 Okay, good afternoon everybody, welcome, welcome, we're so glad to have you here. I'm going to just do a couple of quick introductions and some welcoming remarks and then we're going to get into our program today. My name is Lisa Guernsey. I am the director of the Teaching, Learning and Tech program at New America. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. I'm here with a number of different colleagues from our Washington, D.C. office at New America, Christina Israel, who you'll hear from in a moment. And I'm going to just do already a big shout out to Margaret Streeter, who is our event coordinator, has been in a lot of the behind the scenes for this. So thank you Margaret. She's here from New York. So what we're going to do over the next hour or so is really going to be a lot of fun and also a big experiment for a lot of us. And we're pretty excited about it. At New America, we're a think tank, we're based in a number of different places. I'm from the Washington, D.C. office. We are grappling with these big kind of questions and ideas that are hitting a lot of people across communities around our country right now, which is we're being buffeted by a lot of technological change and a lot of social change for good and bad. And we need to kind of think about and process how to make the most of the ideals of America in terms of liberty and equality and equity, while also recognizing the challenges that these technological and social changes mean to all of us. So as we do that, we've been looking at different communities that are really taking some innovative approaches to how to grapple with these problems. And Pittsburgh here is one of those communities. We are really thrilled this afternoon and tonight to be able to host this event as part of an ongoing series that we'll be doing in the Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania region over the next six months. For this particular event, we're going to be partnering with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and Create Lab at CMU. And their ideas were really the, put the imprint on this, were really the basis for so much of what we'll talk about tonight. So a big thank you to Laura Roup of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the whole team at Create Lab. So what we're doing, and you guys got a taste of that just a minute ago in the earlier, in the room when we were just responding to some prompts, is to try to go deep on what some of the questions are that are facing us today. But to do it in a way that's respectful of lots of different people's ideas and thoughts and backgrounds, and to also recognize more of the voices of our youth, the ideas and the energy that's coming from our students today. So before I introduce Laura, who's going to kind of bring us into the discussion, I want to just do a big shout out and thanks to some of the other partners who are with us here. JB Brown and all of his team from the Lighthouse Project, the YMCA, they'll be doing fantastic. They'll be doing an audio collage and some work later, and so you'll hear a little bit more about that. And we also have Stealtown Entertainment doing the video for tonight's event and also throughout our entire event series. So a huge thanks to Stealtown for being here and for the whole team and what they've been able to put together already for us. And then we also have from the A Plus Schools team block, several of the students there have been involved in some of our discussions about this, and you'll hear from some of the students a little bit later tonight as well. So a big thanks to Johnny and others who are here. So I'm now going to introduce Laura, who is going to get us started. Laura Roup is the director of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and has been a thought leader for us on this entire event and is also a professor, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It has written a book. I want to make sure I get the title of it correct. Sorry, Laura. Drumroll. Doing and making authentic literacies. And this question of what it means to be literate today and how to ensure that our education systems are recognizing the power of technology, but also the pitfalls of it is a big part of the conversation. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Laura, and thank you again. Thank you so much and welcome to the Fannie Edel Falk Laboratory School, which is the lab school for University of Pittsburgh. I really want to thank the folks at Falk School. So Jill Serata and Jeff Susick, who are the leaders of the school, as well as many of the staff. They have been wonderfully warm and welcoming to the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project. For the last five summers, they have hosted us as we offer our summer institute and our teachers as thinkers workshops here at Falk. And we're just so grateful they're willing to share their space with the educators from around the city. We're really excited about this event and all of the partners involved, from New America to the Create Lab to Stealtown Entertainment and the Lighthouse Project. We're just eager to open up new conversations and ask questions about relationships between arts, humanities, and technologies. Our ongoing collaboration with the Create Lab has taught us that if we can be brave enough to dig into unfamiliar topics together across our differences and ground our conversations in inquiry, compassion, authenticity, and agency, we can get glimpses of what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the beloved community. Last year, a study group was put together by the Create Lab and the Writing Project exploring artificial intelligence, ethics, and education. And we asked questions like this, are we training machines to be like humans or humans to be like machines or both? And who is being left out of big data? We learned that just as in politics, we citizens could not expect technologists to sit with the ethical complexities of new technologies without us. So how can we create these spaces to speak and listen and learn across these differences in role, in expertise, in culture, in history, in background, and in power? Today, we're really excited to explore with what Nicole Mira terms critical civic empathy as we consider education's role in the world that is now full of machine learning and artificial intelligence. In her book, Educating for Empathy, Dr. Mira argues that students should be doers and makers. They should be writers. They should be debaters, researchers, and public actors. For Nicole Mira, empathy is not merely kindness or niceness that individuals express. Instead, critical civic empathy begins by looking at social position, power, and privilege of all the parties involved, focusing on ways personal experiences matter in public life, and fostering democratic dialogue and civic action committed to equity and justice. Nicole is an assistant professor of urban teacher education at Rutgers University, and she began her career as an English teacher working in urban schools, including the New York City Schools. Her research focuses on the intersections between critical literacy and civic engagement with urban students and teachers across classroom, community, and digital learning. Nicole will be in dialogue with Christina Ishmael, who is the senior project manager for the New America's Teaching, Learning, and Tech program. And Christina has taught English language learners in Nebraska, has worked for the Nebraska Department of Ed, and served as a K-12 open education fellow at the U.S. Department of Education in the office of Ed Tech. So we're really delighted for this conversation to proceed. