Episode 13: Flipping the Script

If students aren’t engaged, maybe the problem isn't so much what they’re learning as how they’re learning. In this episode, Mindy Faber, co-founder of Convergence Design Lab, discusses the role her agency plays in researching and designing new ways of learning. Discover how these new ways of learning have helped schools increase student engagement and generate improvements in academic performance. 

Learn more about how Convergence Design Lab is building more resilient learning ecosystems: https://convergencedesignlab.org/

Transcript

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. Education is at an inflection point. As we grapple with complex challenges like funding and enrollment, as well as diversity, equity, and safety, we also have an opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine education. Now more than ever, we know the importance that students’ overall wellbeing plays in their success. They need to feel supported and safe and connected to be able to engage in their learning and achieve their full potential. Join your host, Casey Agena, a former teacher turned instructional coach and technologist, as he interviews inspirational educators, school leaders, wellness professionals, and more to amplify their voices. You'll learn about the innovative work they're doing to support student safety, engagement, and overall wellness. And who knows, you may even spark a new idea of your own. Ready to reimagine education? Let's go.

Casey Intro: 

In today’s episode, we’ll be examining that intersection of schools, technology, and design. Do those really address student wellness and mental health? Well, Mindy Faber is the co-founder of Convergence Design Lab and our conversation will examine her work as a researcher, educator, and designer impacting the lives of students, their voice, and their self-worth. Welcome Mindy, and glad to have you here.

Mindy:

Thanks for having me.

Casey:

We were fortunate to have a number of conversations and talk about your work, but for everyone here, let's just dive right into it and just you be able to share your story design and research with emotional wellness of students as a focus. I mean, that's unique. I think in its approach, particularly in your field, yet at the same time seems to have some great impact on youth organizations. So tell us how you got into this field and where it has led to today.

Mindy:

Sure. I don't want to go too far back in the path, but I'll start a little bit with my background. I'm actually started as a media artist and I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and I got a Masters of Fine Arts in video art and art and technology. And I was always one of those kids in school that I kind of knew how I like to learn and it wasn't the way in which our teachers were teaching at the time. I really wanted to do projects. I wanted to do real world, meaningful, kind of applied projects. And I really was interested in technology and hands on types of things. And it just wasn't really the way that schools were set up. And I used to actually keep a little list of all the things I would never do if I became a teacher.

My father was actually the chairman of the Department of Education Administration at the University of Kentucky. Dewey was his hero. So I grew up in this kind of household that was really committed to the idea of education has equity, education has preparation for democracy and civic engagement. But I really didn't want to be an educator myself. I wanted to be an artist and I wanted to make media works, which is what I did. And so I had an actual 15 year career making award-winning videos that were shown at Berlin Film Festival and Sundance. And one of the videos that I actually made was about my mother who was a bipolar manic depressive. So I grew up in this dysfunctional family and I had this background and art was in a way, the thing that saved my life. My ability to use the vehicle of media arts has a way to express myself, to do research, to really understand who my mother was, what the issues were there.

It really was life changing and transformational for me. So once I got all that out of my system, I was like, I have to give back. And I wanted to become a mentor, a teacher to other young people and use the power of media and expression to teach them how to do what I had learned to do. And so I started working with an organization called Video Machete here in Chicago, which was a youth media organization, which had a huge and profound impact on my perspective of how learning could look and what kind of agency could be cultivated in these informal learning spaces and the ways that what weren't happening in schools. But we were so successful at that organization that one of the schools that we did work with, actually asked me if I would come in and become the media arts teacher at, this is Evanston's Township High School, in Evanston. And they had had a kind of radio TV program that was sort of more done in old school and it was kind of falling apart and nobody was enrolled in it.

So they asked me if I would come and rebuild that program. And what I did was take the learning principles that I learned in Video Machete, which was really based on theories of Paulo Freire and Liberation education and bring that into a school model and really build up a kind of media arts program at the school. And I tripled the enrollment in my classes in three years and it was fantastic. And my students went... Five students went on to NYU Film school, I mean, had all this success, but I was so limited still at that time, by the way, that I hated grades. I hated grading. I hated the sort of forced hierarchical way in which things were expected of teachers still.

And it was stifling my creativity. There was so much that I knew was possible that you couldn't really do or even allowed to do in school. So I wanted to leave and start my own kind of youth media program, which I did, called, oh my gosh, Open Youth Lab. And from there I started to really innovate around the edges of pedagogy and really put youth at the center of the learning experience, really kind of ask youth, "What do you want to learn? How do you want to learn it?" Right?

