Andrew Mangino on building the next generation of dreamers

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Andrew Mangino, Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Future Project. 

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We started The Future Project about two and a half years ago. I was in Washington, DC as a speechwriter. Like a lot of young people in my generation, there was a lot of excitement after the presidential election—seen in things like the “Yes We Can” video created here—and many of us went to DC. I went to be a speechwriter to Joe Biden. And by the way, if you’re thinking about storytelling, Joe Biden is the best storyteller you’ll ever encounter. 

I was in DC and felt this incredible sense of possibility, like so many people. But I started talking to my friends, and we all felt a certain lack of fulfillment. There was all this amazing energy, but we were wondering what’s the common purpose: what’s the call to action that’s going to drive our generation to change the world, not just win an election? Many people had been fired up by the election not because of any particular policy, but because there was this new sense of possibility in America. 

The point came up earlier about the interplay between things happening by accident versus planned change, and it’s one that we’ve been wrestling since Day 1. I was mentoring a student in a DC school at the time. Judging by the statistics, it was one of the most struggling schools in America, just a few blocks from where I was living in DC. There was a complete disconnect between that school and the community and the energy that I, and so many people I knew, felt. 

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Ashoka Fellow Eric Dawson on unleashing young people’s moral imaginations

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Ashoka Fellow Eric Dawson, Co-Founder and President of Peace First. 

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I founded Peace First almost 21 years ago. I’d been a sort of pissy kid, and founded it around this idea that we have a narrative about young people in this country—and I actually think it’s global—which is that we tend to think about young people as the future. “You’re going to be a great artist someday,” or a great writer or a great whatever, which is sort of like saying you’re not a great writer or a great artist now. So we have a potential narrative for young people. 

We have a victim narrative for young people, so young people are things we need to protect or keep safe. We have a lot of resources in keeping kids safe and protecting them and keeping them healthy. And then we have a narrative around perpetrators: young people are violent. They’re dangerous. They’re black and brown, they have AK-47s. So we incarcerate young people. We medicate young people. We turn our schools into prisons—literally, with metal detectors and police officers, or spiritually, with these sort of deadening, zero-tolerance policies: don’t talk in the halls; sit in your seat. 

We’ve been really interested in this question of how we create a counter narrative. One part is this idea that young people are the present: they’re leaders, they’re organizers. The other is that they’re powerful: that young people can effect change. And the third is that they’re positive. They’re hungry to be called to something. That’s language for us around peace-making—so when we talk about peace-making, we’re talking about the critical skills of social-emotional learning—empathy, perspective-taking, conflict resolution—married to the critical skills of creativity and civic engagement. How do we unleash young people’s moral imaginations?

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20 young adults skip college to change the world
PayPal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel announced yesterday his second class of fellows for his controversial fellowship program, 20 Under 20 Theil Fellowships. The 20 fellows will each be receiving a $100,000 grant to forgo college and pursue system-changing ventures. Thiel, a Stanford Law School graduate, believes that students can put a hold on college if they have a big enough idea. 
“Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay– whatever it takes,” said Thiel in his May interview with Morley Safer on “60 Minutes.” 
Thiel commented on how the pressure for kids to go to college right after high school graduation has, in his opinion, negatively impacted society economically.
“We now have $1 trillion in student debt in the U.S. Cynically, you can say it’s paid for $1 trillion of lies about how good education is,” he said.
“I did not realize how screwed up the education system is.”

Source: marketwatch.com

The need for school reform?  The image shows a student’s electrodermal activity over the course of a week. As Joi Ito, Head of MIT Media Lab, notes on his blog:  “Obviously, this is just one student and doesn’t necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class…)” (found via boingboing)
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The need for school reform? 

The image shows a student’s electrodermal activity over the course of a week. As Joi Ito, Head of MIT Media Lab, notes on his blog: 

“Obviously, this is just one student and doesn’t necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class…)”

(found via boingboing)

Lunch time - the next frontier in education?

I know it’s a bit late for lunch time, but I think we can all agree that it’s still the lunch hour, broadly speaking.  So I wanted to share my musings on lunch…specifically, as that daily meal to education.

I’m excited about new initiatives cropping up that recognize lunch time as an opportunity to do some informal teaching around some of the lessons that haven’t yet found a place in the traditional school day in more traditional classrooms. Obviously, lessons about eating healthily and preparing your own healthy food belong in the lunch room. (And thankfully, they’re finally making their way there: for just one example, in the Ashoka Fellowship, Kirstin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey are doing this work with their organizational powerhouse Revolution Foods.)  Perhaps less obvious is the idea that the lunch room—or cafeteria, or dining hall—is also a great place to jumpstart empathy education.  Case in point? Lunchtime 2.0, a project aimed to reimagine college cafeterias, by bringing together students from very different walks of life over a meal and a series of profound questions.   College campuses in the US are some of the most diverse places on the planet, and traditional classrooms often can’t or don’t leverage that asset.  The lunch table can.

What if all students had to solve a social challenge?

In a post about her new book on the how-to’s of creativity, Tina Seeling describes an introductory assignment she gives her students at Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), in the Stanford School of Engineering. 

On the first day of class, we start with a very simple challenge: redesigning a name tag. I tell the students that I don’t like name tags at all. The text is too small to read. They don’t include the information I want to know. And they’re often hanging around the wearer’s belt buckle, which is really awkward. The students laugh when they realize that they too have been frustrated by the same problems.