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Really? Hi, everyone. Okay, that's better. How are you all doing? Okay, that was good too. All right. Welcome to Pittsburgh. I'm not from here, but it's nice to be here. Actually, neither one of us. I've been falling in love with the city already. It's really beautiful and amazing, and today's a beautiful day. Yeah. That was my first reaction the first time I came, too. Pittsburgh, you've got it going on. So we're delighted to be having a conversation for the next 15 minutes. We could talk for a lot longer. We just met face to face about an hour ago. However, in preparation for this event, I found out that we are connected by many people. And it just goes to show you how small the universe is, as well as how small the world of education is, and that we are all connected. And it's pretty cool if you think about it. So we could go, again, in all sorts of different places, I think. Are we okay? Yeah. Okay. You want to make sure we're safe. There we go. We could go in all sorts of directions, as far as our conversation is concerned, but we will start right away. With something that you wrote, an article called From Digital Consumption to Digital Invention. And it's toward a new critical theory and practice of multiliteracy. Also, I'm referring to notes on my phone. I'm not on Twitter, I promise. Although we both are on Twitter. And there are our handles. So I want to root this in something that I'm really familiar with, which is the U.S. Department of Education has an office, the Office of EdTech, the one that I used to work in. And it is congressionally mandated for them to create something called the National EdTech Plan. And this is a lighthouse document for the country to talk about EdTech. The newest version was put out in 2016, written by a dear friend of mine, Zach Chase. And with the help of educators from all across the country. And they identify five different areas, learning, teaching, leadership, infrastructure and assessment. Those are the five. See, it's testing my knowledge. See if I remember it. But it's really a vision of equity, active use and collaborative leadership to make everywhere all the time learning. And so there's this one graphic that I like to refer to a lot. We have the digital divide, whether we have access from school to home. But there's also this digital use divide, which is we have kids that consume a lot and they're passively using technology. But then we have a call for active use of technology and then identifies some different ways that you can actively use that. So in your article that I referred to, you outlined a critical theory that addresses a similar issue. Can you tell us more about that and why that's important? Sure. And thanks again for having me to New America and to the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project. I'm a writing project fellow. I'm a teacher. That's where I come to this work from. Writing project! Woohoo! And I'll say first, like, I think for many of you that are in the classroom, when I was a teacher, it was kind of the beginning of the adoption of technology on a large scale. It was really fascinating because when I talked to teachers around the country, I found that a lot of times we think of these shiny devices as having some kind of innate magical power over the room. If you bring them into the classroom, they're going to magically transform learning somehow without realizing that they are a tool to be used by the human beings for the purposes that we create. And so I see schools where administrators want to evaluate teachers. The technology has to be out and has to be used. We don't know why or how. Somehow, as long as they're on an iPad, that means that some kind of learning is happening. And as teachers, we know that that's not necessarily true. So I wanted to get more into what is this difference between passive and active use and maybe go even further than that. So I wrote this article with my dear mentor, Ernest Morel, who's a giant in the field of literacy studies. Many of us know him. And we've been thinking for years now about how this article came out in 1996 by this group called the New London Group. It was a group of researchers that got together in 1996 and think about where technology was then. And they said, you know what? We've got to change the way we think about literacy. We've got to change the way we think about learning. And it's been over 20 years now. And we wanted to come back and say, well, how should our theory of learning change knowing what we know now about technology? And I think we would argue that, yes, most use of technology that is being promoted by tech companies is around engagement on a passive basis because that's what benefits the stats and what creates profit for technology companies. And I think a lot of times the talk that we have around how do we use technology, how can we move more active, sometimes doesn't get to that critical space of saying, well, who's dictating the terms of how we use these platforms. Twitter and the folks that create Twitter, even if I think that I am composing original and amazing tweets, my expression is being couched within and kind of determined by a corporate platform. And they are benefiting from my communication and my speech. How do we help young people understand that and take more agency and more critique over the ways that their data and their voice are being used so that they can then kind of flip the script in the system. So in the article we talk about how, yes, we do need critical consumption of media. We need students to understand where media comes from, who owns it, who owns their data, what privacy looks like. Yes, we need them to also create, like creating their own media. But then we need to move forward into the steps of distribution of their own media. How do we make sure youth voices are being heard across the public sphere, not simply in the ways that capitalistic companies want their voices to be heard, but sometimes in protest or in agitation against how they're treated. And then the final step we try to argue for is digital invention. So how would young people be able to start hacking, creating new forms of media that speak to their own interests as opposed to the interests of the folks that are creating a lot of the technology on the big data scale. So for example, if folks aren't familiar with, it used to be called Youth Radio, and now it's called YR Media out of Oakland, California. It's an amazing nonprofit and I know there's nonprofits all over the country doing this kind of great work where young people are creating apps of their own. These apps can start from very personal kind of service learning space where like I know young people have created apps about finding someone to sit within the cafeteria. And that's great. And then there's apps around like how to help you record interactions with the police and that's getting a lot more into the kind of critical kind of social action that I'm really interested in. And then there's young people looking at gentrification in their communities and they're using technology to reimagine how they would want the storefronts to be transformed into community spaces that would benefit them and their families. So I think encouraging young people to not simply interact with media on the terms of those adults that create it for them that treat them as objects and rather young people becoming the subjects who can take what is being given to them and then kind of flipping it and remixing it and transforming it for their own purposes to speak out against injustice and to speak for their communities. That's what I'm really passionate about. Can you all tell? We talked about it for longer than 15 minutes. Yes. It's fine. I have the little bangles too. So that actually lends itself to my next question which is really rooted in your book Educating for Empathy. And I've been studying with this since I read it and it's come up in a lot of conversations since then with educators and non-educators. I'm like, hey, have you heard of this whole thing, critical civic empathy? And they're like, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. But I was also just with teachers in Cleveland over the past three days and there's this big push for SEL. SEL this, SEL that adds to emotional learning and we want kids to develop their non-cognitive skills and we want them to be, or the soft skills, whatever you may call it. But it's not necessarily buzzwordy. It's buzzwordy now, but it's something that we've always done as educators is that we've