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Education Reimagined is committed to a bold vision for creating equitable, learner-centered ecosystems. In this Episode, host Karen Pittman talks with two members of the Education Reimagined team – Alin Bennet, Vice President of Practice and Field Advancement, and Olivia Christensen, a member of the Board and a student at Morningside University.
Changing the Odds Remix elevates new ways of thinking, seeing, and acting to build toward equitable learning and development ecosystems by remixing ideas from the top thinkers and doers focused on young people. Sponsored by the Readiness Projects, Changing the Odds Remix is the latest endeavor of Karen Pittman, co-founder of the Forum for Youth Investment. Karen will invite guests each season to engage in provocative, engaging, on-the record exploration of a trending or emergent learning and development topic.
In Season 1, Karen will be joined by youth and adult leaders in the K-12 field to reflect on and remix a podcast, lecture, blog or report they have recently released and push for a deeper perspective through an ecosystems lens. Listeners will engage with powerful stories of excellent, equitable learning happening in schools and communities across the country to help us collectively accelerate the changes needed within and across systems and organizations to create ecosystems that support learning and development.
Karen (00:12):
The team at the Readiness Projects has been actively building our partnership with Education Reimagined. Like us, the Education Reimagined team is committed to creating equitable learner centered ecosystems. In addition to the ongoing conversations we've been having, I've enjoyed listening to and participating in their Learning Out Loud Podcast series. In this episode, I bring in two of the guests from their series to dig in.
Karen (00:36):
Alin Bennett, Vice President of Practice and Field Advancement for Education Reimagined and Education Reimagined Board Member, Olivia Christensen joined me to discuss their recent experiences in both leading and learning in reimagined systems and settings. And they talk about how community-based learning opportunities help promote meaning making and connections for both Olivia and others. So Alin, I really just want to start with you.
Karen (01:01):
Education Reimagined is such a terrific organization and for me in others' language is so important and you all have put out such an incredible amount of powerful language about the vision that you want all of us to be aiming towards. I just want to give you a few minutes to have you explain what that vision is, why you picked the words that you picked and how we are moving towards this idea of a community-based ecosystem that really is both healthy and equitable. So give us a little bit of back and forth on Education Reimagined and what these words are and how you selected them.
Alin Bennett (01:36):
Absolutely and thank you for having me. So our overall vision is Education Reimagined is committed to an inclusive world where every child is loved, they're honored and that they're supported in the midst of a global health crisis and a more expansive awakening to systemic racism. They highlighted the fundamental insufficiencies and inequities in the American education system. So our organization over the past year or so has seen the most powerful and voracious way to transform the education system is through learner-centered community-based equitable ecosystems of learning and development.
Alin Bennett (02:11):
As we talk about language, there are three parts of that vision, learner-centered, equitable and then ecosystem. And so learner-centered is that learning is recognized as the primary goal of the system and not the delivery of education, which is the current paradigm, that every learner is unique, capable and that they are wondrous, that the most powerful learning occurs when a child's interests, passions and aspirations are centered.
Alin Bennett (02:35):
And then by equitable, we see equity as an ideal state where every child is able to reach those unique aspirations and goals and that we correct for historical inequities that have existed during time and that we compensate for them and all the unfair disadvantages and advantages that exist in the current system and in the world. And then ecosystem again, a very broad distinction for us. It's just a community that has a stake in the learning development of every member of said community and has the various assets to organize support and credential of that learning and development.
Karen (03:10):
So this is a really powerful and eloquent way to lay out a whole vision that I think a lot of us agree with. I'm sure a lot of the listener agree with. The question is how do we get to that vision? I think we have a long way to go in understanding what we mean by ecosystems and in particular understanding what the role of systems are in getting us to a full equitable ecosystem. So I want to spend our time together really digging in to that word ecosystem.
Karen (03:41):
And when I think about this pivot that Education Reimagine is made and that all of us are now making because of the multiple pandemics that we have had, it is basically how do we scale these ideas? How do we not leave this to chance? We can map out the way that one young person goes through their environment and finds a lot of quality experiences for learning and development and somehow naturally gets them all knitted together, but that's not equitable.
Karen (04:09):
We know that when communities have the resources and the means to do that, that happens pretty naturally, but we don't want it to just be chance. We actually want to say, what is our responsibility? If all young people are going to meet their potential, then they have to have equitable opportunities to find these environments. So thinking about what it is that systems need to do to get us to this commitment, to have this ecosystem whereby design, when I'm thinking about the ecosystem for a child or the ecosystem for children in this community, it isn't owned by any one system.
