Collection Overview
Connected Learning Equity & Access Teaching Writing

Designing for Connected Learning and Teaching

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The Power of Authenticity: Motivating Students with Meaningful Audiences
By Laura Bradley, Kate Fox, and Jen von Wahlde
Three LRNG Innovator grantees noticed a common thread running through their projects as they all strive to give students authentic audiences for their work; here are their stories.
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Content type
Today’s Reasons Why We Need Students to Write for Authentic Audiences
By Katie McKay
The Choice and Voice team, made up of six elementary teachers from rural Bastrop, Texas and a Teacher Consultant with the Heart of Texas Writing Project, embarked on a year-long journey of deep professional development to create responsive curriculum that grows authentic, enthusiastic, and motivated writers in our rural Title I Kindergarten-3rd grade classrooms.
Read more
Content type
Let 'Em Shine ~ Elevating PBL
By Sandra McLaughlin and Angela Stokes
Energized by recent community debates over local Confederate monuments, The Let ‘Em Shine project invited students to help unite the community by creating a symbolic “monument” that tells a broader story and honors the rich cultural history of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Read more
Content type
Lessons in Linked Learning and Maker Education from the Wonder Workshop
By Paula Mitchell
As a small public school in Oakland, California embarked on a culture shift, these educators moved away from whole-class, lockstep instruction, and toward small-group, personalized learning with differentiated instruction based on students’ interests and needs.
Read more
Content type
Exploring Our Environment Together: Green Is the New Pink
By Ellen Shelton
Green Is the New Pink supported young women in grades 8-11 to tap into their interests through environmental research and problem-solving. They learned citizen science procedures linked to career pathways in environmental science and conservation alongside teachers associated with The University of Mississippi Writing Project, the University of Mississippi Field Station, and the Audubon Society’s Strawberry Plains.
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Content type
Disrupting the Prolonged Silence: Youth Inquiry of the Tulsa Race Massacre
By Shanedra Nowell
The Oklahoma State University Writing Project partnered with the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation to disrupt the prolonged silence by empowering Oklahoma 6-12 grade teachers and students to answer the question, “What can we learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre to make the world a better place?”
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Content type
Reflections on Partnering with a Juvenile Detention Center: The Uncaged Project
By Raemona Taylor
The Teen Center and Studio NPL, a YOUmedia Learning Lab, at Nashville Public Library partnered with educators from the Harold Love School located within Woodland Hills Youth Development Center, a juvenile detention center, that houses incarcerated male youth between the ages of 14-19. The goal of our project was to explore connected learning by connecting in-school and out of school learning in a juvenile detention center through music and video projects designed to be self-reflective stories of how the students define freedom.
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(Re)Defining Youth Space: Adolescents “Reading” a Place
By Molly Buckley-Marudas
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Seize Your Future: Career Passion Projects
By Kelly Guilfoil
Students in Washington State face the rigorous expectation of 24 credits to graduate from high school. For students whose learning is disrupted by trauma or who don’t find relevance in their academic courses, even one failed class puts them at risk of dropping out. This summer program helps students make connections between a dream job and the academic standards they need to graduate.
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Content type
Addressing Gun Violence: Creating Visionaries, Storytellers and Community Activists
By Vision Quilt
Gun violence is an epidemic in the United States but for our students at Lighthouse Community Charter School in East Oakland, it’s an issue affecting youth at a very personal level. In 2019, 35% of seventh graders at Lighthouse knew at least one person who was hurt or killed by gun violence. The curriculum we developed to address this drew on the Expeditionary Learning Education Model, with interdisciplinary lessons in the humanities, math, and the arts. We focused on understanding gun violence and its impact on individuals, communities, and our country.
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Content type
This is Not School: Designing a Storytelling Project for a Community
By Katie Kline
KC Storytellers, formed in 2016, was designed with two goals in mind. First, we want an ongoing opportunity for students from our city’s segregated school districts to write and share stories with each other for the purpose of breaking down divisive barriers, like race, within our community. Second, we want to expand the audience and purpose for personal writing in high school classrooms.
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Content type
Advocacy for Game Design: Classes that Keep Student Interest
By Krystel Theuvenin
Playable Fashion is a program which works with youth who are usually passive users of game technology, to engage them in active, creative and critical practices. This after-school program was created at Eyebeam, is now delivered in-school at the Academy of Innovative Technology (AoIT), and has led to the approval of the first ever Game Design CTE Pathway in NYC.
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12 Posts in this Collection