helped cultivate that in our students. Tell us a little bit, well I have the definition, but tell us in your words how you define this. Sure. And I don't think it's a mistake that our interest in social emotional learning is re-peaking at a time when we're worried about cyberbullying, the hate speech online, echo chambers, the negative divisive rhetoric that's happened in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, I don't think it's a mistake because it tends to be that whenever there are social problems we turn to the schools, we turn to educators to solve those problems. We're not simply there, we never were there for simply academic learning. We've always been there for more than that. And so what I've been curious about for a long time, I've always found empathy to be a really fascinating and really powerful characteristic. Like what an amazing thing to try to get inside the mind or try to see the world for the eyes of people who are different than us. And I really do still believe that that is the most powerful competency that we have to try to get past the division that we see in society. I think it's one of our only hopes, is empathy. But I get a little worried when in popular culture, empathy is kind of portrayed as this kind of tolerance or niceness or there's that expression, put yourself in someone else's shoes, which is great, but when I think about my shoes, I wear very simple shoes. And I don't think it's so simple as taking on or putting off a pair of shoes. For me as a cisgender, heterosexual, white, middle class woman, to imagine the world through the eyes of someone who is experiencing police brutality or is from a minoritized community in this country, it takes a lot of work to do that well. And if it's not, if you don't do that work, it just stays at a surface level. And we just kind of talk about how we're all human beings, which is true. At some level, we are all global citizens. We are all part of the human family. But we know that that's not the way that life is experienced in our social context. There are issues of power. There are issues of privilege. There are systemic inequities in our society. So it's not simply so simple as to say, let's all just get along. We need to go a little deeper to understand why power manifests itself in certain ways. And if I truly want to understand what life is like through another person's perspective, it takes a lot of personal excavation of my own privilege. It takes true dialogue and communication. It takes moving past a lot of the surface narratives that we have. My idea of critical civic empathy is just the critical part is understanding power, privilege, inequity, how that plays out in democracy. And the civic part is if we have empathy but we don't use it to change how we act in the world to create a better democracy. If it doesn't change how we vote or how we treat our neighbors or how we solve problems in our communities, then what's the point of empathy if we're not using it to create a more just society? So the book is basically about trying to figure out in educational spaces with young people how can we use literacy to foster not just surface level empathy but a more critical and civic form of empathy. And that's, I think, it's an aspirational goal. I don't think I'm there. I don't think any of us, we're all trying to kind of move towards that in our practice as much as possible. Yeah. So this is not on our questions, but this is, it just spurred something. So I have a really good friend who is a digital media teacher in St. Louis. We've kind of talked about this a little bit and was teaching in a high school setting when Ferguson happened. And he empowered his students, mostly students of color to start to ask questions and dig into this. And they leveraged the power of the digital media that they were learning about and then applied that in specific projects and then got out there and started asking questions of their community and of their neighborhoods. Do you have any other examples that you can share of similar projects or what you're seeing across the country when it comes to like that act of use of technology? So it's marrying the technology but also with this idea of the critical civic empathy. Yeah. And that's where I see kind of speaking to one of the chalk talks about like what is digital citizenship? I see that kind of project is what I would want digital citizenship curricula to be focused on whereas I think a lot of digital citizenship curriculum starts from a place of risk and danger and protection. Don't share your password. I see posts from folks like show my students how many times this will get shared around the world and how nothing you put on the internet is safe, which I don't discount how important that is. There are serious issues to talk about there, but if that's the limit of it, there's so much we're missing of how technology can create those connections across perspectives like we've never been able to do before. So there's stories like that. I'm involved in a project right now with the National Writing Project. I've got six National Writing Project teachers from across the country from Alaska to Philadelphia who have been using digital platforms to connect their students to talk about the civic issues that matter to them across their different contexts. So it turns out we've got over 300 students involved in this project. The issue that they wanted to talk about the most right now that affects them, not surprisingly, is gun issues. But it's been really fascinating to see how that issue is playing out differently based on the social context that they're coming from, the way that students in Philadelphia are experiencing guns is very different than the students who are in Anchorage, Alaska, or in Aurora, Colorado, or in Detroit, Michigan, or in Dallas, Texas. And so it's been fascinating for the young people to think about what their civic values are and how their perspectives might change on how they have dialogue with folks who are different from them in an educational and loving and pedagogical space, which I think is really powerful. But the flip side of it is that I often talk to just as many teachers who want to do this kind of work, but because of the rhetoric we have around fear or closed off, we need schools to be protected spaces. They don't want them to go online to ask questions or to do research about controversial issues because they don't know how administrators are going to react or family members are going to react or community. So there's many teachers and students that want to talk about this stuff, but they need the support of the administrators and the communities around them to support them to do this. And to remember that public education was meant to be a space to see different ideas, not for us to be clients who only get what we want and can reject what we don't want. And I've also seen that when young people speak up and often do research, adults want them to be civically engaged until they start asking questions that adults feel uncomfortable about and then they don't want them to be civically engaged anymore. So there are students in Philadelphia. We can stop for that. There are students in Philadelphia. If you need something as small as like there's a ski trip that would happen in the school district of Philadelphia for the school every year. It was canceled, students were given no information why, the teachers were given no information why, and they were journalism students who had just learned about the Freedom of Information Act. And so this is an authentic use of learning. They wanted to go and ask why did this happen, why is the school that's across the city that has a lot more resources and more affluent students, why do they keep their trip and we don't, and literally like their principal or they were getting phone calls like, stop your kids from doing this. And I think that leads to a lot of questions for me of how much do we really want young people's voices to be heard. And I think that kind of agitation and interrogation of the system is what I think is more important than just participating in the