Express Yourself

Illustration by iFp Teen Creative Maxwell

Your personality, skill, and style all separate you from someone who has similar aspirations and curiosities. Expressing yourself - figuring out how to do things and show others what you can do - can help you stand out in a crowd. There are many different ways of expressing yourself and standing out.

For this blog, we want to focus on specific aspects of expression. Different learning styles help people express themselves. Cultural learning can teach people to embrace their identity. All of these can have positive effects on others in both the school setting and in life as well. Teachers should encourage students to prepare their work in the best way possible. Students should be proud of the work and feel comfortable with the results.

Identity

Your identity is unique. No matter how similar you think you are to someone else, your identity is still your own. You can express yourself with your identity. No one can define your identity. Your culture, nationality, race, gender, passion, and even your favorite ice cream flavor is part of your identity. Certain parts of your identity can change over time. School plays a major role in our childhood. That is why it is important that our identity is reflected in our schools.

Our educational system is from a period where only one type of person gained an education. It is hard to justify using the same curriculum when today’s student body is more diverse. If we want to make the system more inclusive, we need to understand where the information comes from. Is it the full picture? There is never one side to the story. Even in history books, we usually only get to see one side of the picture. That’s often from the European culture. Schools should include more primary sources by a more diverse set of authors.

Discussing the materials with our classmates will help gain a better understanding of what we read and hear. These discussions would not only help us with communication skills, but it also helps retain information. Such discussions are also a great medium for expression, as it creates a safe environment to let students express their opinions and learn from their peers.

Culture

There are other learning strategies schools should use to promote expression and diversity. One way to integrate culture and create a more inclusive classroom atmosphere would be to include the concept of culturally responsive learning and teaching.

Humans are very complex. Everybody comes from different backgrounds, and culture plays a big role in your development. Culture incorporates family, food, and your environment as well. This can influence what you wear, what you eat, your morals, beliefs, and what language you speak.

Culturally responsive learning and teaching is a method that takes the student’s cultures and identities into account. It is where schools use aspects of everyone’s cultural identity in what they teach.

Some examples of cultural understanding would be avoiding nicknames to children that do not have English names. Having a safe space for students and teachers to discuss their personal cultural practices can create better connections. Students should always feel comfortable with themselves and peers in the classrooms.

Diversity

We want to incorporate and embrace everyone’s differences. Students should be able to see themselves in their learning experiences. Schools should also have school administrators and teachers who they can relate to. The school environment is a part of your identity, after all. If school does not let you freely express yourself, your self-confidence will not be nurtured.

The purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world. If they are not exposed to different people and things around them in school, then embracing diversity outside of school will be more difficult.

Culturally responsive learning and teaching should be implemented more. This will promote cultural understanding and increase cultural representation. We want to raise awareness for cultures that may not be represented in school. We want everybody to be accepting towards others in spite of their differences. As students and teachers become more diverse, schools need to reflect that in our learning.

Teenage Design Team Behind Kendall Square Installation

We were so excited to see this photo in the Boston Globe several weeks ago. The article recognized Kendall Square’s long history of innovation. If you zoom in really close - you might see a few people that you recognize. The picture was taken on June 11th, 2019 as iFp Teens were celebrated for completing the installation of the Looking Glass.

Early in 2017, iFp responded to a grant from the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority for creative interventions that improve Cambridge’s built environment. Over serval months we guided our students through the design process. The Looking Glass is the outcome. Our students will tell you that was the easy part. It would be 18 more months before breaking ground.

The Looking Glass invites visitors to look backward and forward in time. Standing on one side, you can catch a glimpse of Boston and the Longfellow Bridge, provoking memories of Boston in 1793 before the bridge was installed. On the other side, the sculpture frames a view of Cambridge and the future being created by some of the world’s most innovative companies. We love that story. However, we love the back story more so.

Unfortunately, many young people in Cambridge feel disconnected from the innovation community in Kendall. Students have shared with us that they feel invisible walking through Kendall. We explored two Cambridge parks for the installation and knew that Galaxy Park, in the heart of Kendall, would be its home. It was an opportunity to put a stake in the ground for our young people - a 5-foot aluminum stake nonetheless.

The Looking Glass is becoming an iconic symbol in Kendall. Every time we share a picture with our students, they are overjoyed. Even the ones who were not on the original design team smile with glee. They are a part of this legacy as well. Before COVID, we would sometimes hang out there and their smiles were even wider. If there is one place in Kendall that now feels like home - Galaxy Park is it.

Our biggest regret is that the picture below was not memorialized in the installation. Everyone who walks past the Looking Glass should know that it was designed by Cambridge’s next generation of innovators!

