caise

Introduction

Diane: The Teenage Designers of Learning Places…go into a physical space, like a Boys and Girls Club. We picked nine spaces originally, four in Minnesota, and five in St. Louis. I'm in St. Louis. We picked a shelter, a traditional small boys after-school program, a Boys and Girls Club, a Girls Inc., and a Head-start. They all serve low-income young people. All, these kids…had the potential to be part of this achievement gap, on the wrong side of it. We could still look at ageism, because we were very young kids to upper elementary. We could look at gender equity by pulling out the girls with Girls Inc.

The teens, at the end of this, were supposed to go in and make recommendations on how to physically change the space that kids were in. Because we weren't going to be able to put…what we found in the home, but put it into their after-school program. We felt like it had to be somewhere, and we didn't think we could put it in a school.

These are the skills you bring with you to the classroom. So, the teens as an audience got to start to understand what does it mean….What does learning mean, what is the value of learning, how do people learn, and what does it mean to be science literate, and what is the value of that. So, they started having those conversations among themselves, with the people who work in after-school, with the people who work at the science center, or the families, the kids, and their communities.

Can you share some design examples of this project?

Diane: The kids came up with certain areas. One would be the way in America we allow young kids at a very early age to interact with materials. So, when you're very low-income, and you do a science activity or a make-and-take at the Boys and Girls Club, you give them the materials to be successful. You don't give them extra. You give them just enough.

So the difference would be, say I have a daughter, and every time I traveled, she liked to color and paint. I'd bring her different papers. She has had oil paints, pastels, color pencils. I don't just give her one thing, an end product. She's explored them. To kids, the property's a paper. Maybe you're going to make-a-paper-airplane. They don't get to choose the paper, they don't know the properties of tissue paper, or tinfoil, or wax paper, and it was just across the board, from the youngest kids we were working with all the way to staff have not played with these materials. If you think of what that means when you sit in a classroom, when you're talking about stuff, they're not know the properties of materials.

One experience is that we cook…you know, we have refrigerators, we have stoves, we make ice, we boil water, we have little teapots and stuff. I'm working with kids who eat two meals a day at school and none at home. They get breakfast, and they stay in the after-school program, they get dinner. So they haven't seen those things, so they don't know the properties of liquids. They really don't know. They're not playing in the tub; there are no swimming pools in their neighborhood. So when you get into a classroom that is totally abstract to you. The other one would say, "We grew up with pets, and plants, and you know, gardens, you know, somebody in our circle has done this." I could take a kitten in, and kids would be terrified, they'd go screaming from their room.

So what we found is not only were these experience not there, but there was a lack of comfort. Which meant it was really hard to build interest, and there was no vocabulary. So if you were trying to work with a kid in a botany class, they knew what a flower was. They knew flowers had leaves, but they didn't know petals, pistons, stamens. So observational skills around them were really low. So, when working with little kids, and I'm reading Hungry Caterpillar that is being read all over the United States. I'm afraid of a caterpillar, I've never seen these fruits he's eating, and the story is like Greek. It's just really has no real meaning. It's just words, it's the rhythm of the words that the kids are getting, but not what my daughter would get if we read the Hungry Caterpillar and we went out and searched for caterpillars and compared butterflies, and took her to the butterfly house and all that.

It is a totally different experience, so if you think of starting without this experience in kindergarten, it just continues to grow, we know that you accumulate knowledge and it needs to be connected, and you're asking people to learn things that other kids know through experience, very concrete, they're learning it as abstract…in the abstract. So we felt that, we had to address that, so that's what we're finding, we think that this needs to be addressed, and I thought we'd find something, but I didn't think we would find as much as we found.

What does it look like? So you go to the shelter, the whole community is just concrete, and there's a little bit of grass coming through the cracks of the sidewalk. So after two years, the staff realizes that this was important, so they wanted more botany in the building. So the teens said, "Well, you've got this patio that you can't go out on with these French doors." The patio's structurally unsound, so they found a clear shoe bag, the kind that you hang up over your door, filled it with dirt and seeds, and grew plants there, and put a field guide. There are all these plants growing all over the door that just creates this sense of, “Oh my god, look at that…It was this big bulb, and now it's this thing, and what is that called? A tulip!" Next to it is the ability to grow your own plant, so as you build this sense of wonder and wow, build your interest, and then you start on the content part.

So we made it our responsibility to remove the barriers, build the interests. If the barrier is comfort, get ride of that. "You know, I don't touch dirt because dirt is dirty." Okay, it's a good thing to get dirty sometimes. You can touch dirt, you can grow plants, be fascinated by it. Then we start to talk about botany, and what does that mean, and how you think about it. What does it take to grow your plant? We make it a really, really long process that you don't have to go from knowing to not knowing.

So we don't have to introduce a word of botany until people are trying to explain something. Say, you know, some people call that botany, and then you introduce that language, and as their interest and their conversations grow around this, then you start to get it. The kids, and this is where this is interesting, we knew that there were going to be restrictions, that people say, "Look, when you're going to schools and after-schools, they're going to tell you this, this, this, and this. You're going into someone's territory." So Girls Inc. said, "Okay, we get it, we want more science, but you have to take the dance room, and you can't do anything that'll damage the floor." So you're talking about neat, clean science? They said, "pretty much." So the kids said, "Let's talk to them about light energy and sound energy. It goes perfect with dance and performances. We can do some things on magnetism, put lots of mathematics in their area," and that's what they designed for the Girls Inc.

For the Boys and Girls Club, they gave them a lot of space. Way more than we were expecting to have to design. But some of the things they came up with were, instead of having ordinary chairs, “let's create these benches that are terrariums.” That were fascinating and people would just look down, see all these plants growing. Some things were just ordinary, like putting fish tanks in and collecting data, figuring out how much water you take out and how much you add in. What is going on in that tank and finding ways to talk about it or turtles. So we're hoping to get to more live animals in there.