structures we already have, which is what I get worried about with a lot of traditional curriculum is just kind of like do better with what we give you, except that this is the system there is and work within that system as opposed to appreciating when young people really want to start shaking things up. Yeah. I'm keeping an eye on time. We've got two minutes. You know, no big deal. We are in a city that is dealing with, well you have a lot of technology companies. The theme of this event is around automation, artificial intelligence. I was at ISTI, the International Society for Technology and Education, their annual conference in Philly a few weeks ago, and their opening keynote speaker was a futurist, and he looked like a magician, just so you know. And I also want that title. That's really made up. It's awesome. He talked a lot about AI and education. There were also a lot of sessions, how to use Amazon Echo in a classroom, and I have some serious concerns over that. I know that we are challenged by this. Do you have any thoughts on that in one minute? This kind of speaks to the chalk talk that was out there. If companies have a profit imperative, how does that intersect with the public good? How do we have oversight over the way that these things are being used? I get very nervous around the amount of millions of dollars that are being spent around the idea of 21st century skills and 21st century learning, when we don't have a clear definition of what that term actually means, or what skills that students need in the 21st century that are any different than what they needed in the 20th or 19th century. If what we truly have always been after is authentic student voice, action, empathy, those are eternal skills, and they're not going to be bought by any kind of tool. It's something that is about the pedagogy and the connection. And I don't know if it needs to be, I do think that technology companies need to like, hire national writing providers to kind of tell them what's what and kind of speak to the idea, like we need educators in these rooms where decisions are being made, as opposed to them being seen as the buyers of what technology companies are selling. How do we actually move into a more critical friends kind of partnership where there could be some real difficult dialogue? So my friends Zach and I had a conversation about the terminology critical friends. Those are the friends that you don't want to invite to brunch. So we called them provocateurs. So provoking thought and asking those tough questions. I really appreciate your thoughts on that. Also, what do you think about, I'm asking another question, what do you think of the idea that teachers can be replaced by robots and the automation? I have lots of thoughts on that. I feel like it's almost, it's watching the failures that happen that we try these experiments are almost finally making some people open their eyes to the fact that teaching is a human complex endeavor that is, cannot never be mechanized, it can never be digitized. And I think that it shouldn't have to come to these kinds of experiments for us to understand that. But the idea that any tool that needs to be used has to be taken into account with students, individual identities, their cultural identities, the social context in which we're in, the intersection between teachers' beliefs and practices and larger structures that they're working in, like none of this exists in isolation and none of it can all be accounted for by algorithms. We are more complex than an algorithm. And I think that I get worried. But at the same time I worry because our public schooling system as we see through accountability system, standardized testing, is trying to also, it almost seems like they're trying to converge because if the only point that we care about is transmission of isolated facts and knowledge, then technology probably can do some of that. And if all we want is students to regurgitate factual information on a test and we want to use AI to grade student writing and make writing kind of a dead, mechanized, kind of computerized process, and in some ways that could work. And that's even more scary to me is if we don't recognize it coming, we're going to lose more of our agency in the process and we'll see more and more generations of students after No Child Left Behind who are coming out without the kinds of critical thinking and creative skills that we know that they need to navigate a complex changing world that has problems that we don't even know the kinds of skills we're going to need to tackle them yet. That kind of learning is not going to help us to figure out what to do with those challenges. Yeah. Okay. So the next part of this is that Nicole has provided us with three big questions or the big three. It's in kind of small print, sorry. And I'm not going to read it to you. So you all have the chance to read that. But I would love for you to take in these three questions and then give it a few moments to think about it but then turn and talk to a neighbor nearby. What are your initial thoughts, reactions, or kind of questions that you might have around these big three? We're going to go into a facilitated Q&A kind of session after this but we wanted to now put these three questions in your hands for the next two moments. Would you like me to read them? Are you good? Okay. Turn and talk. Find a neighbor. My mic's stolen. Is it yellow now? Do you know how to turn them? Hi. God. Why don't you take your mic? So, you can talk about it. Why don't you take it off? Or mute it? They don't have the time. I'll be back in a minute. Good night. So, what is this? I don't know. You never did a meeting. There might still be one for sure. Ask him your questions. God. Our God. At least you're not mild. At least you're not mild. It's only 5.30. Well, after the talk, I'm muted. After the talk, you don't need anything else. So, why did they turn them off? I just put them on mute. Because they're talking out there. They don't want it? No, that was mild. They don't want anyone to hear what they're talking about. She didn't understand. You got a bar in the cereal bar in there? Only one was in there. Okay. You got a cereal bar in there? Heck, yeah. Anyone ever went in the room? We have a few folks that had some questions that were kind of keeping you up to date while we were having our conversation there. Excuse me, can I leave this? Can you like, turn it on? No, we have a couple right now. I was going to ask if you want to be able to stay up there. I know what the other people are talking about. I know what he and I are talking about. But I don't know what the other people are talking about. Hi. Hi. How are you? I'm with Team Block and A Plus Schools. So one of the questions that I've had was, sorry. You're good. I didn't have a question. I was writing questions, but it was more of just like, repeat the question. Why don't like adults like kids like, like go off on their own and do what they want. And I actually kind of had to answer that too. You can't tell us. Yeah, tell it. Yeah. I think it goes back to what you were saying about how students and teachers and sometimes the administration are afraid to step up and try to like advocate for themselves and their students. I think right now that is a big problem because I know within my school, like a lot of the teachers are like, well, we can't do that because there's that in a third. And even now in my class, we were talking about how not every student has the same needs and it's about equity. But the tutor told me, well, I'm not being paid enough to be a teacher. I'm a tutor. And I feel like that was also a problem. I feel like people within a system shouldn't always settle for the job that they have. They should want to work towards like having the position where you get to structure the way this program is because you will sit there and complain about how the structure is right. But then you won't get up and do something about it. