Teach Boldly

Using Edtech for Social Good

Jennifer Williams

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781564847928
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Technologie de l'éducation

Transformational education leader Jennifer Williams offers design- and empathy-driven practices to help teachers activate positive change in student learning. Today's students are ready to design, dream and MAKE the future. Teach Boldly: Using Edtech for Social Good is a guide for educators ready to apply innovative practices, meaningful technology use and global collaboration to drive the change they want to see in the world. Readers will learn how to create a customized plan for education innovation, with strategies for constructing agile classroom environments, digital storytelling and communicating across lines of difference, and prioritizing feedback and active listening.This book:

• Showcases the power of narrative and bringing focus to the need for storytelling in education.
• Offers direction for seeking out authentic feedback and steps for iterating on ideas, emphasizing preservation of voice and creative expression.
• Discusses learning space design through the lens of empathy and amplification of student voice.
• Provides easy-to-implement ideas for transforming learning and classroom culture through space.

With inspiration from real-world peaceMAKERS in education, Teach Boldly invites readers to create ready-to-go action plans for themselves as educators, for classroom communities and for the global community. Audience: K-12 educators

1

BE PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER THAN ONESELF

As teachers and students embark on their journey to do good in society, they must understand their purpose and the means by which they can bring change. This chapter introduces human rights goals and frameworks that can offer them inspiration, as well as design thinking principles that can help them devise and implement actions.

Spearmint by Owen Dunno, Grade 8
Teacher: Luisa Vargas, Director of Art Education
Christ Episcopal School, Rockville, MD, USA

Inspiration: Power of a Teacher’s Presence

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Etched in my mind is the memory of this sentence, written in dusty white chalk on our classroom blackboard. Had it been a different class from a different year of my schooling, I might have said “a blackboard in the front of the room,” but this classroom was unlike others I had known. Our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Buttery, had purposefully arranged our individual desks into one large open rectangle, so the room never had a front or a back or a “good seat” or a “not-so-good one.” I imagine we were known by other teachers as quite the chatty group, but Mrs. Buttery loved us just the way we were. She welcomed our conversations and laughed and dreamed right along with us. I can still picture her as she walked around the perimeter of our room, always moving and always smiling. Each day she wore long, flowing skirts that would nearly touch the floor, which gave me the illusion she was almost floating.

This day, she directed our attention to the sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Our task was to uncover what was special about the sentence, and we were to solve this puzzle through an inspired process of inquiry and exploration. Our classroom was alive with ideas. As to be expected from the literal minds of nine- and ten-year-old children, we narrowed in on the nouns and on possible explanations for why this dog was so lazy and what might be causing this fox to be filled with such energy. Through Mrs. Buttery’s scaffolded questions and gentle guidance, we finally found what made this sentence so special and unique—the letters. All letters of our English alphabet represented. In one sentence! For me, a child who loved words and letters as if they were my friends, this was magical.

That lesson was one of many from that year in Mrs. Buttery’s class that would stick with me. Each day that we entered her classroom—our classroom—we knew she would share a new adventure with us. With stories of distant cultures and maps of lands old and new, she opened up a world beyond our chatty little class on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Later that same year, I learned of Africa. This wasn’t the type of learning I had experienced before, where Africa was an item in a memorized list of continents. By that point, I had lists and lists of information I had learned by rote: planets and state capitals and food groups. This new type of learning brought me to a place of wanting not just to learn, but to know. Noticing this new interest of mine, Mrs. Buttery brought me books and newspaper clippings, and I soon came to understand the incredible challenges faced by many African children.

It never occurred to me that I was learning about the struggles of the people of Africa; in my mind I was learning with them. How could a child like me—just born in a different place on our planet—be without schools that had books and blackboards and, even more troubling, without access to medication and water and food? Doorways that led to teachers who invited wonder and discovery were not part of many of these children’s days. And so, with a teacher who told me to keep going and parents who always inspired me to think bigger than myself, I set out to do anything I could. I told anyone who would listen about the conditions for children in these certain parts of Africa at the time (this was during the 1985 Ethiopian famine), and I worked to collect as many coin and dollar donations as I possibly could. After months of collecting money and a constant play-rewind-repeat of “We Are the World” (my self-selected theme song), I delivered my little (but big to me) $300 of funds raised to the Red Cross.

