A Generation of Caregivers

Posted on August 31, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

All the discussions about health care reform have reminded me of a workshop I did with high schools students last summer as part of a youth forecasting project with the KnoweldgeWorks Foundation. I developed a curriculum for teens about key trends in technology, community, health, economy, and demographics and worked with the Center for Digital Storytelling to conduct 3 workshops in which high school students imagined their lives ten years in the future.

The stories were personal, about distinct moments in their future lives, and they revealed issues that mattered to them. One theme that came through in several stories was their recognition that they would be caregivers – not only to their aging parents – but to their chronically ill peers and to their friends and family members who had become ill as a result of toxic environments and food. Part of their vision of themselves as caregivers involved developing personal relationships with digital para-professionals (robots), with human medical professionals thorugh social netwokring, and through online markets for medical services.

Here are two of my favorite stories.

ZaidaCervantesDV

MarissaBeckettDV

My big take away from these workshops is how capable and insightful the teens were at imagining plausible futures and teasing out the implications that mattered for them. It was also rewarding to see how excited they got about the present when faced with a set of possible futures. I need to do more of this work!

The Race to the Top Leaves out a Key Player (part 1 of 2)

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

“What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse?”

Mark Warren, Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University, asks this fundamental question that is largely unaddressed in the current debates over school reform and the race to the top in education.

He wrote this in 2005, and it is even more insightful and on target today given the increases in job loss, housing foreclosures, education cuts, and the harsh realities of community life for many Americans. How can schools get to the top if their communities remain at the bottom? How can the race to the top increase the wellbeing of both schools and communities?

His paper, Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform, makes the case that the fates of urban schools and communities are inextricably linked yet education reformers and community developers often work in silos. Following the outlines of the reform agenda of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, it seems that school transformation is positioned largely out of the community context—out of the set of institutions and relationships that fully shape the learning experiences and well-being of the K-12 population and their families.

Communities and Schools is particularly important to keep in mind today as the stimulus package is providing historic levels of funding for school improvement, as charter school networks and other third party school management organizations are expanding in districts, and as “disruptive” innovations (online learning and virtual schools are the recent popular examples) are gaining attention. There is an opportunity to open up the scope of reform and do things differently. If school improvement remains constrained in the education reform box, gains in school and community well-being may only go so far.

Why Community Matters

Warren offers a compelling case for why we need to link education reform and community revitalization and he provides a framework for thinking about strategies to implement collaborative school-community transformation.

1.) Kids can’t learn if they lack adequate housing, nutrition, safe, and secure environments.

2.) Schools can’t teach children well if they don’t understand their students (their lives and culture) and they lack meaningful relationships with their families.

3.) When school and community are isolated from each other a culture of power in schools can exacerbate “deficit” views of low-income parents, fueling tensions and undermining efforts at collaboration, and overlooking potential social and cultural resources.

4.) Structural inequalities of low income urban schools, such as their lack of resources compared to suburban schools, requires broader political engagement to sustainably address.

By joining school reform and community revitalization, Warren says that reform strategies “ emerge in a dialectic between experts and an engaged community of stakeholders in and around schools.” Authentic participation enhances commitment and success. Reform efforts take root in the values, concerns, and conditions of local communities. It seems that any effort to scale school “turnarounds”, “restarts”, and “transformations” would need to involve some kind of school-community collaboration in order to be relevant and avoid a “cookie cutter” approach.

Approaches for School-Community Collaboration

Warren’s framework for understanding the possibilities for school-community collaborations hinge on two important concepts: social capital and relational power. He defines social capital as “the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation.” Schools with high social capital are able to make the most of the assets they do have and can mobilize their social capital for greater resources. These are the intersecting relationships that bring people and resources together toward shared goals. This web of trust and cooperation also provides what Warren calls, “social closure” for children, a shared context among children and adults in which there are unifies sets of expectations and behaviors and coordinated actions to achieve their development holistically. The Harlem Children’s Zone comes to mind here, in which the institutions in the “zone” bring sets of relationships, resources, and a common vision together to improve the lives of its resident school age population.