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone snap for that. Thank you, Johnny. Roberta, where are you? There you are. All right. Roberta, you have history in early childhood. Did anything resonate with you from that lens? Are you going to ask or have other thoughts? Well, actually a dozen things. We're resonating that we were talking about. But one of my struggles is that we often in the early years especially end up talking about the devices or the material instead of the pedagogy. Like how would we use this? And one of the questions I have is how do we get that conversation centered back on what is the learning that occurs rather than what's the newest and latest? I don't know if you have thoughts about that. And then I have a second part of that. I think that's really powerful. And I often get, there's another part of, we didn't get to talk about youth research. We talked a little bit about young people developing questions about things they care about. And then using technology to go out and maybe interview elders in their community, collect data and represent it the way they want to represent it to tell their story. And every time we talk about this work I've mostly done it with middle and high school students. So people come up to me and say that's great and all but elementary school kids can't do this. We know that they can. We know that they can. We know that young people understand what's going on around them and have questions about what's going on around them from a very young age. And oftentimes they are more like justice warriors and more idealistic in their solutions than we are because we lose that as we get older sadly. So I find a lot of hope in the youngest among us to have that kind of equity lens. And I feel like I can give stories of like first grade teachers that have been able to engage in kind of inquiry work and writing to journalists who are writing stories about things going on in their town and utilizing technology for a meaningful purpose. And so I think some of it starts with encouraging teachers to make sure that they are fully committed to what the potential is of their students and what they're capable of. And then not thinking, and I'm always telling teachers to think about the pedagogical goal and then figure out what technology you need to make that goal happen. And it might just be paper and pencil. Connected learning is not always about technology. It's about using what you need to use to accomplish the goal that you have. But it is true that technology can then connect young people across time and space in ways that we've never experienced before. So I think there are often powerful things that can be done. But I think it's really, I mean it gets back to what Johnny was saying about like, do we truly believe that young people care about like these issues and do we truly believe in what they can do? And we say that we do in rhetoric and we don't often back that up with our actions. And if we're truly going to, I think it takes a little stepping back about what our purpose is and how we really feel about young people in this country and how powerful they are and how their voices need to be heard. They don't need to be empowered. They just need to be given the microphone. And so I think that helps even with the youngest students for me is to get back to that. Like what do I want my students to explore? And then like I don't care what this range of new cool apps are. Yeah. Only so much as it's going to help me accomplish a goal that I know my students need. That kind of thing. Yeah. That's a great, great idea. Can I squeeze another little bit? Sure. Yeah. Cool. And this has to do how we change attitudes about what learning is. Because my frustration in the preschools is that so often people become enamored with what I call animated worksheets. At a time when we wouldn't give children pencil paper worksheets as a teaching tool. And yet somehow the belief that these animated worksheets are going to communicate, are going to help children learn. And so the frustration I find is how to get people to understand that it has to be developmentally appropriate when we introduce it. And that I loved your examples. There are ways that we can use technology in developmentally appropriate ways. And it's not worksheets. So any other ideas about that? Yeah. Any engagement is not learning. They're connected. But they're not exactly the same thing. I worry that too many of the programs are about being like shiny and moving things around. And so the kids are visually drawn in. But are they following up with a true theory of learning that's leading them to somewhere important? And if not, then it's just shiny for no reason, with no depth. And so that's why I worry about sometimes that's not needed for the kinds of deep and sustained conversations that need to be had. There are some ways, again, it's the same kind of thing we've been talking about. There are ways that the tools can be harnessed by us, but we're letting them harness us right now. We're letting the tools harness us instead of us harnessing them. I just have to do a shameless plug for my director, Lisa Guernsey, and her book, Tap, Click, Read, as well. A great resource, if you are not familiar with this, to talk more about technology in the early years. So that is something that you may find useful. Tap, click, read. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The author's right here. Now we have a high school ELA teacher. Amy, where are you? From one high school ELA teacher to another. That is Nicole. Yay. Hi. I'm Amy from Annie. I teach at Weber Area High School, and I'm here with the writing project as well. And I just love your work. I love what you're doing. And I really appreciate the opportunity that these did. The digital platforms offer us to foster empathy, inquiry, responsiveness. And I'm interested in hearing, or if you could speak a little more to what you're doing with those six writing projects, schools, especially with regards to overcoming the barriers to get these different communities to communicate. I teach in a pretty homogenous district, and I think something like this would be invaluable. Yeah. I mean, we're in the process, in September, October, we are putting resources onto the current, which is the National Writing Project's network of sharing resources. So everything that we're doing in the 3D project, we call it 3D, Digital Democratic Dialogue Project. And so all of the teachers are going to be publishing blogs, and we're going to be putting all of our curriculum resources online for all teachers to use. So that's coming soon as soon as we can. This project was originally funded by the Spencer Foundation, which is important to say, because they were able to give us some seed money to allow me to visit all six of the communities around the country, and for us to explore the kinds of platforms that we could use for people to connect. And we did have, we have some very homogenous kind of communities, and then we have much more diverse communities. We have communities that we're all about learning from others. We have others that were much more closed, and the administrators were having a hard time letting students get online and talk. But I really can't, I mean, I wish I could, we're going to talk more over time about the amazing kind of like moments of growth and moments of change where young people were exposed to someone outside of themselves. I don't want to tell the whole story for her, but Janelle Bence, who's an amazing writing project fellow in Texas, has a story about students of hers who, they have a shooting club at their school, speaks to a little bit about different cultures around guns in different places. And the student just kind of couldn't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion than he did about guns. Like he'd learned from his family, learned from his community, and I think we need to acknowledge that sometimes there could be a process of loss or pain in kind of hearing a perspective that's different than what you've been taught as part of your family identity and your community. That's a really serious learning that has to do with music and grief. He spoke to a student in Philadelphia who had a friend who was a victim of gun violence, and