Looking Glass Design Team July 2017

Learn more about iFp Studios our Teen-Powered Design & Innovation Studio where teens in collaboration with mentors create positive impact through design, technology and storytelling on student-initiated and client-sponsored projects.

The Case for Curiosity

Illustrated by iFp Teen Creative Lina

Curiosity. The interest to know or learn something. The urge to see things in ways that others might not see. Everyone has the ability to be curious. Those curiosities can lead to new learning experiences.

Curiosity is an important trait for students to have. Curious minds have a drive to understand, often by asking questions. They want to explore all the possibilities that can come out of one idea. For problems that are usually solved with common strategies, curious minds will be able to create solutions that may seem unusual and unheard of, but works as good as the common solutions or even better. Being able to come up with ideas that are outside of the box or adapting similar ideas are what makes curiosity an important trait to have in this increasingly innovative society. Instances of curiosity bring people together. By having a variety of people contribute different ideas for the same solution can create a greater chance of making everyone be heard and finding the best solution.

At Innovators for Purpose, we always use everyone's ideas and curious mindsets to come up with what we want to research and focus on. All of our voices can be heard, and our diverse mindsets are reflected in the projects we create. This helps us to find solutions to problems we want to solve.

Where our curiosity comes from

Our environment affects how curious we are and what we are curious about. Curiosity has no limits, but relevancy helps determine whether it will be important in the long run. We naturally ask questions about our environment, like what we know about the environment we live in. You can be curious about things that you have yet to learn as well. However, in the world that we live in today, it can be easy to access information about the unknown, which can make us lose interest in those curiosities fairly quickly.

Children are born curious, but children are being taught to learn that failure is not an option if you want to be successful. That is not the case. We are all human, and we need to learn that failure is the most common and effective way of learning. This starts with curious minds exploring various answers to problems without knowing whether they will work or not. The best way to encourage curiosity is by giving many opportunities to ask questions and knowing that there is no wrong way to ask questions. As Charles Proteus Steinmetz once said, “There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”

Taking Interest

Curiosity begins with the person taking interest in the topic. They have many questions about the topic, and want to know more about it. In our other blog, “It's Time To Take a Risk,” we mentioned different learning strategies that can be implemented in schools to promote curiosity, collaboration, and spark passion. You can get an interest with the curiosity you feel on a certain topic, which can lead to a passion for the topic. However, your interests can change any time, and you can use that to explore different passions.

Learning experiences are different for everybody, and whatever learning strategy fits you best is what you should follow. While some may like visual learning, others may like it when they can do hands-on projects. This shows us that there are multiple learning styles and schools don’t seem to recognize or take into consideration these multiple learning styles. This makes it difficult for students to figure out their passions.

Our Environment

The environment we live in greatly affects our lives. The spark of curiosity that we get can be influenced by our environments. We can all have curious mindsets, even though the environments we live in can differ from person to person. One person’s environment can be very encouraging to nurture that curiosity, while another person’s environmental setting can oppose the curious mindsets. Both of these people can start with the same amount of curiosity despite the differences. However, how motivated you are to retain that curiosity will decide how much you will progress with your creativity. Curiosity is important for life, as it is the key factor of how you learn, and your environment is where your curiosity is sparked.

The point of school is to teach kids how to learn and what to learn for the benefit of their future. Though this should be the case, it is becoming clearer to us as students that it is more about finding where you place on a ranking system. Since how we do is so important, the pass/fail system becomes a prominent part of our studies, making us care more about doing our classwork the ‘right’ way instead of trying to think outside of the box. Students would not want to ask questions that do not fit the material, as they study for their tests. On the other hand, teachers have to see students based on the number grading system instead of their curious minds. This way of teaching is only beneficial to the industrial times, not accurate for the innovative job opportunities for today, and certainly not engaging for most students.

Why should we care?

Schools have the potential to foster curiosity, help us be creative, and make it engaging - not only for students but for those teaching as well. Letting schools continue with the outdated ways of teaching means that we are keeping students from using school as a way to nurture their curiosity, and that should not happen. We should be improving the school environments, and act on the potential of what schools could be, not just note them down or forget about them until it's too late. Knowing that curiosity involves interests and encouraging environments - not just from others but from ourselves as well - we shouldn’t have to create our own environment that fosters our own creativity.

It's Time to Take a Risk

Illustrated by iFp Mentor Julia

Our current education system has been around for a long time. It was created to teach factory workers to be punctual and do their work the correct way. With so much innovation, potential, and need for creativity going on nowadays, doesn’t that educational system sound like the opposite of what we need?