Social capital does not necessarily imply power, particularly in the case of the urban communities where poverty and racism exist. Warren contrasts relational power (the power to get things done) with unilateral power (power over others). Relational power is developed through collaborative, problem solving approaches. It is necessary for working through community tensions and confronting tough challenges collectively. Relational power helps build the capacity of the school to actively co-create solutions with community organizations rather than be a passive recipient of their services.

Warren describes several case studies of school-community collaborations in which social capital and relational power were developed to make school-community improvements. They represent three distinct models for school-community collaboration.

1.) The service model: schools develop as a full service site for a range of programs for children and their families. These neighborhood hubs are often open beyond normal school hours and can provide health services, afterschool ESL, adult education and other programs for community residents. In this model, the community extends into the school to wrap services around the needs of the school population.

2.) The development model: includes the community sponsorship of a new school such as a charter school, and are typically oriented around a set of shared values and perhaps a pedagogical approach, such as many of the recent charters that are organized around technology and project based inquiry methods in the classroom.

3.) The organizing model: community organizations, like neighborhood associations, collaborate with schools to develop leadership skills, relationship building, and public action among community residents and within the school to improve the school-community. School sites become hubs of political organizing and parent leaders emerge as key links between school and community issues.

While these models differ in their approaches for developing relational power and social capital, they all work toward creating public schools as “institutional anchors for low income, urban communities.” This is a significant difference from the reform efforts we hear today. Besides Obama’s public (and financial) support of the Harlem Children’s Zone, school improvement remains disconnected from its social, economic, and political context—the broader community that surrounds it. Schools may succeed in bringing down their dropout rates, and may gain a few points in standardized test, but the communities they inhabit, and that their students eat, sleep, socialize, live and learn in, will still languish.

(next, part 2, A Resilience Model for School-Community Collaboration)

Looking for WalMart Effects in Education

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

Daniel Goleman spoke at the beautiful new David Brower Center in Berkeley on August 13th (as part of a seminar hosted by the Center for EcoLiteracy) about his new book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Two big ideas that stuck with me were (1) the emergence of new tools and techniques for achieving radical transparency of products—a deep accounting of a products biological and ecological risks across its life cycle and across its supply chain, communicated in easy to understand rating systems and indices like the GoodGuide; and (2) the need for introducing ecological intelligence into the K-12 school curriculum to develop a generation of globally and ecologically empathic individuals. Radical transparency combined with ecological intelligence provides the data and the collective human capacity to turn empathy for the planet into meaningful action.

Goleman explained that ecological intelligence is the capacity to live well in our ecosystem. It is an extension of our emotional and social intelligence to a planetary level in which our collective empathy is put into action globally. With emotional intelligence we learn how to identify, assess, and manage our own emotions. With social intelligence we learn how to manage relationships and develop empathy. According to Goleman, ecological intelligence “lets us apply what we learn about how human activity impinges on ecosystems so as to do less harm and once again live sustainably in our niche—these days the entire planet.” Many native groups do this well, like the tiny Sher village in Tibet that has sustained itself on a steep mountainside for over a thousand years. We don’t. Our modern routines and industrial systems have disconnected us from our adverse impacts on the world. We need to change this if we are to create significant and lasting positive impacts on the health of the planet and preserve the human species.

Goleman proposes that with ecological intelligence and radical transparency we will relate more empathically to information about human risks (like exposure to harmful pesticides) and ecological damage (like destruction of coral reefs from chemicals in sunscreen) and make different consumer decisions. As companies respond to new market choices and demands driven by ecological intelligence and radical transparency (and potential cost savings) they will innovate business and industrial practices that are less destructive to human and ecological wellbeing. Goleman sees the supply chain as the point of leverage and points to WalMart’s new sustainability index as a way for their suppliers to compete for shelf space. With 200 million customers and 60,000 suppliers, the impact is huge.