Today, looking back, I can see the signpost moments in my life and the way my experiences in education shaped me as an educator—and as a person. With teachers like Mrs. Buttery who were fully present, who inspired and empowered our ideas as students, and who offered us spaces to explore new worlds beyond our own with the best technologies and resources available at the time, education opened up pathways to let each of us mold and design our own futures. Since those days in 1985, my journey has been dedicated to seeking quality education for all. I have found my community of other globally minded educators who, like me, see all the world’s children as their own.

Positioning students as knowledge constructors and empowered, creative communicators enables us as teachers to help foster the passions and dreams of all our students. We don’t just open doorways, we build them.

Through technology-infused practices that allow for design, collaboration, and digital citizenship in learning, I believe that educators of the world, present in this moment of teaching and learning, can come together in solidarity to help rewrite the “stories of possible” in our global communities, so that students can move beyond concerns about seeking out quality learning or meals or water, and instead can explore puzzles of energetic foxes and lazy dogs and dream with chatty classmates about stories that seem filled with wonder and magic. I have hope.

SOCIAL GOOD IN EDUCATION

In classrooms and in schools, teachers and students are coming together to take action on creating change. Technology for social good makes it possible to share diverse perspectives, values, and beliefs. It allows for engagement through collaborative activities and coordination of efforts for increased impact. Social good provides purpose for inquiry-driven practices and project-based learning (PBL) by giving students the opportunity to engage in work that is relevant, interesting, and connected to the human experience. Though dedicated efforts for social good are relatively new in K–12 education, students and teachers are seeing how and where their voices fit in the global conversation, and that they are needed.

Traditionally, work around social good has been mostly reserved for the profession of social work. Programs, services, and products would target areas of need to promote well-being and to support causes in areas such as human rights, immigration, the environment, poverty, and access to housing, food, and clean water. In recent years, however, work around social good has spread into other professional sectors such as business, technology, and social entrepreneurship. With a sense of urgency and purpose, people from all areas of life, in all parts of the world, and of all ages are responding through committed grassroots efforts. Those of us in education are finding that innovative methods of awareness, advocacy, and activism are enabling us to make a positive difference for our world.

CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF SOCIAL GOOD

“Social good refers to services or products that promote human well-being on a large scale” (Mor Barak, 2018, p. 762). Three anchor themes that serve as a conceptual model for social good and describe the universal elements for the work within social good include (a) environmental justice and sustainability, (b) social inclusion, and (c) peace, harmony, and collaboration (Mor Barak, 2018).

These themes, fitting in at all grade levels and across all content areas within K–12 education, provide logical pathways for educators ready to support students in social-good efforts.

OUR ROLE IN TEACHING SOCIAL GOOD

What are our roles as educators in spaces of social good and social change? The job of a teacher involves developing skills in areas such as reading, writing, math, science, and history, but how do competencies such as kindness, empathy, commitment to action, and resilience fit in?

In considering this question, the phrase “raising our children” comes to mind. I use this phrase often—as a mother of three, as a teacher, and even in writing hopeful sentences such as, “As teachers, we must help raise children to reach their full potentials.” The verb “raise” has a powerful meaning: “to lift up, to move to a higher position or level.” In our work as teachers, we are in fact raising the children in our care. We hold them up and give them the right amount of boost when needed.

As my teacher Mrs. Buttery did for me, we can help shape the experiences of our students by meeting them with curiosity and interest. By endorsing a general trajectory while leaving room for exploration and wonder, we can invite our students to connect to their passions and to discover possibilities that may ultimately change their paths in life. But it takes discipline on our part to use our power as educators responsibly.

To “teach boldly” may mean that we take action, or it may mean that we simply listen without judgment. To build a culture grounded in inquiry and discourse, we need to guide our students so that they build on questions, seek out experts, and become confident individuals who are comfortable with imperfection and change. As teachers, we raise these children; we help them to chart their own visions for a better world and to establish...