after that, just having a Zoom call and being able to see a student who was different than him and talk through that issue, he left that conversation kind of thinking like, wow, how was I able to have this view this whole time and never know there could be someone out there like my age and just like me in some ways that has such a different experience. And does it change their entire political philosophy in a moment? No. But I think those moments of critical civic empathy, those moments of, you know, we know that developmentally, teenagers are very much, you know, kind of narcissistic and in their own worlds in some ways, but at the same time also craving to reach out. And as much as we have residential segregation and school segregation in this country, it's never going to be enough to just do these programs in high schools because there's oftentimes too much, like we're saying, homogeneity. So sometimes digital technology is one of the best tools we have to break out of the bubbles that we've been put into by years and years of redlining and other policies. So I really have a lot of hope for the ways that technology can be used in transformative ways for that kind of connection. And the ways that teachers, we met every month, it became a teacher inquiry group that really became a group of healing and a group of how to navigate restrictive policies that are often trying to turn teachers off from having these hard conversations. The teachers feel like this is the real work. Like we're seeing, this is like the real human work of helping young people to become citizens. It's really powerful. It's really cool. Awesome. I can't wait to read about this. And lastly, we have Jason from the STEM coding lab. Hello. My name is Jason. I'm the program director of the STEM coding lab and I looked at the third prompt and also something that you said about elementary students because that's where we focus and they very much can do it. We just did it. So we ran an HTML camp for kids going into fourth and kids going into fifth grade where that they learned HTML and CSS skills while also developing a webpage about the neighborhood that they live in. Pittsburgh is a very much community of neighborhoods and the students that we worked with at Summer Dreamers Academy typically are living in the neighborhoods that are saw the news as gang violence and drugs and violence all together and we wanted to give them a voice and show the positive parts of their neighborhoods and I think that is they did a really nice job with it. Lisa was there she can attest to that but the I just want to see ask where do you see by the time they get to fifth grade what is an ideal amount of knowledge they need in your opinion and it can vary from suburban school to an urban school to this they have very little resources but in an ideal world in an urban setting by fifth grade what should they be do you think they should be really their skill level should be in terms of skill level being able to integrate tech into their learning. Well again I think it goes to the authentic purpose. I think young people in fifth grade I wouldn't even put it in terms of I guess I wouldn't even think of the tech first I think what do I think fifth graders are capable of I think fifth graders are capable of really complex analysis of their identities of their communities of what adults think they're capable of I think they can represent that in writing I think they can represent that with their voices I think they can collaborate and so I think that if those are the things I believe that fifth graders can do then I think that it's only like the capability of teaching them how to use a certain tool like kids can pick that up like nothing that's not even the problem the problem is whether we ever give them the chance to develop the actual skills of collaboration if we let them raise their voices if we let them fail an experiment and we get beyond the test prep curriculum for them to actually have those cycles of inquiry then I think they can master any of the tools that would allow you to do that online like I really believe that it's not about the like do they have to be coding I always say coding for what like I think coding is important but not as an isolated skill if it's just a neoliberal like you should learn these tech skills because it'll help you get a job for me that's not enough like what does it mean and also it's going to keep them in the mode of just being the objects of the tech rather than true subjects of truly understanding the ins and outs of who's created it, how it works so for me I'm not as concerned if a fifth grader in one school knows how to code and a fifth grader in another school doesn't but if they both know how to raise their voices and engage community around inquiry then I'm happy because the tech stuff can come like we many of us are all learning different I still don't know how to use certain things and I'm still learning but if you have an authentic and meaningful purpose to use it they will learn it I don't, you can't mic drop a laugh but I think that was it right there like boom and we can go to the reception okay, no actually we do have about 10 minutes to open it up to anyone now on the floor, yes we've got a question already I just want to say because a lot of this feels a little odd because well I did go to Harrisburg last month to learn about computer science I do have in Pennsylvania a framework for computer science that is pretty good that includes areas that I didn't think were computer science and so I think when you're saying once I mean to me when you that comment you just made was kind of weird because I do think it matters I mean we do have standards in a framework and I think it's important to stay within that and there's a a PhD person there who is very nerdy and is working on putting every little piece of linked possible curriculum support with it so I think if people could just commit to reading that framework and to working within it that would be a really good first step that's what me as a not a computer science teacher thought was what I got out of that just actually reading the framework and working within it and then we don't you know it isn't okay if somebody in the suburbs can code and then somebody in a higher poverty school doesn't have that skill set that's not okay okay so if we work with our framework and work with our state standards I think that would really help thanks thank you I've got really good wait time you're all thinking of that reception really? really? yep you got one back there? oh Michelle's got the mic I really think about empathy because really I feel like it's actually actionable and that makes it compassion because it's just not enough to feel something but what does it mean to actually be in practice but I'm really interested in what are the new narratives that unite us? the American dream is an old story doesn't work but what is the thing that is the aspirational thing that we should reach for as a people so when we think about what will be the nature of work what will be the nature of being together we're really doing this right we're going to remake how we are in society together will our neighborhoods be the same will we be in discourse differently for really doing it so what are this may be prefigurative work but what are the new narratives that should be driving us kind of our north star in this work that's funny I was just talking to Christina about some of the deep philosophical challenges that the students have been grappling with in this 3D project this is one of the last design cycles that we did was imagining a civic future and we wanted them to be as crazy and creative as they wanted to be some of them developed civic superheroes and developed origin stories for them and just went off crazy not even having to worry about whether it was realistic or not just what they imagined the civic future to be and what kind of skills we're going to need to live with each other in the community in the future and part of me gets really sad because I think young people more than ever have a really like I think I'm really interested