They then come up with ideas bound to the format of the classical name tag, before being pushed to focus on the end goal: why do you want to wear one? What’s the purpose; the challenge that needs to be overcome? 

It sounds like an assignment that should be given to all students in any discipline to practice the ability to innovate for people and people’s needs. Imagine if all types of schools always gave their students a social challenge to solve, as the first assignment of the year? Every school has some kind of “getting started” excise, why not one that could change the world? One that challenged the students to use the skill of empathy to do good?

It could even be formalized into state and national competitions in “change-making”. The winners could win start up capital, depending on the age of the students, others maybe the chance to get a social entrepreneur as their mentor or a dinner with their biggest social hero. Imagine if all students had tried to tackle a major challenge by age 25, and given the inspiration to keep changing the world for the better? Sounds good to me!

- Anna

Source: ssireview.org

Call for a new hero in school reform

New Classroom

“We elevate the wrong hero in school reform every day: we dramatically overvalue the importance of academic learning, and assume that merely focusing on better curricula and clearer standards will carry the day. Yet the research suggests otherwise, affirming what sociologist Pedro Noguera and others have said repeatedly: “unmet social needs become unmet academic needs.”

Sam Chatlain, a DC based writer and education activist, on integrating new research about how we learn into the US education system, putting social needs alongside the academic needs.

(Image is courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, Bart Everson - we are not the only ones, who thought that this image was great for a story: see his post about it’s popularity)

Ashoka and YV partner with the Bully Project

Whew. What a week! With just four days notice, teams at Ashoka and Youth Venture managed to pull together a youth campaign just in time for today’s launch of “Bully” — a documentary film that follows the lives of five families affected by bullying and their determination to make a difference.

In partnership with The Bully Project, the campaign will be a platform that encourages youth to “Stop Bullying and Start Empathy”  by submitting ideas for projects in their schools and communities. The YV team will then provide advice and support for youth teams to start their own movements.

It’s a terrific opportunity to channel the energy and publicity around a national problem into awareness about empathy and its importance. 

And, the campaign is a nice preview for the upcoming launch of Start Empathy on the web in just over a month. (We’ve already got the Facebook page up and running, so be sure to stop by and “like” us!) 

Again, on Monday morning, we had nothing. And by Friday morning, we have this. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re working with such a wonderful and dedicated team!

-Michael

The Relationship School

Interesting piece this morning by David Brooks in the NY Times. 

I like his line about the school’s founder, Shimon Waronker: “He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.” 

It’s exciting to see the increasing recognition that our schools aren’t fully preparing students for today’s rapidly changing world. And to read about the emphasis on relationships in this school - especially between student and teacher. Because it’s through relationships that we learn about empathy, teamwork, conflict resolution, and similar skills that are absolutely essential for us to succeed. 

As it turns out, this school isn’t too far from me in NYC so I’ll have to make a visit! 

-Michael

There’s an app for that

“It seems to me this technology offers us a chance to get empathy into the DNA of both a teacher and a kid,” Ellen said. “This could significantly change teaching practice.”

I admit, I’ve been something of a skeptic when it comes to the latest in gaming technology: “this new iPhone app will change your life—-and better yet, the world!” Sure, I love Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk as much as the next person, and I get that, when it comes to education, one well-designed app can reach millions in the time that it would take a phenomenal education program to reach a few hundred kids. But then I think of the many apps I rarely use, and question their ability to effect lasting behavior change. And I have yet to come across a game—whether played on a computer, a tv, or a phone—that alone has the power to rework incentives, create new markets, turn around struggling institutions, and ultimate catalyze systems-change.  

But maybe—just maybe—I was wrong.  Earlier this week, I spoke Ellen Moir, a Senior Fellow at Ashoka, and the Founder of the New Teacher Center, and the team behind AOK Media, a social game for good, that encourages kids and adults alike to share and celebrate acts of kindness, large and small. The New Teacher Center is out to accelerate new teacher effectiveness by pairing new teachers with experienced mentors, reaching over 25,000 teachers—and over a million and a half students—each year. AOK was one of five early entrant winners in our competition currently running on Changemakers, and as a reward, they had the chance to get feedback on their entry from a leading innovator in our network. They’ve created a social network where users can track and share their positive actions, and earn points which in turn go to a cause of their choice, as a way to make doing good hip, rewarding, and fun. They’re now trying to figure out how this would roll out in schools, as a teaching tool and through school-wide competitions and active chapters, led by AOK Ambassadors, so we began the discussion there. 

And that’s when she said it. A woman who knows a thing or two about systems-change believes that this could be not only a neat trick in a teacher’s arsenal, but a way to revolutionize teaching practice. Well, when you put it like that…We talk often about the fact that the real test for empathy is what students do after the class is over. Here’s a simple way to find out—to encourage and keep track of empathy in action. Imagine if teachers everywhere were using AOK—and other technologies like it—to reward and evaluate students’ problem-solving skills, or their ability to design and implement a service project, or their experience of real-world learning. Imagine what would happen to classrooms when empathy was suddenly made “cool”. Imagine what would happen to the school when kids came to class excited to learn, more connected to their school, and less likely to bully—not because they’re under threat of punishment, but because the rewards of treating one another with kindness are that high. 

Turns out, there’s an app for that. 

-Lennon

TED is now adding “Lessons worth Sharing” to it’s portfolio of great content. The channel is designed for students and teachers:

“TED-Ed’s mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. You can nominate a teacher, nominate an animator or suggest a lesson here: http://education.ted.com”

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