Karen (04:44):
I may go to the library, I may go to the park, I may have music lessons, I may participate in my faith organization, I'm on a neighborhood soccer team. All of these are parts of that ecosystem. And the question is, how do we really know what that looks like? How do we even get people a vision of what that looks like? Because it isn't just about I go in the school building and I'm making that school building better. Why are you trying to help us understand what this decentralized picture looks like? And give us a little bit of understanding of the language that you've selected there.
Alin Bennett (05:19):
Yeah, so we'll start at home base and this is the place where a child is known fully. Their interests, their passions, their needs, their gifts is known. And it is where they in partnership with trusting adults and peers in groups are able to navigate a very complex ecosystem of learning and development and are able to access those learning hubs and those field sites. And it is probably one that is the most consistent and structured. Their learning hub opportunities may shift over their 12 plus years of their education.
Alin Bennett (05:56):
This place would be the centralized place where that child is known and is supported in navigating an ecosystem. And if you move up that level to learning hubs and learning hub in a very broad definition of it is any location or community asset that exists that is supporting learning and development. And that could be, like you said, a public library that has an early literacy program where they're helping learner with their phonics and decoding.
Alin Bennett (06:23):
It could be the Girls & Boys Club up the road that has a strong citizenship in civics program. It could be a 4-H that is supporting kids with agricultural learning. It could be the YMCA where they're doing their physical and health programming there. So it is anywhere where that learning is happening is what we would call the learning hub. And then at the top level is the field sites. And the field sites is you can imagine that being where much more of the application side of learning happens.
Alin Bennett (06:53):
So thinking of you would join a community project that is helping explore the impact of pollution on your local river with the local Save The Bay project. And it's a community group project. It could be an internship site where you're pursuing your interest in finance at your local bank. So the bank is a field site. So it is the parts of the community where as you transition out of the learning and development ecosystem where you enter the economic sector and it's that place where the economic sector interfaces with the learning and development ecosystem. And you get to apply much more of that learning and development that you are engaging with in the ecosystem.
Karen (07:32):
Thanks, Alin, that's really helpful to me. But Olivia, I want to get you in this conversation. Talk about this language. Does it make sense to you? How do you use it? Are these distinctions between home bases and learning hubs and field sites, does that help you think about what's in your community and how you navigated it?
Olivia Christensen (07:50):
Definitely. I think when they first presented these ideas to me, it was very hard for me to wrap my brain around. I mean, I got more in to the work and we talked more about it. And definitely with Alin's description, it makes a lot more sense. And I can definitely pinpoint these spots in my Iowa BIG experience.
Karen (08:08):
I'm glad to hear that this language has grown on you to be useful. I want to hear more and have you to start from the beginning and describing Iowa BIG. Before I do that, I just want to ask, now that this language makes sense to you, would you change it in any way if you were describing it to another young person? How would you tell another person what thinking this way sounds like?
Olivia Christensen (08:33):
The way that I would describe it, I definitely like the way home base is described as being the place where the learner is completely understood as a whole. And I think that's one of the biggest things for me that when I made that transition into Iowa BIG was that I actually was considered a whole person by every single one of the faculty members or the mentors. They really truly saw me as a person rather than a statistic or a grade or any of the learning curves that I had to get around as I made that transition. So yeah, home base is definitely where you are considered a whole person.
Karen (09:10):
Let's dig in and find out what Iowa BIG is. Take us from the beginning. What is Iowa BIG?
Olivia Christensen (09:17):
So Iowa BIG is a partial day, not necessarily a program. So they partnered with the schools in the community. And so students would have classes at their regular schools and then they would come to Iowa BIG for a portion of their day. It depended on their schedule and what other classes they had going on and different requirements that they had to meet. But for the portion of the day, they would come to Iowa BIG and they would have courses there.
Olivia Christensen (09:44):
We would meet with a teacher that was on site and they would have a learning session. Every one or two days out of the week, we would meet with them and they would give us a little course work. And then for the other portion of the time that we were there, we would work on projects with community members. So for me, I know I pitched a couple projects that I was really interested in that eventually I didn't necessarily get partners. And so that was also a really cool experience as well, even though those projects weren't very necessarily successful. I learned a lot from them. I learned how to pitch a project. I learned what aspects were necessary for a project to be successful. And so I learned a lot from that.
