Unpack the biases, boundaries, and possibilities of materials you bring to an event.
It can be challenging to avoid “school-ifying” a new concept or skill. Sometimes, in our efforts to help people learn, we default a lowest-common-denominator kind of material, like a handout or quiz, when learners might benefit more from learning by doing or making.
We mean well - want to provide instruction and materials that everyone “gets.” Many of us share a common understanding of traditional assignments and worksheets that makes them seem like attractive shortcuts for teaching and learning. It may even be possible to design a handout, worksheet, or quiz that works really well, but whenever we use them we run the risk of losing learners who resist this kind of formal, institutional facilitation and we advantage those who are most “school-successful” or compliant with rote work. We create a biased view of success for ourselves and our learners when we use traditional assignments because, traditionally, education is biased toward privilege.
Our challenge is to design broadly appealing and specifically adaptable learning experiences that are participatory. We can differentiate for several levels and kinds of participation, but how we teach and how we ask others to learn should seem more accessible, collaborative, democratic, and equitable than “desk work.”
There is bias in everything we do and make; we should try to biased toward things like discovery, diversity, inquiry, and possibility in the materials we curate for our learners. Whenever possible, we should try to match the playfulness and potential of what we bring with what we know about our learners’ interests in the same way we adapt our content for learners’ contexts.
Here are some materials you might consider including in a traveling “event kit” for facilitating constructive, participatory activities that complement activities learners might do online.
- Pens and pencils.
- Colored pencils and markers.
- Different kinds of paper (e.g. lined paper, graph paper, sticky notes, giant sticky notes).
- Paper prototyping templates.
- Paper cups and plates.
- Scissors (though it might be better to borrow or buy these locally depending on how you travel).
- Glue.
- Hot glue.
- Salt dough.
- Pipe cleaners.
- Pom-poms.
- Construction blocks.
- Action figures.
- Mini-figures.
- Stickers.
- Circuit stickers.
- Batteries.
- Electronics kits (e.g. arduino, Red Board, Spark).
- Hole-punchers.
- Brackets.
- Binder clips.
- Small white boards.
- Dry erase markers.
- Board game pieces.
- Dice.
- Index cards.
- Playing cards.
- Modeling clay.
- Googly eyes.
- Rubber bands.
- Balloons.
Look at the differences between prompts like these given after participants watch a video about the internet:
How does information move on the internet?
- On wires.
- On fiberglass cables.
- On multiple pathways around the world.
- On all of the above.
or
Send a person from your group to the materials table. That person can bring back anything they find [from our list of materials above]. Next, work together and use those materials to create a model of how the internet works. After ten minutes, we’ll go from table to table on a “gallery walk” to listen to each group share its thinking about how its model works.
What biases do you see in each prompt? In each set of materials? Which prompt supports learning best? Which one allows for the most diversity of “correct” answers?
What are your takeaways from those prompts? How can they help you revise the assignments in your activities?
Finally, always be on the lookout for materials you can add to your traveling facilitation kit. When you see a new resource that might inspire a new kind of response to one of your favorite prompts, bring it to your learners if you can. Avoid “closed” kits that can only be used to make one thing or that are consumed after a single use. Look for the most reusable and remixable materials possible and err on the side of easily manipulable, open resources that carry more bias towards things like discovery and delight than they do towards privilege.
When you “dogfood” your own work, you try it out to see how it “tastes.” Whenever you design an assignment, try it. This lets you experience the assignment as a learner and produce a model you can share with others. If you get confused, frustrated, or lost doing your own work, change it. Make it more inviting for learners or scrap it all together and begin again with a better idea of what to ask people to do.
Work through the offline assignments in your prototypes, dogfood them to make sure they “work,” and iterate on the ones that need to be clearer, more engaging, or better supported by you and the materials you bring to an event. Invite a few critical friends and readers to dogfood the activities with you and take their feedback into account as you revise your work.
Your goal here is to make sure your assignments support the learning outcomes you want participants to achieve and to make sure your materials support a wide variety of valid outcomes. Work on fun assignments that make sense and that learners can complete several different ways.
Don’t try to find the perfect recipe of materials for each assignment or to anticipate everything your learners might make. Obsessing over details like that at the expense of having a working, open, remixable design is sometimes called “bikeshedding” or “yak shaving.” Don’t invent new biases for yourself about what learners should make; instead, create a framework of learning in which they can approach and demonstrate learning in a variety of ways they choose for themselves.
Once you’ve revised your offline assignments, pick one that seems especially challenging to you.
Next, gather together all the materials you might have in your traveling facilitation kit.
Use a random method like rolling dice to separate those items in 3 groups.
Then, try out your assignment using each set of materials. The idea is to approach the assignment three different ways to build mental and physical models of how your learners might approach the same work.
It’s important for you to see and understand the common characteristics of different products that all demonstrate the same kind of learning. That way, even if you wind up suggesting a few possible paths for learners to take, you can emphasize what their products should show, rather than what materials they should use.