Developing ecological intelligence in the school age population is necessary for nurturing an ecologically empathic future generation of leaders, consumers, voters, innovators, and community members. And Goleman is hopeful because there seems to be an emerging track record here. He stated that a new study is about to be released, a meta analysis, (he didn’t cite it in his talk so I have no reference unfortunately! I’m trying to track it down.) that reviews research on classrooms that implemented social-emotional learning (SEL) in the school curriculum. Those classes that were exposed to SEL reported lower rates of antisocial behavior (e.g. bullying), high rates of pro-social behaviors (e.g. cooperation), and higher levels of academic outcomes. Introducing ecological intelligence into K-12 curriculum could extend those positive results to our behaviors regarding human-natural ecosystems and raise student achievement at the same time. That is exciting.

Goleman mentioned that there is discussion about having some form of ecological intelligence curriculum included as part of a revised No Child Left Behind bill. That is one way to diffuse ecological intelligence, but it might just be perceived as one more requirement added to teachers’ load and could become watered down and scripted curriculum by the time is reaches the classroom. Perhaps we should look at the supply chain in education to think about other ways to catalyze ecological intelligence in schools. WalMart acts as a de facto regulator and has huge impact on changing behaviors of manufacturing and industrial processes because of its size and leverage on supply chains.

Where in education is there that kind of catalyzing effect without going to the federal government? Another player in the education ecosystem with big leverage is higher education—colleges and universities. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate ecological intelligence. Just as suppliers are intent on getting their product on a WalMart shelf, families and schools are increasingly focused on getting their kids into college. Foundations have built initiatives on facilitating entry to college, K-8^th grade and high schools have oriented curriculum around college entrance, and a thriving market of commercial providers has targeted college acceptance to design an array products and services.

The University of California and California State University systems together serve over 670,000 students. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate proficiency or a certain number of course credits in ecological intelligence. What if their application included an essay question or description of a project that dealt with ecological intelligence? What are other levers in the education supply chain? There may be other creative ways to stimulate the states into finding ways of diffusing ecological intelligence into curriculum, service learning opportunities, and even internships with businesses. Focusing in the education supply chain may provide ideas for some useful strategies.

Achieving Personal Democracy

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City in late June and returned home excited about how social media and web 2.0 tools can help to create a transparent, accountable, and innovative government and a more inclusive and dynamic civic sphere. I also returned with a deeply nagging concern that we may not get there from here. Not because of any technological barriers, lack of will, or lack of creativity, but because of our education system.

The personal democracy reflected by the speakers and discussions at PDF assumes an engaged, tolerant, and reflective citizenry. It assumes a personal relationship with civic sphere and the capacity to think critically about complex topics, debate issues, cooperate, and solve problems. Are the goals, strategies, and resources of the education system aligned to support personal democracy? I’m sure there are examples of schools and districts that are, but is the whole system? What kind of citizenry is our education system creating?

Jeff Jarvis invited the audience into a discussion about the government as a platform, an API, a network that allows citizens to fully engage, create and innovate as a part of the civic process. He exclaimed, “do what you do best and link to the rest, ” whether that is volunteering, campaigning, or any other activity in the public interest.

Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the United States, thrilled the audience with the IT Dashboard, a site that makes all federal IT spending open and accessible to the public, and mashable. In notes to the Press Kundra said, “In making this data publicly available, we are providing unfettered access to investment performance to its true owners – the American people.”

David Weinberger described how a digitally-based personal democracy benefits from difference and seeks higher truths. The “hyperlinked world of difference adds context and meaning” and “argument, conversations, debate, controversy give up wisdom not just facts”. This new open platform will bring transparency to government enabling us to scale democracy and discover deeper insight, and presumably create a more just and equitable society. “The linked world of difference gives us a greater sense of truth of what a topic is than the paper world”.

These statements are exciting, possible to realize, and could bring real transformation to governance. But then I think about danah boyd’s and Michael Wesch’s presentations.

danah posed the question: are we growing together or apart? She suggested that we’re falling prey to the shallow argument of “anyone can participate if we just give them access”. She continued to reveal how racism and classism manifest in social networks, suggesting that we are witnessing the equivalent of the “modern incarnation of white flight” among social networking sites. The early signs of stratification online by race and class exist, and we risk creating a bourgeois public sphere rather than a truly broad and inclusive one.