It meant that the teens really had to learn about these things too. One unexpected thing was, okay all of these people were discomforted, we had discomfort like we said. The kids we were working with, the staff, the community centers, their parents. Then we realized, "Oh, so do the teens we're working with." Then we realized, "So did including me, the African-American staff." I had to admit, I never touched a worm. I don't want to. I don't want to have to pick up a hamster. And then I said, "Oh my goodness, we are going to have to address this. The staff is going to have to get over it if we find that this is an important issue to take out on the community." We're going to be the first ones to have to learn how to get over this barrier, and not help other people get over it and not deal with it ourselves.

How do the younger kids react to these spaces?

Diane:They're the easiest. Because they're just playing, so they are water tables in their space. Head Start is very organized, and they do a lot of professional development, so they had some of these things in here. The difference with Head Start is that no one had done the “meaning making” and explained the value to them. Now the teachers are more intentional when they do water play, when they bring out little bugs to show the kids. When they read, you know, really paying attention, "Do they really understand the vocabulary in the book?" That's been for the little kids, the little kids are easy to get excited and we're creating the barriers there. Even though they haven't seen a caterpillar, they don't know to be afraid of the caterpillar. We sort of do that as we go along. So they've been the easiest.

What do the older kids think of these spaces?

Diane: Their reaction is that, has been most to the teens who are now teaching at their sites. And they get it. One kid said, "I want to grow up to be a YES (Youth Exploring Science) teen and inspire young kids like these teens do for me." So in their mind, these teens who are 15 to 17 are professional, are engaged in science, and they see it now as something to aspire to. They were an easy group to win over because they would do whatever the teens would do. You know, kids don't want to grow up to be me, they want to grow up to be a teenager, a cool teenager.

Because these kids come from their neighborhood, we didn't have to deal with the “nerdiness,” the outcast or any of that. These are the kids that hang out in their neighborhood. One of the things in my program is I always make sure there's a huge cadre of kids so that you're not picking one kid and making him sort of weird in his neighborhood. He's got all these colleagues, and it's a paid program. It's his job to learn science and to teach science. He gets it from his peers at school who don't think he should learn science, or science is too hard, or whatever. He could say, "That's my job," and so they get a lot of respect because they get a job at 14. They work all through high school, but their job is learning and teaching science, and they're admired in their community, especially around the younger kids. So that was an easy sell, too, by having teenagers come in.

With the staff at those community centers, they felt that they could not teach science. They have not had positive experiences in science. They had very little science. I mean, as a person, you can go through science and get a degree, like me, and taking little to no science, you know. Some sciences like chemistry, I haven't taken a chemistry class since the 10th grade, and it wasn't the most pleasant experience but I passed it because I knew I needed to pass it. So, we're talking about people who may have less science than that, and a very unpleasant experience with science. What the project did for them is say, "I don't have to be afraid of science. If these teenagers can get involved, and these are the teenagers that come out of their community organization, and be comfortable, and teach, and learn all this, so can I." So it gave them permission to get involved in the science education.

What role did Internet technologies play in the project?

Diane: I've been doing this for 11 years, so for, let's say, the first 7 without using this type of technology. We don't have any way to talk about it outside our building. For kids, they're really important to the project, so connecting them to the world was huge. Having the project be very public, letting them know that there were people out there. That this wasn't something that I sat down and came up with as busy work for them. It also allowed them to see they are a part of the world. It allowed them to talk with people as peers, not based on, your are the teacher, or you are a university, or you are an engineer, you are an architect, but we're peers solving a problem. So they ended up getting advisors from all over the United States. But they used technology in a way that I'm still learning to use.

There's a fluency in the technology with the teens that we're still working with on the staff. It's helped us bring people to the project because the consistency and the way we use technology. You could say you work with kids, and the kids did this, and people are like, "Yeah right." But when it's consistent, and you see the photos, they come up daily, they're tagged, you see the kids, you see their videos, you know that they're doing it, and it's all that consistency. It gives a credibility that people who want to join you ... actually, it creates people, "Wow, that's pretty exciting. I think I'll call them up," and join, and that has happened. The one person was Dr. Shirley Brice Heath. She said "Can I come see you?" Can you ... you're asking me, "Can I come see you?" I'm like, "You are Dr. Shirley Brice Heath," You have written all of these incredible books, and have shaped education, yeah. "Can we pay you to come see us?" So it's those kinds of things for us too.

How do you extend the reach of the project?

Diane: What if you thought of a group of museums the same way department stores do? JC Penney's is JC Penney's. We get a group of museums that say, "OK, I'm going to have a youth program, I'm going to have...," and you put out the goals of where they are going to get. “We're going to have great professional development, we're going to really have deep understanding of inquiry,” all these things. There are people who already have a piece of it, but if we work as one museum with multiple sites. Could we get all of that in those sites?

That's what I'm looking at now, some of these here at the conferences, "I can't get any kids to work with me." I made a point to go over there, and he says, "So, you don't do what I do." "OK." Because it's too hard, people can give me good ideas, but unless I can internalize it really well, understand their rationale, their reasoning, their resources, their institutional culture, it's hard to implement. We have to take all that into consideration when we get these lessons learned about how we help people implement the lessons learned, it's not me telling you. It wasn't my staff coming to me saying, "You need more technology." "OK." I knew that, but that wasn't what's going to get me to implement it. So what does it take, and I feel like, as a field, we have the resources all there, but we just have to think about them differently. I think at the leadership level, if you look at the precedents, I think they're ready for that. I think they'd be a lot flexible, a lot more flexible how they think about staff and staff time.