Who Am I Teaching For?
Last month I was in Chicago to meet my Web Literacy Colleagues for the first time. We’d been video-chatting for months — sharing our projects and our ideas — and this was our first in-person meeting.
I arrived to our meeting awestruck by the collective talent and ingenuity in our group, and I was excited to have unobstructed time with this tiny constellation of people.
I responded strongly to our second day, which was an exercise in Design Thinking. Design Thinking, briefly, is a method by which success is measured by harmonizing a user’s wants/needs, with the range of attributes in the designer’s skill set. I was aware of Design Thinking in the product sense; this methodology, for example, gave us the computer mouse. But I was piqued to re-frame Design Thinking through our collective lens as informal educators.
Given our role as public-facing workers, we kept landing on the same phrase throughout the work session — to meet our patrons on their terms, and to work with them from there.
Through a series of iterative exercises, we defined the needs of our respective patron populations, then structured curriculum for this group. For my part, working in an urban setting with a digital chasm such as ours, CPL serves as the great leveler for access to information, serving the diverse population that binds together the fabric of Cleveland.
These exercises taught me that in practice, my Web Literacy curriculum should be structured for folks who are looking for jobs, who are savvy with smartphones, and who get their news and information primarily from social networks such as Facebook. For most, the smartphone was the first window into the Internet, thus shaping their perception of how the Internet works.
Smartphone skills do not necessarily translate into computer skills, and my job as an educator is to meet my patrons at this intersection, because until things change, most job applications still require basic computer skills. And my patrons are still filling out applications on computers.
My job now is to bask in the glow of a productive work session in Chicago with my peers. I’m taking what I learned and figuring out what that looks like for me and my project here in Cleveland. More on that to come, but in the meantime, here is my favorite part of the trip — C.A.T.S (Creating Active Teaching Spheres)!