in speculative like science fiction right now after futurism young people are looking to their future and they see that our world is being destroyed they're worried about climate change they're worried about continued inequity they're worried about gun violence they're worried about polarization and when they look to the future they have a pretty in some ways pessimistic view of what adults are willing to do to support them on their journey but at the same time they also have hope and where that hope comes from is not necessarily based in any nation state or even global citizens it's really about like kind of an indigenous idea of like being in relation with each other like where they find hope is in those little moments like the little moment that a student had of having that breakthrough about he was in relation for a moment with a student another human being unlike himself and I think what they see when they get worried about the bigness of the system and whether there's hope on big scales they start to look to the only hope being us being in better relation with each other and with the land than we have been before and that's as far as I've been able to get I'm still like processing what that means because in some ways it breaks my heart but in other ways it kind of makes me believe that young people are the most you know they're the most powerful and most social justice warriors that I could imagine and so I feel like there has to be something there about us breaking down some of the traditional hierarchies of how we and like you're saying how neighborhoods are constructed how workplaces are constructed to be more in relation with each other and what that I don't know what that means yet in practice but that's where that's where the young people are leading us I think we were talking while you all were having your chance to talk the I in New America we have a lot of millennials I qualify as an elder millennial we also discussed that that we both qualify as elder millennials and there's that blame that's kind of put on millennials like those millennials like actually all the millennials that I've worked with are pretty amazing and are pretty like well in tune with things like inequities and social justice and when you talk about some of these students that you've worked with and within the projects I'm also not really worried about Gen Z like our current generation of students that we have right now they yeah if we continue to cultivate this as well and not letting the automation or the AI or the technologies kind of take over but that we have the power to kind of help drive that hey students in the room hey student hi hey you have a room full of like educators in the room you have any thoughts for us no really totally put you on the spot okay any other questions Greg you had your hand yeah so I'm we have a room full of educators and educators are among the if not most trusted source of support and information for parents families and caregivers and in our brief conversation we were talking about the challenge as parents navigating all of this because there's a danger that a parent either hears technology can solve everything or technology bad right and it's obviously much more nuanced than and we benefit significantly in states across the country with frameworks like you described in terms of work that state departments of education are doing in all sorts of pure learning networks like the western Pennsylvania writing project and dozens of others and educators are wonderfully probably 12 steps ahead in terms of thinking about this as compared to parents who are just you know the parents in the room appreciate we're just navigating 10,000 things so as educators where are you turning for very practical resources practical support so that when that parent comes in with that email with that phone call in the few minutes during open house like tell me the five places I can turn okay I turn to common sense where else can I turn how are you navigating that in support for parents the teachers in my study are relating to their their parents since I'm not working with I'm working with undergraduates now instead of K-12 and I feel like in a lot of ways teachers need to and my teachers have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves across all these different sites so that they can speak because the people that it's about relationships of trust like they can send their parents to certain websites but that's not really going to assuage the fears that a parent has who knows their child and if there's a level of trust there and they know that the teacher is looking out for the best interests and how they use technology in their schools that's why I think all the parents have been happy to be part of this weird study where they're getting their kids online to talk across platforms we've had like you know we've had to do some things about privacy and keep ourselves on closed social networks in some ways because of issues of privacy working in technology in schools but we've used all of those as teaching moments and explained all of it in detail so that they don't feel like they're in the dark or that they're just kind of being like just trust us like I don't want it to be just trust us we know what we're doing but I also don't want it to be like look at X, Y, and Z I think it has to be a more relational contextual thing that's what I've seen working so far and that also puts pressure on teachers because obviously we don't have time in our days to like go and like become experts about every like in and out of screen time and so that's where I think there needs to be kind of combined inquiry within school districts before we spend like there's millions of dollars being spent and curriculum frameworks are being transformed and I think if that was done in a more research practice partnership kind of way in which all stakeholders were brought to a table to talk through it together I think everyone would feel a lot more comfortable with the results that came about so I think that's where some of the research is going next is about like truly collaborative research so that everyone feels like they're getting what they need out of the conversation Educator, does it want to help answer Greg's question too? Like what are some of the the sources that you go to? I think a hand, Amy I found a helpful way to go about this is to teach the students and have them create a resource to share with their parents so I've had them after we've gone over everything from echo chambers and the filter bubble and you know different different kinds of media and I have them create a project to share with the parents and that's been helpful in one way creation when we broke up into groups we talked a little bit about just how a lot of students don't really understand that they're consumers of this technology and how we don't really see the technology as something that companies are creating for us and we see it more as like open source and so on is doing this and so it must not be a big deal sort of thing and I think that that's an interesting point when it comes to teachers just sort of opening the world view and sort of giving the knowledge that it exists and even if students continue to sort of have a passive view of that that technology at least they know a little bit more about it so I don't know if you have any other points about how to break away from the not knowing about consumers sort of work of the product and tech with students that's a great point and I think that that's what I think I think what you just said is what should be the foundation of digital citizenship curriculum but not in a hey look how scary this is that Instagram is like using neuropsychiatric data to make you engage more and do more clicks and how messed up that is even though that's one part of it but like to understand that information but then to understand what your agency can be within that as a young person I know that there are problematic things about Facebook and I'm still on Facebook for reasons about former students finding me there even though I'm really upset about the network