America’s education system was a groundbreaking effort to help a growing nation thrive in the 19th century. Now, 200 years later, the world has changed; the horizon looks drastically different. Collectively, we need to redesign our education system to enable all of our children — and, by extension, our nation — to thrive today and tomorrow. “Horizon Three” or “H3” names the future-ready system we need, one that is grounded in equity serving learners’ individual strengths and needs as well as the common good. This series provides a glimpse of where H3 is already being designed and built. It also includes provocations about how we might fundamentally reimagine learning for the future ahead. You can learn more about the horizons framing here.
By: Josh Schachter and Melinda Englert
The future of education demands bold transformation to meet the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly changing world. Students today are learning in environments shaped by change, where technology evolves at unprecedented speed, reshaping how educators teach and students learn. The Horizon 3 (H3) blog series has been offering a vision and roadmap for education that prepares students to become active learners, adaptive problem-solvers, lifelong learners, and creators. To catalyze this needed transformation, we must reimagine and elevate the role of educators. For our learners to develop the capacities to be future-ready, creative, and adaptable leaders, the educators who guide them must also have authentic opportunities to learn and grow in these ways.
Educator leadership and development are essential for growing thriving learning ecosystems – spaces where learners, educators, and community members co-create real-world learning experiences that tap into the gifts and potential of all involved. Realizing this vision requires deliberate action that fosters educator agency and leadership, alongside a collective commitment to expand the role of our communities in supporting educators and learners.
We know this can be done effectively. For the past ten years, CommunityShare, a non-profit based in Tucson and working nationally, has been connecting the skills, wisdom, and life experiences of community members with educators across regional learning ecosystems. These connections expand educator capacity and access to community knowledge. We have also seen community connections increase educators’ sense of support and being valued by their community, improve educator well-being, activate new ideas and energy, and catalyze a stronger desire to stay in the teaching profession. These collaborations not only create transformative learning experiences for all involved, but also strengthen the foundation of democracy as students, educators, and community members connect, listen, and learn from each other and contribute meaningfully to their communities.
These shifts are guided by CommunityShare’s Community-Engaged Learning Framework.
Photo credit: CommunityShare
Below, we share some examples of the work in action.
For Students to Be Leaders and Innovators, Teachers need to be Leaders and Innovators
Several years ago, we looked around our home community in Tucson, Arizona, and began wondering what it would look like if every community member saw themselves as an educator or mentor. We asked ourselves, “What would happen if we could create pathways for people to share their passions and experiences with each other every day? What kind of learning and relationships might emerge by bringing people together across geographic, socioeconomic and institutional boundaries? If learning transcended school boundaries, what would this make possible for students, educators and communities?”
In 2015 Jackie Nichols, an educator from Sunnyside Unified School District (SUSD), joined us in exploring these questions. She became part of our Educator Advisory Council (EAC), as we felt educators needed to guide the direction of CommunityShare from day one. With Nichols and other educators as key drivers, the EAC evolved into a year-long, peer-led Community of Practice (CoP) focused on co-designing real-world learning experiences with learners and community partners.
Nichols wanted to launch a new STEAM program in her middle school. She wanted to help her students see themselves in STEAM professions and experience careers in hands-on ways.. Nichols, however, recognized that to design an authentic program for today’s careers; that required building capacity and tapping specialized expertise. The CoP helped Nichols expand her definition of who could be an educator; she and her students began collaborating with STEAM community partners – landscape architects, artists, designers, and astronauts – on real-world projects. By building community connections and expertise to design, build, and implement the program, Nichols shared, “I was able to work towards my goal to close the representation gap for girls and Hispanic youth in STEM fields. Community mentors helped my students begin to see themselves in those professions.”
Nichols knew others needed to experience what she had. Inspired by her program’s success, she led the development and facilitation of a district-wide CommunityShare fellowship. Through this fellowship, educators across SUSD could experience a peer-based CoP to grow the mindsets, competencies, and practice to design learner-centered, community-engaged learning experiences. Patricia Switzer, initially a participant in the fellowship, transitioned into a co-facilitator role with Nichols to shift the fellowship toward a shared leadership model. As a fellow, Switzer first experienced the value of community-engaged learning by exploring the idea of “servant leadership” with a class of student council members at her school. They partnered with the Humane Society of Southern Arizona by visiting their shelter and learning about their needs. Students then organized a school-wide family and community service event and workshops to create toys, blankets and sleep items for sheltered pets and raised awareness about the need to support animals locally. Through Nichols’ and Switzer’s leadership, the Fellowship continues to grow and evolve and since its inception has engaged educators representing 86% of schools in SUSD.
Building Social Capital
These community connections not only transform learning; over time they build social capital – the professional and personal network of connections that open doors to opportunities. Social capital is a strong predictor of well-being both for individuals and for communities and has powerful effects on health, happiness, educational and economic success, and child welfare. Social capital, however, is not equitably distributed; young people from the top socioeconomic quartile report nearly double the rate of non-family adults accessible to them compared to young people from the bottom quartile.
To address this challenge, CommunityShare has developed a set of tools and strategies to “democratize” connectedness and access to social capital. Our digital matching platform is a “human library” that connects PreK-12 educators and learners with community partners who offer skills, life experience, and expertise to real-world learning experiences that align with students’ interests and educators’ goals. Community partners—STEM professionals, artists, entrepreneurs, parents, retirees, higher education faculty/students, government staff, and more—create profiles that highlight their individual lived experiences, which expands the talent pool that educators and learners can tap into (as compared to limiting the network to organizations). Inviting community partners to share their gifts in a collective “public cloud” enables educators to tap into partners beyond their direct network and helps facilitate more equitable access to social capital.