Casey:

So flipping it, asking them versus to your point, which a lot of our current teachers are dealing with, it's coming from the top down.

Mindy:

Exactly. And so what ended up happening around that time, this was at the very beginning of something called the Connected Learning Movement. MacArthur Foundation was very involved in this sort of digital media and learning revolution really. And Henry Jenkins was writing about participatory media and culture. They were just speaking my language and I was like, Oh my God, this is me. This is what I want to do. And eventually I was asked to then come and run a program at the Center for Community Arts Partnerships called Convergence Academies. They had just gotten a $3 million grant from investing in Innovation Fund at the US Department of Education. It was a beautiful little grant because the whole idea was like, we've got two failing schools, how can you bring an innovative model into these schools and see if you can turn them around? And you just have to have a theory and you can test it and we'll see what happens.

And so that's when Convergence Academies, I kind of took over that program and came in and we took this connected learning model, this theory that was developed by Mimi Ito. And we tried to say, "Okay, what does that look like in a school context?" And it was the same idea, flipping it. How do you take what's powerful about informal learning and apply it into a school context where there's hierarchy and grades and there's a curriculum, but how do you try and cultivate a culture of student agency and purpose? Where students’ passions and interests are really driving the curriculum and their learning and they're owning that learning. So I was really excited by that challenge and we came in and began working in two of the neediest schools in Chicago.

Casey:

And that was the really, I think, the launch then of Convergence Design Lab, right?

Mindy:

Well, we had a three year grant. We started as Convergence Academies. And I'll just quickly, two of the models that we had that I think are really pertinent to this conversation were, one was like a teacher coaching model. Building relationships with teachers and really positioning teachers because teachers are traumatized too, right?

Casey:

Mm-hmm, yep.

Mindy:

And especially teachers in the schools that we were at, high poverty schools with low re levels of resources, very overstressed, underpaid, I mean, just all kinds of problems, huge expectations on teachers. And we didn't want to come in at top down and say, "We know how to do it. Here, we're going to teach you." It was more like, "Tell us about the kind of teacher you want to be, the kind of classroom you want to cultivate, how can we support you?" And we brought in artists, media artists, and everybody was so afraid of technology at that time. All of a sudden there was this switch in the culture where teachers were expected to use technology and digital media in their classrooms. They've never been trained on how to do that.

Casey:

Right.

Mindy:

So we brought in digital media artists to help coach and train the teachers in how to design powerful learning experiences using connected learning theory and technology and media. The other component was a space-based, place-based design model where we asked the school to give us an empty room, an unused space, and turned it into what we call the digital atelier.

Casey:

I like that.

Mindy:

And that, again, bringing the informal model from out of school spaces into a school space in which kids would actually have everything that they could possibly want. Games, technology, but no curriculum. They could just come in and choose what they wanted to create, what do you want to make, and all the tools were there to do it, and they would have artists as mentors in the space. So we did that. And it was profound results that we studied. We actually tracked and researched the entire model as we unfolded it. One of the things that's really interesting is the kids were actually part of the design process. So we worked with the team of architects and we used a participatory design process so that the students were asked, "What kind of colors do you want in here? What kind of technology do you want? What's going to motivate you to come here?"

And they participated in design charades. So when the space was actually built, we had almost everything donated, but it was about a $100,000 worth of equipment that we had donated to the space in, oh my gosh, everything high tech. And the kids came in and they go, "Oh my God, you listened to us. You actually did what we told you. Nobody ever listens to us." And what happened was that the students, it was completely like drop in space. Those students retracted, those students who actually participated at high levels increased their grade point average, increased their engagement in school, their teachers reported they had higher leadership, they developed relationships with their adults, trusting relationships with adult mentors for many, that's the first kind time they have really developed trusting relationships with adults and started actually treating each other better, right? Having better peer relationships. So we knew we were onto something.

Casey:

So knowing that we've seen the evolution of some of those programs in many other schools nationally, internationally, where you've taken that approach that you were involved in, fast forward of thinking about the past, just even the past 24 months where the media creation, the ability for youth students to put their voice out there in many different platforms, for others to listen and to hear all of that in the palm of their hands, whether it's their own personal devices and or school, the number of school issued devices through COVID and whatnot. How has that impacted their ability, from your own perspective on what students are able to do and then how they connect, maybe not necessarily with adults, but even just peer to peer?