Illustrated by Teen Creative Ashi

What’s needed

Students, teachers, school administration, and the general public are incorporated into this topic. We all have things we want to have implemented in the educational system, as well as things that we need to be changed.

We, as students, think that the relationships between students and educators is crucial for an engaging learning experience. These relationships are important because it gives students a sense of individuality instead of being a number on a report card. In order for them to show their individuality, they should be given room to demonstrate their creativity. The people who are able to provide that space are the educators, administrators, and anyone else who has the influence to make those crucial decisions. Additionally, educators who build positive relationships with students and teach using the best of their abilities will give students a more enjoyable learning experience.

Standardized tests showcase how well we can memorize and understand information for that grade level. Standardized testing does not focus on the creative mindsets that we need. Students have the potential to show educators and politicians, who are the people that decide what they learn, that they can be creative. Being creative is an important 21st century skill. Our job opportunities are being based around creative thinking.

Teachers are the ones that help us get prepared for life, and teaching is one of the most important professions in the world. What teachers want from their students is respect. We need to appreciate the fact that they are here to teach us and are here for us. The way to solve these types of problems is not to just raise the salaries of educators and administrators. As said before, engagement between students and educators does not just relate to students, but relates to educators as well, as they are the ones that are also in the classrooms, and the leading the engagement.

Because the times are changing, society as we see is changing rapidly. The growth mindset of innovation is becoming more important than the fixed mindset of industrialization. Since the creation of computers and the internet, the whole world is practically at our fingertips. It has gotten significantly easier to acquire information and because of that, the world doesn’t really care about what you know anymore, but what you can do with that knowledge. Our education system today was not set up to teach students how to use information, but only how to make sure it’s credible for a specific assignment. It’s very easy to find information on the internet, but to synthesize the information that we get and to create our own ideas with it is not exactly what schools are focusing on. It should be, if we want to make the way we learn more relevant to our society today.

Illustrated by Teen Creative Ashi

What does it all mean?

While there are many different types of learning styles in the world, we want to first focus on three small but impactful learning strategies/styles to be tried out in our schools. We’ve seen these learning strategies being used in other public schools around the country, and they have had many positive effects and impacts on the schools without tampering too much with the system that already exists.

The socratic seminar is one of the strategies that we would like to implement. We’ve actually experienced something similar to this in our schools, as socratic circles. However, the biggest difference between these two activities was that in the one we wanted to implement, there was significantly less teacher involvement. The students are the ones that are left to discuss what they want and lead the conversation. They get a voice in the conversation instead of being told what to say and answer. Little rulesets like saying ‘I understand’ instead of ‘I agree’ help students learn to have a conversation, respect, and listen to other people and their opinions. Additionally, this gives teachers a way to see students shine in different ways from just standardized testing, writing on paper, or talking to the teacher one on one.

Student-led conferences can make a huge impact in the relationships between students, teachers, and parents. This would be in place of parent-teacher conferences. Students are the ones to lead the conversation around their school life, whereas in a traditional parent-teacher conference, parents and teachers would discuss the students’ grades and behavior without the student themselves being involved or knowing what exactly the student is going through in the class. The students would take time to reflect on the work that they did instead of throwing it away once they get a grade. They will then present some works to the parents and teachers. Not only does it improve the student-parent-teacher relationships, but it improves the way students are able to present their work by using their voices instead of being just on paper or on the screen. Students can focus on what they need to grow and make them present in the conversation about how they do in class.

Passion projects provide an environment for creative thinking while allowing students to develop and work on their own projects. Often, students relate their projects to subjects that are relevant to real world jobs and skills. Passion projects give students one day a week to do an independent project on something they are passionate about without restrictions. By letting them research their passions, they can become experts in what they are interested in, while also finding more passions they can hold on to. During the research step, students take notes about what they are researching. This can also be a record of students actively participating, and these notes can help teachers learn what the students are interested in. The students can then turn this research into presentations, galleries, demonstrations, or videos. This helps students with their presentation skills, while allowing them to express themselves in the way that they are most comfortable. This type of project can be adapted for various learning levels, and is encouraged by other teachers who have tried this method before.

Illustrated by iFp Teen Creative Jeanne

The Next Steps

In order for us to move forward with more innovative teaching styles, we need to remember that it’s good to take risks. The types of tests and grades that we have now either tell us that we pass or fail. This sets up students to always think in grade point averages and not in comprehension. Even if we do everything 100%, it doesn’t mean that we can fully understand what we learned. Life isn’t like that. We need to take risks in life. If we have the fear of failing, then we’ll never be able to learn!