Image Credit: CommunityShare
This approach is also more sustainable. Schools often rely on a community engagement coordinator or individual teachers to build connections with the community. What happens to those relationships and knowhow when, as is all too common, that teacher or coordinator leaves the school? There is currently no way to sustain and systematize those connections.
CommunityShare’s platform serves to solve this common problem. Connections don’t live in the mind and smartphone of any individual; the knowledge and relationships are shared in our digital human library, enabling other educators to connect with valuable community partners, organizations, and resources. The platform also recognizes the multidimensional, dynamic nature of people and systems, as it allows people to play both the role of educator and community partner depending on their goals. For example, a school librarian might be looking for a partner but also serve as a partner to an educator. We also recognize that over time people evolve into new roles, so why not design a system that can evolve with them? Learners graduate and become community partners, and partners can become educators, and vice versa.
So what does this approach make possible? We have heard from hundreds of educators, learners, and community partners about the value of making these shifts. By engaging the community, educators like Nova Kline, a CommunityShare fellow in SUSD, have had the opportunity to build capacity to create new learning pathways. “My experience with all of the partners I’ve worked with through CommunityShare has been life-changing because I can still wear the hat of a student, and bring in experts for my students. We can grow together. I’m not overwhelmed by having my students say, ‘We want to learn robotics and gardening.’ CommunityShare has removed barriers for me so that when my students have curious ideas, together, we can create a project and bring in an expert to help support that learning. I think that is one of the best gifts that I can give myself, another educator, and my students. We have an entire community of mentors and leaders out there that are willing to share their talents.”
Photo Credit: CommunityShare
It can be intimidating and overwhelming to build these community connections with everything that’s already on an educator’s plate. Community-engaged projects can start small with a single community member but over time the relationships between educators, learners, and community members can lead to more multifaceted projects.
For example, Nichols’ projects have evolved in complexity over the years. Most recently, she facilitated a multi-tiered STEM mentoring project for 80 middle schoolers. Throughout the year-long project, students were engaged in mapping and addressing green infrastructure inequities in their neighborhoods compared to higher-income neighborhoods. Collaborating with University of Arizona (UA) faculty, learners gained experience using geospatial technology to map access to green infrastructure. Through a multi-tiered approach, UA faculty-mentored graduate students and undergraduates, who mentored high school mentors, who in turn mentored middle schoolers, allowing each participant to interact as both teacher and learner. The learners presented their data and geospatial storymaps to university faculty, school leaders, and statewide, which provided them opportunities to be leaders, change agents, and educators of the broader community.
Photo Credit: CommunityShare
Projects like this both expand community support of educators and create meaningful opportunities for learners to build relationships with caring adults. They enable educators and students to explore passions and interests with practitioners who have real-world experience. They make pathways and careers that were previously unknown seem attainable. As Lexana, a former learner in Nichols’ class, recently shared, “I used to think that engineering, science, and research were for smart people, and then I discovered that I’m smart people.” Lexana is now studying engineering at Arizona State University on a full scholarship.
Through these community-engaged learning experiences, educators have the opportunity to expand beyond traditional roles to serve as facilitators, connectors, and navigators. KnowledgeWorks shares eight future educator roles to help make schools and education systems more adaptable to student needs and more vibrant places for teachers to work. Using the KnowledgeWorks model, Nichols, for example, shared the role of Learning Spark Facilitator with community partners – university faculty, and undergraduate and graduate students. Further, technology, such as CommunityShare’s digital platform, supported the role of Partnership Navigator, by helping Nichols efficiently find and contact interested partners, which enabled her to focus her time and energy on building relationships with those partners.
Revitalizing Education through Community-Engaged Learning
Community-engaged learning is a critical and necessary conduit for revitalizing education. A future-ready system must be grounded in equity, resilient and responsive to change, and a generative force for educators and communities. It necessitates de-siloing school. Community-engaged learning serves all these aims.
When educators are empowered and supported to take risks and collaborate with learners, they bring fresh energy and innovation into their classrooms. This not only attracts high-quality professionals but also inspires them to stay and thrive in their roles. It shifts the focus from merely filling classrooms to creating vibrant spaces led by educators who are driven by purpose and passion.
Switzer reflected on the implications of the journey she’d been on: “Imagine all the educators who left because the creativity and passion of teaching were stifled, and the space students need to explore was taken away. They went somewhere else where their voice was valued, and their hard work felt meaningful. This shift to community-engaged learning and supporting educator agency and autonomy creates that space for joy and wonder – it could mean having highly qualified and passionate teachers across the board.”
Perhaps most importantly, community-engaged learning centers learners but in the context of also stewarding healthy communities. Healthy communities nurture healthy young people. Through place-based, real-world learning experiences our learners and educators are invited to become the leaders and change agents we need to address the local, national, and global challenges we face today and tomorrow. Equally important, as our society increasingly grapples with loneliness, isolation, and division, community-engaged learning creates opportunities for connection, belonging, and shared understanding among young people, educators, and our communities – ingredients essential to growing and nurturing a thriving democracy.
Josh Schachter is the Executive Director and Melinda Englert is the Director of Communications and Marketing at CommunityShare, a national nonprofit that weaves vibrant learning ecosystems that connect educators, students, and community partners to co-create meaningful, rigorous, and relevant real-world learning experiences. We do this work through educator professional learning, a digital “human library “ that matches real-world projects with community partners, as well as a learning ecosystem toolkit and personalized coaching for education organizations.
This blog series is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a non-profit organization accelerating progress towards a future of learning where young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in the Age of AI – as individuals, in careers, in their communities and our democracy. Curation of this series is led by Sujata Bhatt, founder of Incubate Learning, which is focused on reconnecting humans to their love of learning and creating.
The post Catalyzing Educator & Student Agency through Community-Engaged Learning appeared first on Getting Smart.