description:

This project was initiated by Post-doctoral Fellow Katie Headrick Taylor of the Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy, and Assistant Professor Nathan Phillips of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Education. We were also joined by UIC PhD students Shawndra Allen and Simeko Washington. The purpose of this project is to engage young people in learning how to create and share public stories about places that are important to them using traditional digital media tools (still image, video, audio) complemented by geo-spacial tools.

Reasoning using spacial argumentation is a key 21st century civic literacy.  Not so long ago, geography was a limited tool for reasoning whose strengths lied in showing us how to get from here to there, or how the boundaries of nations and civilizations changed over time.  Today, the convergence of raw data with maps reveal an additional layer; the conditions under which people live on a level of granularity not previously possible.

More information about our process and impact can be found in the Descriptive Report. ¹ Photo documentation can be found here.

contributions:

"We were able to recruit seven students, ages 12-15 from communities in and around Chicago to participate in the program." ² Over the course of five hours on four consecutive Sundays, we engaged them in a number of explorations such as: interviews during a self guided tour of a neighborhood; geo-caching; GPS drawing, and the use of a program called social explorer. "The course concluded with an opportunity for MY PLACE youth to share their work and what they learned with their family members, neighbors, friends, and other attendees."² Aside from generalized deign support my own contribution included:

Logistics:
• Creation and management of our $5000.00 budget.
• Research and procurement of our media equipment.

Curricula and Instruction:
• Unit: Walking Tour of Pilsen - Designed and led walking tour of the Pilsen neighborhood where we stopped at a 5 neighborhood favorites businesses (bakery, bookstore, cafe, etc.) and collected audio interviews with the people that worked there. We also took a single photograph at each location as well. After we returned, we put the audio and image together and shared what we learned.
• Unit: A Brief History of GPS - I have been shocked that education about the history of the technologies we use everyday is nearly nonexistent. In every presentation I give I always ask who invented the World WIde Web and I'd venture only 5% of people know. Ask someone who invented the lightbulb and it's not a problem.
• Unit: How to use iMovie - In particular, using still imagery with an audio overlay. Think Ken Burns, except the first thing you do when you open iMovie is remove the Ken Burns effect.

challenges and lessons:

Community engagement was a struggle. Despite our outreach, most of our participants were connected to a member of the research team and we only had one female participant. The reports from our participants indicate that they had a meaningful experience. I'm confident they left with a new point of view through which to see the world. Naturally, we did not have the time to refine their skills in the actual argumentation. We opened them up to a whole new field of questions, but there is still much work to do in learning how to answer them meaningfully. This last issue will be the focus of our next iteration.

A lesson that was a welcome surprise was that a common complaint amoungst all participants was that there needed to be more people from more areas of the city. Mind you, our students were already from vastly different areas of the city. This isn't a sentiment I hear from adults.

future directions:

Recently, we were awarded a $20,000 grant from the UIC Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) to continue our project. This second iteration, currently in progress, is a design based study of the teaching and learning of spatial argumentation in schools. In partnership with both a middle and high school teacher, we will be exploring measures of curriculum efficacy as well as what constitutes deep learning of evidence based spatial argumentation through media and story telling.

Concurrently, we are seeking funding for a third iteration which will have an emphasis on the use of spatial argumentation from the learning site (be it an in-school or out-of-school learning context) to communicate with community members (e.g., leaders, local stakeholders, elected officials).

1. ^ Please note, I had very little hand in the writing of this report. Of course, I did contribute to the content that allowed the report to be written. I have learned a lot from the two Principle Investigators about writing such things though.
2. ^a b Phillips, N., Taylor, K.H., Sugar, B., Allen, S., Washington, S. "Media for Youth Participatory Learning and Civic Engagement (MY PLACE): An Instructional Design Collaboration with CivicLab" (grant descriptive report, Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago, 2014, Pg. 2)