I'm upset about how data is used I understand that I'm engaging in problematic practices at the same time and we all are in some ways in some ways we've gotten to a place where we can't fully extricate ourselves from this we're not all totally off the grid but if I position you as a young person to say I want to give you this information again the media and digital ecosystem in which you're operating and then you get to make choices about what you feel comfortable with or that as long as you want to move forward but you know about this and you know what your agency is in that then I feel like that's a positive way of doing digital citizenship instead of just saying oh my god it's so scary there's so much risk you all just shouldn't be on it because we know that youth culture like there's exciting stuff happening online we don't need to treat it as a total demon or as a savior it's much more you know it's in the middle of what you're saying is the kind of stuff that we need I'm going to stand up so you can see me all the way in the back here hi I know this is maybe too big of a question but I'm going to ask it anyways which is there's for so long and this feels like like a century of American educational theory has had such great ideas about what we should be doing in schools and in fact like John Dewey and all this incredible stuff that we still haven't implemented because we keep on getting steamrolled by power, money, material interests so how do you sort of try to build towards systemic change while you're also doing the granular work with the individual students how do you try to manage those two things because yeah I don't know that's the main question for me yeah that's our life's work everybody in this room are educators that's what everyone's I feel like yeah that's Wednesday that's true I do feel like one element of it is around teacher education which is the space I'm in now I felt a lot of mixed emotions I was really there are some days when you're in academic world and you're writing or you're this doesn't even matter like I should be in front of 150 kids every day at least then you know you're making an impact even on individual lives but I do feel like there are different levels of impact and we all can create impact in the spaces that we're in and I think teacher education is a really important part of it because if we can influence the next generation of teacher educators to think about technology differently then they all go out and each have their 150 kids then we could start building some momentum and if we create true partnerships where we don't just send student teachers into schools without like consulting just using the placement schools as kind of like dumping grounds instead of actually treating them as true partners then we could actually have partners working with universities and with student teachers and creating a virtuous cycle of like inquiry and exploration together I feel like that's where I see pockets of hope where it feels like it's still going to be moving against the grain but you need to see examples of success to like or of struggle to inspire you and so I feel like I mean you could ask any educator in the room there's those moments of depends on what scale you're looking on and if we're always looking at the top scale then it can really really easy to feel powerless and cynical or but there are different scales at which we could work where I feel like if we keep on like harnessing more of those stories we could start moving it makes me feel like that's where I get hope from to keep doing it so you said something right there as far as the stories are concerned going from the classroom to the state level in my own experience whenever I got to the state I was like oh they have the state board of education I didn't know anything about that as a classroom teacher imagine if I would have brought my students to these meetings on a monthly basis you have these in your own you know in your own states as well so that the power of story can actually of from students yes not just us as the educators telling the story but with students and from students can actually help with this policy as well I think we have time for one more how do we help at tech companies keep humanities in front even when they're talking to investors when they say that's not the best thing for kids just I know it might make me the most money but it's not the best thing for children or we shouldn't go that rapidly because that needs time to be tested with children and families instead of let's roll it out there buddy got it that's a million dollar question I feel like I don't know if the companies can do it without oversight from the public and from educators and from families and communities because I don't know I know there are like socially just entrepreneurs that are trying to kind of work within that space I feel like we need to know more about them because I often don't know like who I could be supporting with the past by-cots going depending on who we support I just feel like the public it has to be like an oversight mechanism because I know that ed tech companies are going to be looking for profit to survive to their stakeholders above all investors are looking for profit so even if you have a good intentions you're going to get kind of swept up and so I'd be curious to talk to more ed tech folks about how they try to navigate that challenge yeah comment okay so I think that going back to what almost everyone said that she you said something like what is okay for kids and I think exposing children to those type of things like modern like pace could work but I also think that at the end of the day students don't care like how y'all are recording this right now unless an educator takes this to the classroom how many students are going to pay attention to this like I know me personally yes I would pay attention because this is something that I'm interested in but if you're not doing something interesting to grab the students attention then no one will care and I know like I think within social media especially if you want to use that type of platform within a classroom I think you should make sure students use it for what they want to do like there's somebody that I know and he's all about sports he plays sports he's a football player but he's like a very horrible person and I think also teaching like social competence within the classroom is very important too because at the end of the day people aren't smart because of what they know or what they learn they're smart because of their own experiences and because of basic common sense so I think you shouldn't just worry about like what you put out there I think you should make sure like it goes back to equity you can make sure that it can't think of the word make sure that it's make sure every student will understand it to who that student is I like what you're saying about audience right because if this event was truly meant to like get young people engaged it would have to have been designed in a whole different way right and it would have been designed with young people at the forefront because this kind of event is not going to be something that's engaging right like just like talking heads so yeah if we're going to flip it that means we need to start with what young people are excited and interested in like you're saying and build from there so I think that's an important way to speak maybe even to the ed tech companies right like youth panels but instead of just doing focus groups but making them kind of more like critical friends like we keep saying okay thank you all so much for your time because we are among educators who love writing and prompt and reflecting before that's not working now okay well it's not working we're going to transition to the reception Lisa is going to say a few words but I want you to think about the I notice I wonder and what if those three prompts as you go into the reception and have some of your conversations I noticed I wonder and what if those are three really helpful prompts processing some of this information that you just heard Lisa sorry there we go