Michael Wesch, giving a standing ovation presentation, asked if we can use the new media ecology to conquer narcissism and triviality he sees in the MTV generation. Can we discover our authentic selves, he asked, a deeper sense of self-awareness in the new media ecology that provides tremendous connection without constraints? Can we shift our society, specifically youth culture, from the indifferent “whatever” to the purposeful “whatever” it takes?

Both danah’s and Michael Wesch’s talks point to education transformation as a critical factor in creating a broad and inclusive personal democracy. Given this country’s dropout rates (particularly in large metropolitan areas), the economic constraints that face public education in the next decade, and the uncertain national leadership in education system, it is unsure whether the student age population that matures along with the personal democracy platform will engage in a personal democracy even if there is access.

There are some hopeful signs on the horizon. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is working with educators in 10 states to introduce a new curriculum framework that includes 21st century themes (such as global awareness, civic literacy, health & wellness awareness, and financial literacy) along with Life & Career Skills; Information, Media, and Technology Skills; and Learning & Innovation Skills. While Partnership for 21st Century skills tends to weigh heavily on workplace skills for a knowledge economy, stressing global competition as a key element in its rationale, the effort moves curriculum away from traditionally siloed subject areas and toward relevant, integrated activities that connect students with their broader world. And CIRCLE at Tufts University is a research and information center supporting the link between academic success and civic education and engagement. Service learning is becoming more common at K-12 schools and the eco-schools movement is using food and nutrition to make the link youth, health, geographic community, and learning.

In order to achieve the personal democracy envisioned at the PD Forum, the tools of personal democracy, the digital media applications and the cooperative, bottom up, social practices, need to be used to bring a systemic alternative to education in the U.S. Perhaps having the equivalent of a Vivek Kundra and a Beth Noveck (Wiki Government) in the Department of Education could bring a sophisticated awareness and understanding of transparency, openness and bottom-up, co-creation to the education policy and institutional worlds. What kind of incentives would catalyze social media application developers to focus on mobile and web-based apps for families and communities to self-organize and create their own relevant learning ecologies? We need an Obama style campaign to get education raised to a first tier issue in this country at the national and local levels.

Perhaps these can be threads discussed at the next PD Forum so that we can ensure that personal democracy is not just accessible to all, but meaningful, relevant, and treasured by all.

Who Does the Chief Learning Officer Hire?

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

Here is a post I wrote for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation blog about designing education and schools by process rather than outcomes. Thinking about the interactions and processes involved in learning can open up possibilities for imagining new kinds of roles and functions, and ultimately new relationships between schools and their broader community. The post was inspired by a terrific blog post by Will Richardson and links to research on learning agents by KWF.

NLab: Amplified Individuals & Business Resilience

Posted on June 19, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

Last year I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the Nlab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. The day focused on discussing the implications of Web 2.0 tools and applications and social networking for small business. It was a great event, in part due to the wonderful hospitality of the folks at the University and the Institute of Creative Technologies, but also because we tried to bridge big ideas and concepts with the practical challenges of managing small business.

This year, my colleague Sue Thomas, Professor at DeMotfort University, invited me to prepare a short video for their NLab event, Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience. I was sorry not to be there, but at least I got to share some ideas, via video, of the opportunities for using participatory digital media to infuse communities and business with resilience – the capacity to reorganize and recover from crisis – to meet the challenges of a complex and uncertain world.

Here is a link to a page with the video and other audio clips from participants in the seminar.

What is most inspiring to me about this topic is the opportunity for local organizations to gain a bit more agency, in the creation of information and the discussion around that information, in the ability to create more transparency in local processes and decisions, and in the ability to create, share, and direct resources.

Resilience: Enabling New Patterns, New Agency

Posted on April 24, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

I’ve been reading with great interest the posts of John Robb and Jamais Cascio related to resilience. Both make the case persuasively that in a world of black swans, global system shocks and instability, resilience (in communities, institutions, systems) is necessary not only to remain viable, but to thrive.

