooled Life” by Astra Taylor.

9. Namely the Reggio-Emilia model and Peter Gray’s blog Freedom to Learn.

10. See Sandra Dodd’s Big Book of Unschooling p 49 11. Quinn, Daniel. “Schooling: The Hidden Agenda.” The Unschooling Unmanual. Ed. Jan Hunt, Jason Hunt. The Natural Child Project, 2008. 41-53. Print.

12. Quinn, Daniel. “Schooling: The Hidden Agenda.” The Unschooling Unmanual. Ed. Jan Hunt, Jason Hunt. The Natural Child Project, 2008. 41-53. Print.

13. Kohn, Alfie. “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.” Independent School: 2008.

14. Quinn, Daniel. “Schooling: The Hidden Agenda.” The Unschooling Unmanual. Ed. Jan Hunt, Jason Hunt. The Natural Child Project, 2008. 41-53. Print.

15. See Ian A. Lubin, Xun Ge’s research on motivation and relationships with other 21st century skills 16. Kohn, Alfie. “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.” Independent School: 2008.

17. See It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects 18. Kohn, Alfie. “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.” Independent School: 2008.

19. 21st Century Skills p 95 20. See “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.”

21. See “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.”

22. See Sandra Dodd’s Big Book of Unschooling 23. See “Student Feedback May Be Underutilized in High Schools” 24. “The Challenge of Working with Teens as Participants in Interaction Design.” Fitton, Read, Horton.

25. “Engaging Teens: Using an Engagement Event as a Research Tool for Teenagers.” Bell, Toth, et al.

26. From interviews conducted with Talking Stick board members, and unschooling community members July 2013.

27. American Society for Cybernetics, “Foundations” via asc-cybernetics.org 28. See “Through the Lens” 29. See the results of the Home Research Kits pg 103-104 30. See the “Independent Project White Paper” 31. See the “Independent Project White Paper” 32. See “Through the Lens” 97

APPENDICES DESIGN TOOLS IN ACTION CANDIDATE BIO GLOSSARY OF TERMS BIBLIOGRAPHY

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DESIGN TOOLS IN ACTION INTERVIEW TOOLS Distinct interview tools were used to assist the researcher gather and organize relevant information and data during contextual interviews. They are adopted from the book Universal Methods of Design.

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SEEING, THINKING, HEARING, DOING FRAMEWORK This paper tool is used to help the researcher organize the response received in an interview. The subject’s thoughts are placed into one of five categories: what the subject thinks, sees, does, hears, or says. These categories are meant to be loose and interpreted by the researcher. The tool also serves to maintain an air of transparency between the researcher and her subject. The large sheet allows for the subject to see what and where the research writes down, and can also be shared with the subject after the interview, giving her insight into her own state of mind.

For this project, this tool was used both by the researcher, and by the young adult workshop participants.

The YA’s used the tool to interview each other in Week One in order to discover collective interests of the group. The graphic depiction on the tool invites its user to be creative in the way they document responses and can facilitate the creation of a rich, qualitative impression of a subject.

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HOME RESEARCH KITS After centering in on an area of study for this thesis, I designed a culture probe – a interactive collection of objects to be used by research subjects alone, in their regular day-to-day lives. The concept of cultural probes stems from the practice of anthropology and the desire to gather ethnographic data. For this project, the goal is to build a richer understanding of the homeschooling culture, by which to check the designer’s assumptions. The kit developed for this project included a calendar for families to record learning experiences that happened away from home, and personal journals for the teens and adults in the family. The journals included various prompts about homeschooling and learning practices, as well as asking participants to upload photos and videos. The kits were with the families (five total) for one month.

The tool succeeded in gaining in depth perspective on homeschooling culture for the researcher in this project. The journal entries served to flesh-out user profiles with intimate details. However, the kits were overall very attuned to proficient writers, with the journals being main components, and therefore were generally used more thoroughly by the parents. This being said, the private nature afforded by these journals facilitated an intimate look into the lives of these families, especially through the reflective anecdotes of homeschooling parents.

The response of one parent was so strong that it filtered immediately into the structure of the workshops. She described how fruitful it was to reflect and evaluate the homeschooling methods she used with her family, and how she hoped that her daughter would experience something similar in the workshops.