Karen (10:26):
You've said a couple of things that I want to just come back on that I wanted to turn to Alin to put Iowa BIG in a context for us as we're trying to play with these words. You've used the words teachers and mentor. You've talked about pitching projects. And you also earlier mentioned the fact that for you Iowa BIG was your home base. So first question, were the teachers, public school teachers who were working in Iowa BIG?
Olivia Christensen (10:51):
Teachers isn't really the best word I would say. I think mentors and advisors is more of the term that we used when we were in Iowa BIG because teachers, especially in this environment for me, it actually has a negative connotation because it does feel very much like when I think of a teacher, I think of somebody who's above me and somebody who makes it a point that they are the ones instructing me rather than having a mentor or advisor where they are working alongside you and a lot of the things that you were doing. And so I would say a lot of the people, the staff that worked at Iowa BIG were more mentors. Even I consider them a lot of the time family members. We had very good relationships. They made it a point that they weren't there to be above us, they were there to work with us and they were learning alongside us as well a lot of the time. So yeah, teachers isn't the best term.
Karen (11:46):
Good, thank you for clarifying that. What did you call them? I mean, just now are these their staff, their advisors, their mentors, their friends, their colleagues. Did they have an official term in schools? People have very official terms. Teachers are teachers. What did you call them?
Olivia Christensen (12:02):
Advisors, mentors. So we basically just called them by their names. We didn't really have a specific name for them. They were a faculty member. And that's why I use those words because they're very general and I want to get them as a whole, but I called them by their names. I remember them, every time I'd see them in person, I would call them by their names. They knew me by my name.
Karen (12:24):
I think just the fact that you're having that trouble emphasizes what we mean by home base that by the time you really have a home base, you have a relationship with the people, the adults and the peers in that home base that you know them as individual people and you're calling them by their name. So just the struggle that you're having and the fact that you emphasize, you only have that struggle at Iowa BIG.
Karen (12:46):
You didn't have that struggle in the half day that you were at school. You knew exactly what to call those people. Alin, talk a little bit about this. Help us translate the specific Iowa BIG story into this more general idea of how we really bring this language to life and these distinctions to life in ways that allow for this mixing and matching across locations and across different adults. And then take us into a little bit of how you got into this work in Providence.
Alin Bennett (13:15):
I'd love to transition just by continuing that thread of why it was so difficult for you Olivia to find terminology for such a nuanced and complex role. Try to put the role descriptions of mom on paper, it would be 50 pages long, or your [foreign language 00:13:33] or whatever. It's like that's what advisor was for me in Providence. The role of an advisor was so nuanced when I was an advisor and then later principal at the Met School in Providence. The advisor was that friend. It was also that mentor that was simple like a personal life mentor, life coach.
Alin Bennett (13:52):
They were a curriculum designer because they had to design a curriculum for every single child based on their interests, their passions and what they were navigating in the community. So that role of advisor, which is I have seen as the most common term for that adult, who is the go-to adult in a child's life other than their primary caretakers that is helping that child navigate a complex ecosystem of learning. So I would use advisors at primary home base. And then I usually see advisory as another most common way to describe that home base location.
Alin Bennett (14:26):
And for us at the Met, it did happen at the Met School in some cases, but it also could have been in that child's home. If that child had a specific need that they couldn't come into our school, the advisor went to them. And their home base was literally their home. And when students were engaging in dual enrollment in early college programs, their home base was... They barely left the Community College of Rhode Island Campus. So the advisor went to... Their home base was centered in the quad of Community College of Rhode Island and in their common spaces. So just to elevate that home base could live anywhere and it's wherever you can meet that child and support them the most effectively.
Alin Bennett (15:04):
In regards to the different learning hubs in Providence, there were a number of them that we engaged with. So learners often time left the home base of the advisory at the Met School and engaged with their core content in those environments. And then for the term field site, I would say those were largely manifested in internship programming where the learners would go one or two days a week, full days in an internship that connected to their passion or helped them develop skills that would help them later pursue a passion in their learning journey.
Alin Bennett (15:38):
And the role of the internship host was the mentor. And with partnership with that advisor would help, and their family members would co-create the learning journey for that learner. And so as I engaged with this ecosystem framework with Education Reimagined, I always superimpose it on my experience at the Met School because I've seen it the most closely realized just personally it exists everywhere in a lot of places across the country, I'm sure, but it is the place where I can make it the most concrete for myself.