Summary:

Playable Fashion at the Academy of Innovative Technology in NYC provides tools to teach students game design, technology, and fashion to engage students in active, creative and critical practices that integrate technology with real life. Included are resource links, program development tips, and student feedback.

More often than not, learning is still thought to be a matter of skilling up, remembering facts and figures, and knowing what’s been known and proving you have the skills that “matter.” It is often organized around sorting students (Are they ready for the next grade? For AP? For college? For graduation?) and, in our great information age, tests and data promise to help us see something we still can’t figure out—even with all the tests and data—about access and about equity.

What if we really stopped to redesign what we are doing and approached learning differently? What if we design learning opportunities that center around what brings joy and inspires passion? What if we approached the challenges of access and equity by supporting youth in being agents in their own learning and directly addressing issues important to them and their communities? What would we see, and learn, if we approached learning this way?

Teachers across the country do actually know what this kind of learning looks like and, over the last few years via LRNG Innovators, they have been working to redesign their everyday learning and school spaces to tap into the interests of their students. These interests might be those built from youth’s personal passions or they may be more connected to something political, philosophical or historical in nature that impacts them and their communities (Ito, et al., 2020; Kirshner, Strobel, and Fernández, 2003). Either way, what we can see and learn from across this work is that this powerful learning is doable and that it provides access to opportunities and supports equity for students.

The projects shared here are part of a larger collection of designs and stories that show the possibilities when teachers and students co-design for more creative and connected learning. We invite you to explore them, to tap into inspiration and resources, while also raising questions about how these approaches could work and what they would look like in your context.

Here are a few stories about what it can look like when youth have an opportunity to follow their interests and passions with the support of caring adults – including teachers, peers, families and mentors:

These stories show us what it can look like to support deep learning through project-based design that emerges from youth questions and community inquiries:

In these stories we see teachers working alongside key community partners and tapping into larger resources that helps make the reimagining possible and impactful:

Here we see schools addressing challenging issues in their schools and community contexts by designing alongside youth and engaging them as collaborators:

Read more about LRNG Innovators, founded in 2014 by John Legend’s Show Me Campaign with support from the National Writing Project, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Collective Shift. You can also tap into more teacher resources and stories at The Current.

Hero image from another great LRNG Innovators story: Advocacy for Game Design: Classes that Keep Student Interest, Bronx NY

Up next

Content type
Today’s Reasons Why We Need Students to Write for Authentic Audiences
By Katie McKay
The Choice and Voice team, made up of six elementary teachers from rural Bastrop, Texas and a Teacher Consultant with the Heart of Texas Writing Project, embarked on a year-long journey of deep professional development to create responsive curriculum that grows authentic, enthusiastic, and motivated writers in our rural Title I Kindergarten-3rd grade classrooms.
Read more
Content type
Let 'Em Shine ~ Elevating PBL
By Sandra McLaughlin and Angela Stokes
Energized by recent community debates over local Confederate monuments, The Let ‘Em Shine project invited students to help unite the community by creating a symbolic “monument” that tells a broader story and honors the rich cultural history of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Read more
Content type
Lessons in Linked Learning and Maker Education from the Wonder Workshop
By Paula Mitchell
As a small public school in Oakland, California embarked on a culture shift, these educators moved away from whole-class, lockstep instruction, and toward small-group, personalized learning with differentiated instruction based on students’ interests and needs.
Read more