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CANDIDATE BIO Jordan Shade is a candidate for the Master of Industrial Design degree at The University of the Arts, and is expected to graduate shortly before this book is printed. She loves cooking, camping, hosting parties with 90’s hip hop music and generally anything that involves an outdoor grill. While her East Coast roots have been happy to be so close to the best pizza/pierogies/bagels in the world while living in Philadelphia, she plans to move back to Texas where, she always seems to be in the end. Jordan has been passionate about education since she was a young girl forcing her brother to play “school,” although, her understanding of the concept has become a bit more refined in recent years.

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS COLLECTIVE INTEREST A topic deemed valuable as a pursuit for a learning experience by a group of six or more individuals.

CONTEXTUAL INTERVIEW An interview that happens within the context of the subject at hand, ie. at the interviewees place of work, learning, business, etc.

DESIGN METHODS Any activity or strategy regularly employed by a designer such as: collaborative creative “think� sessions, brainstorming on post-its and then organizing the post-its into categories, drawing out an idea in crude pictures to better explain it to others.

DESIGN RESEARCH The process of using design methods and tools to conduct research with the users of a certain system, product or service.

DESIGN TOOLS Objects designers make (usually the human-centered kind), often by hand or with laser cutters, out of papers and cardstock and cardboard, etc. to help along their design process with other people. Ex. Paper cards printed specifically for an interview to be sorted by the interviewee to give the designer insight into a system or problem.

FACILITATOR One who acts as a guide for learning, who can provide resources, materials and offer lines of inquiry or experiment to those practicing self-led learning.

FEEDBACK LOOP Traditionally: a process in which information about the past or the present influences the same phenomenon in the present or future as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop. In the context of this thesis: a process of gathering the opinions and insights of young 107

adults about a specific educational program in order to influence, inform and impact directly the further development of that program by the adult facilitators who manage it.

GAME In the context of this project games are problem-solving activities that act as a platform for a group learning experience.

GROUP LEARNING ENDEAVOR A prolonged problem solving process which involves stages of discovery, brainstorming, ideation, decision-making and an iterative collaborative learning process with reflection on that process.

This must be done as a group of six or more individuals over the course of multiple hours or days.

HOMESCHOOLING Practicing education between the ages of 6 and 18 years old outside of a public, charter, or private school for religious, social, political or personal reasons.

INTEREST-LED LEARNING A practice of choosing subject matter and skills to study, practice, explore or master solely based on one’s individual interests and goals.

NATURAL LEARNING Learning as an inborn curiosity and skill. The best example of natural learning is how an infant learns by constant watching and listening and imitation, because of her innate desire to do so for survival.

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION An educational model in which the young adult or child is at the center of the learning process and supported by adults or facilitators. This thesis uses Alfie Kohn’s definition of progressive education and schools which includes notions of self-led, individualized learning, social justice, attending to the whole child, taking children seriously, and promoting an active community.

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS CONT. REFLECTION The process of looking back on one’s experiences and seeing them in a new way now that they are in the past. In the context of this thesis reflection mainly applies to educational experiences of the past.

SELF-LED LEARNING A practice of studying, exploring or mastery of content and skills based on one’s individual motivation and goals, at one’s own pace and style.

TALKING STICK LEARNING CENTER A non-profit space in the Greater Philadelphia area which offers three days of programming (loose subject matter, facilitators and materials) to homeschoolers aged 4-17 for a reasonable cost during the traditional school year.

TRADITIONAL EDUCATION An educational model founded in the factory-model of education that was developed during the Industrial Revolution. The model is generally teacher-centric and characterized by a government mandated set of standards and curriculum, segregating students by age, and control over the specific time allotted for each subject, periods of eating and limited play.

UNSCHOOLING Term coined by John Holt in the 1970s referring to an educational practice among homeschoolers that does not follow a pre-determined curriculum or standards as dictated by the state, federal government or any other third party. Unschooling usually refers to a practice of “natural learning” wherein curiosity is the driver for “subject matter,” and the individual is responsible for any and all “formal” learning or activity as recognized by traditional public school models. Parents are highly involved in providing learning materials and experiences, but do not work to directly influence the course of their child’s learning.

YA Short hand for young adult.

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CREATING SUSTAINABLE TEEN PROGRAMMING FOR HOMESCHOOLERS JORDAN SHADE | THESIS DECLARATION