Alin Bennett (16:14):
And I would say the one major difference or the thing that was missing in that Met framework that I relate to it with is it is only reaching 840 students in Providence. There's 250,000 learners in Providence. And the only way you had access to it is if you went to the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island or Newport, Rhode Island. So that's where I see it as not a fully realized dispersed and distributed ecosystem of learning.
Karen (16:41):
So I want to get us to that place of both how we talk more intentionally about both equity and scale, but I want to come back, Alin, to something that you said and something that's for me has been very helpful about this conversation, which is overlaying the people on top of the places. So when we talk about home base and learning hub and field site, we can imagine that those could be different places. What you all have both done I think to really help me and I think help the listeners is talk about the adults and in particular the adult roles that may or may not match on top of those perfectly.
Karen (17:19):
So you said, well, my home base could be over here and the adult that really helps me with that home base, where I've got the relationship may come to me as opposed to me going to them. So just that conversation about getting specific about how the adults actually fit in and come in and out of home base and the learning hub and the field sites is really important for us to understand. I want to go back, Alin, to your discussion about how critical that advisor role is, which reinforced Olivia's difficulty in describing.
Karen (17:51):
I love that. How do you describe what a mom does? The complexity of that relationship. Alin, I know in the podcast that you did for Education Reimagined, you talked not just about the complexity of the relationship, but the responsibility that comes along with that relationship that if you are the person who's really helping that young person as they go out into the environment, you also have to be the person who's prepared to help them make meaning of that environment when it throws them a curve ball. So can you just talk very briefly about what it takes to be an advisor and how we prepare people for being advisors, whatever professional background they're coming out of?
Alin Bennett (18:30):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the first things we have to acknowledge and come to terms with is that it's not going to take the traditional teacher preparation programming to prepare what this complex and nuance role is of an advisor or a learning facilitator. So it does, it takes a certain aspect of being able to engage with the youth in the community holistically.
Alin Bennett (18:56):
And as I've looked at post-secondary training, I have found youth development coordinating programs better served to do this holistic work with child and communities than teacher preparation programs. So I think it's a marriage of the youth development preparation and the teacher preparation because you need to know the learning science and the brain science and adolescent psychology that is in the teacher preparation programs, but also all of the deep threads of learning that happens in youth development programming credentialing.
Alin Bennett (19:26):
And speaking of credentialing, another thing we'll have to come to terms with is we will have to have a very different relation to what we mean by credentialing and what adults we acknowledge and value in a community that can serve our children to help them learn and grow because again, it could be your mom, it could be your [foreign language 00:19:44] or it could be a formally trained ELA teacher. It could be any of those adults. So we just have to have a much more expansive view of who has the charge of supporting the growth and development of our young people.
Karen (19:56):
Let's jump in on that as we try to get to scale on how we really make sure we do that. So Olivia, you talked about, so in Iowa BIG, there were five or six or seven of these faculty advisors, mentors, et cetera. Were there other people who were playing this role for you outside of Iowa BIG? And what would you have liked them to be able to do more formally, to be acknowledged or supported in that? So Iowa BIG gave you a set of very supportive people, but did you also have other people in other organizations or places in the community that were playing this role for you that you would like to have had integrated into this?
Olivia Christensen (20:33):
Definitely. Actually one of the biggest things that made an impact for me from Iowa BIG was that I didn't really have that much of a support system like that before. I wasn't really much into sports. I wasn't a crazy academic kid. I was just there for the most part. And that's I think why the traditional school system wasn't that well fitted for me because I didn't feel valued in that area. Sorry, it always gets me wound up. But I actually met an Iowa BIG and worked as a partner on one of the projects for Iowa BIG before I started with Iowa BIG through LBA, which is leaders, believers and achievers.
Olivia Christensen (21:13):
It's a program that is in Cedar Rapids. And I just happened to fall into that. And it's a group of people. Well, basically [Al 00:21:22] started this club just to bring students together that weren't necessarily bad in the school system, but just weren't thriving or weren't necessarily feeling their whole selves at school and gave them something outside of school to participate in community and activities and community programs and stuff like that.