Mindy:

Well, it's just a huge, huge topic. I mean, it's interesting because when the whole participatory media and learning movement began, we really had very utopian visions at the time of how power and media control of information is decentralized. Anybody can have a broadcast, the ability to broadcast their views and their perspectives in the palm of their hand with their phone. We saw all this tremendous possibility. And then we began to see what's happened in the last few years. And that the very thing that we thought could be a tool of empowerment became a tool of oppression and bullying and dis-empowerment. And the issue of wellness is never been... Now, I think for sure, these mental health challenges that young people were experiencing during the pandemic began before the pandemic. And they were completely exacerbated within the last two years. There's just been soaring rates of mental health challenges among children and adolescents and families during COVID-19.

Casey:

Yeah.

Mindy:

And social media is a huge, huge part of that. We work with an organization called Spy Hop, which is a youth media organization in Salt Lake City, but actually works with youth, rural, indigenous populations all through the state and also in Salt Lake City, including incarcerated youth and those and young people in foster care.

Casey:

Interesting.

Mindy:

One of the things that we try to do is help Spy hop study its impact and listen to youth experience. We always use this terminology of, "Let's listen to youth experience. What are they experiencing? What are they experiencing outside of your organization, in their families, in their communities with their peers? And how can we learn from that in order to inform better design choices? How can you make better design decisions that benefit youth?" And from that experience, we're hearing that the mental wellness issues that are brought on by social media are very, very real and super exacerbated when they became isolated from their peers, that we know that social component, that social emotional component of identity development for adolescents has a lot to do with your peer relationships.

And when things became mediated more and more by technology instead of interpersonal relationship building, it was just spiraling out of control. So one of the programs that we studied in particular, sending messages was interesting because those youth are incarcerated youth. And so what what's sending messages is, actually it's the longest running and most prolific media arts training program for incarcerated youth in the country. And it's one of the few that actually consistently generates youth produced podcasts that centered on incarcerated youth voices. So the 14 to 21 year old kids in that program actually get school credit because they're taking classes while they're incarcerated, right? And so when they take a Spy Hop class in their facility, they're actually getting school credit for it, which makes-

Casey:

Awesome.

Mindy:

An actual example of informal youth media training, the type of thing that I knew was very powerful in an incarcerated context with getting school credits. Just very interesting. Well, those kids are actually producing podcasts that they know that are being shared.

Casey:

Right

Mindy:

Across the world, globally, and they're telling their stories. It's kind of this American live version of, or youth version of This American life.

Casey:

Yeah. And I think that there lies the difference, right? I mean, we had touched upon the ability for youth to have media creation devices in the palm of their hands and vehicles to do that. But if it's done overtly and if it's done in recognition with adults that can help shepherd and carry them and amplify their voice to others, then we're talking about relationship, trust, those types of things that really is thinking about your beginnings working in Evanston, which is what you wanted to do then, which is what you're doing currently now with students at Spy Hop.

Mindy:

Yeah. I think it's fascinating in a way that I always kind of kick myself. I feel like I was born a little bit like 10 years or 15 years too early or something. The things that I would wanted to do back then, which were kind of looked down upon, or were regarded suspiciously by my colleagues are the norm now. This is what teachers want to do. They really want students to have participatory agency to have ownership over their learning. We know that hands on learning is important. We know that expression and using media arts has a lever for creativity, innovation, problem solving, expression are really key ways to deepen learning experience, right? And to help youth kind of solve and develop their own kind of self-efficacy, their self determination, sense of narrating their own identity. There's so much happening when you shift learning to be more like what happens when they're outside of school, when they're pursuing their own interest, when they're having great relationships with their peers.

Casey:

And I want to highlight something that really kind of comes through in your work. And I know that we have terms and ideas and aspirations like design thinking in K-12, but I mean, you're really living it, I think, in terms of that empathy piece of really thinking about the students wherever they may be, from Evanston to the incarcerated youth itself in South Lake City through the work of Spy Hop, that really kind of rings true for me. So in our short time, I really want to thank you for your time, Mindy, and sharing your personal story as well as the story of Convergence Design Lab. And I'd really love to have you back and as well as really kind of diving in on those kids that's at through Spy hop, that's a really interesting story that I'd love to share with everybody here. So thank you for your time, Mindy.

Mindy:

Thanks so much.

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