Jamais offers a clear definition of resilience: the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an  institution, or a system–to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks,  and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards.

I’d like to extend the idea of “recovery” a bit.

I find the significance of the concept of resilience in its adaptive and transformative power—in its dynamic to generate novelty during crisis. Resilient systems, communities, organizations recover by reorganizing, and possibly even transforming. (John Robb’s reference to the T-1000 reassembling (through scale invariance) to continue to attack the Terminator is a nice visual of this.)

Fritjov Capra (The Web of Life) argues that a property of all living systems is their capacity to generate new patterns during times of critical instability. Brian Walker et. al., writing in Ecology & Society, emphasize adaptability and transformability as important related attributes of resilience. They describe resilience as the “capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change” (italics mine). Sometimes the system transforms. It creates “untried beginnings from which to evolve a new way of living when existing ecological, economic, or social structures become untenable.” They give an example of the transformation of a rangeland ecosystem from many cattle ranches to a few conservancies managed collectively for ecotourism.

For communities, having the capacity to reorganize and transform to a more viable system seems to be critical for long-term success. Community resilience is an adaptive practice, enabled by generative capacities to sense, learn, create, and re-organize. These capacities will support a community’s efforts to generate novel solutions that maintain its distinct identity and wellbeing as it is connected to the global system and subject to global forces.

I think four trends are converging to drive a creative explosion of ways that communities can develop resilience–their capacity to reorganize and generate novel solutions and strategies:

• Amplification of sensing and cognition through participatory digital media. New digital media, from camera phones and sensors to social media such as Twitter and wikis are enabling people to create, filter and track data streams more effectively as well as make sense of it. Citizen science projects, for example, use mobile sensors to amplify a community’s ability to capture environmental data. Data visualization applications and collaborative gaming are ways to make sense of vast amounts of data. This amplified capacity could help detect system threshold points (like its getting too big, or too polluted, or too leveraged). This could help avoid system failures and recognize them more quickly when they do happen.

• Super empowered groups as a modular social infrastructure. The ease of affiliation and group formation has increased tremendously with social media. I see this trend as an intersection of Clay Shirky’s ideas in “Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” and David Reed’s point that group forming networks grow exponentially and can rapidly scale as members co-create their own value. Communities now can grow very user-centric social infrastructures to catalyze collective action and cooperation around issues and needs that matter to them. The Transition Towns movement exemplifies this as self-organizing groups in communities across the world have quickly adopted Transition Culture ideas and have started to act collectively in their own meaningful ways. The Interra Community Change Card (a shop local project) shows how social networks comprised of merchants, producers, and residents can boost local economies.

• Democratized fabrication and the emergence of community-based micro-economies. Efforts such as TechShop and MIT’s mobile FabLab program have the potential to transform the productive capacity of communities. Equipped with 3D printers and computer controlled machine tools, these open fabrication centers amplify the capacity of communities to design, prototype, and fabricate stuff – objects, parts, components. Community members and local organizations like senior centers or schools, and local artisans can create their own micro economies, repair networks, and production webs. South Bronx residents used the FabLab tools to make furniture and irrigation pipes.

• The rise of know-how networks and exchange of practical knowledge. Opportunities to share, and learn from, practical knowledge is unleashing DIY behaviors and creative capacity in various domains. Local expertise can attain global recognition and support and local organizations can reap the benefit of others’ experience, experimentation, and insight. Some key areas of growth are: artisan networks that share how-to knowledge and instructions like Instructables; open educational resource networks that exchange curriculum methods and lessons such as Curriki and OER Commons; and R&D and design networks.

Together these four trends can enhance the resilience of individual communities through flexible platforms in various domains (education, food, health, finance) and could begin to create an interconnected web of pioneering communities with increased local agency and more suited to the volatility of the global system.

NOTE: I will be exploring more of these ideas in an upcoming paper published by the online journal of the Institute of Creative Technologies.

andrea saveri

making the future actionable

Category Archives: community