Olivia Christensen (21:43):
So I met him just by chance and he brought me to Iowa BIG. And that was the first thing that I had really fallen into that I felt like I had actually found a community of people that cared about me and were giving me opportunities to grow as a person. So that was really the only thing that I had had. I'm not really very religious.
Olivia Christensen (22:04):
And my mom was always very supportive, but she also worked a lot. So she couldn't be there to support me in all of my figuring out who I was as a person. So finding Iowa BIG was that big thing for me. And I think having more involvement from clubs and stuff like that, which actually Al is now part of Iowa BIG and he works very heavily with them.So that was something that warm my heart to see, but that came after I had left. So I think they still are developing things and developing community relationships.
Olivia Christensen (22:34):
And a lot of the time it was actually really hard because the schools didn't really welcome Iowa BIG with open arms. They didn't talk about Iowa BIG very much in the schools. And when they did, it was a negative connotation that came with it because they didn't really understand it. And they thought it was a competition rather than somebody there to help their students feel more welcome in the community and give them more connections throughout the community.
Karen (22:58):
It's been incredibly useful for me to hear you all dig into and struggle with describing how you all in your own journeys have tried to get to this vision that we want to have for all young people in all communities. But let's just deal with what you just touched on Olivia, which is the stark reality that at this point in this country, students are required to go to school. Whatever school means in that community, students are required to go to school.
Karen (23:28):
And that even when we have organizations, small ones like LBA or larger ones like Iowa BIG that are really trying to help organize and optimize connections for young people in their communities, they can be met with resistance by the schools. You used the word competition. So I want your last words to be about really understanding that reality, understanding the vision. What is it that you think schools should be required to do to not only use their resources, fiscal and staff resources, but to really rethink how to guide students time and experiences to ensure that they really are out in this learning ecosystem?
Karen (24:11):
What's the challenge that you would really go back and give to the schools, Olivia that were in Cedar Rapids? And Alin, what's the charge you would give to the other schools in Providence so that they could really get to this goal? What would you say to them now that you have this deeper understanding of where we're going? And there's some momentum behind this. And frankly right now in this times, there is some money for infrastructure building coming into communities. What do you want to say to them in your last minutes?
Olivia Christensen (24:40):
I would just want to say listen to your students. I think that's the biggest thing that's being missed is that this is all for us. This is all... We are the ones going through this. We're the ones that'll get the most from this. And you want us to benefit from this because we are the future of this country, but listen to us.
Karen (24:57):
Alin, your last words.
Alin Bennett (24:58):
Take a hard look at the outcomes that your school has and then cross them with the outcomes that the community that you serve have. And we are seeing outcomes shift in learner profiles and profiles of a graduate shift in the direction of learner-centered. So after you reimagine what your outcomes are for your learners and the community that you're serving, take a real strong look at your system and practices and see in any way those systems and those practices can deliver the outcomes that you're aiming for. My gut tells me and my mind tells me too that 99% of the time, the outcomes you really want for kids could never be accomplished or reached with the standardized and conventional systems and practices that exist right now in public education.
Karen (25:45):
That's terrific. And I'll add my quick last words to that, which is I think what we absolutely have to do is not just listen to students, but put them out into their communities to map where these places are, where learning and development is happening for them so that when we get that assessment that schools absolutely can't do it, we actually can now start to turn to who could.
Karen (26:10):
So what are the takeaways from this discussion that can help us move from being satisfied that we've helped a few young people beat the odds to implementing strategies that will actually change the odds? Education Reimagined's vision and language help us begin to more clearly conceptualize what components are needed for a learning and developing ecosystem to take shape. And even in this framing as Alin and Olivia describe it, the human power of all adults serves as a critical element to the system's success.
Karen (26:38):
What became clear in our conversation though was that these adults come from and take on a wide range of roles beyond just the traditional role of teacher. So as we continue to rebuild from the pandemic and think about the once in a lifetime funding opportunity that will continue to exist for the next two years, it is imperative that our investments consider not just traditional schools, classrooms and teachers, but explore the multiple people, places and possibilities that can serve as a home base, as a learning hub or a field site, even if we don't use those terms. So how might today's conversation help you rethink the next round of funding investments?
Speaker 4 (27:19):
Please visit changingtheoddsremix.com to watch the webinar that sparked today's episode, to hear more of this conversation and to learn more about Education Reimagined. There won't be a new episode of The Remix Podcast next week, but we'll be back on January 5th with episode five, where Karen reflects on and remixes this season's first four episodes.