Collaborating Globally on Local Curriculum
When teaching the web, getting things right means listening when you get things wrong
“Does everyone know what we mean by Bingo?”
“Bingo is not played in Kenya.”
Moments like these are my favorite invitations to learn. Since leaving the classroom to work as a curriculum developer at Mozilla, I’ve been challenged to change the way I work. Before, I tried to share what my students and I did in our classroom. Now I try to help other people meet their own personal, local goals for teaching and learning about the web wherever they live.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that I often make mistakes and run into assumptions I have to dismantle and move past so I can be of service to others. Teaching and curriculum development both are often all about failing in ways that help you help others better. Figuring out what works best halfway around the world isn’t a matter of educational authority or expertise at all; it’s an opportunity to listen, to learn, and to give thanks for ideas that you never would have had on your own.
Most recently, I’ve been helping a local curriculum group develop “interventions,” or lesson plans, for teaching web literacy skills to new smartphone users at several different sites in Kenya. Our project managers bring us together to pitch and comment on ideas, ask questions, and find the best local connections for the ideas we want to illustrate in each lesson. We’ve developed 3 interventions together, and the process we use for collaboration has changed dramatically since Intervention 1.
None of us knew each other very well when it came time to draft our first lesson, so, as the person with “curriculum developer” in their job title, I wrote up a rough draft for people to test in the field. Of course it didn’t work very well. The lesson ran too long, covered too much ground, and wasn’t specific enough for users’ needs and questions. Thankfully, facilitators from the curriculum group created space for question and answer sessions throughout the lesson and shared frank feedback about what else their learners needed. In some ways, it sort of worked to have a broad lesson there in front of us to analyze and dissect before we started on a second one. In other ways, it would have been better to provide more wait time before drafting that lesson to normalize more collaboration and conversation before we began.
Between that first and second intervention, our project managers took time to reach out individually to each of us and invite more input and crosstalk on the next planning document. That personal invitation made a huge difference in upping our engagement with one another and each other’s ideas. Sometimes it’s vital to find the people who can help you make connections that aren’t obvious to you. There should never be a blocker to asking for the help you need to help others.
With our strengthened interpersonal connections in place, we went into our second intervention sharing ideas, comments, and suggestions that tightened the focus of the lesson, increased the relevancy of its content, and addressed issues — like signing up for new accounts and creating strong passwords — reflective of local participants interests and needs. Our project managers’ decision to “close the loop” and connect us with one another and our feedback let us co-design a much stronger follow-up experience for developers, facilitators, and learners that made account and password creation meaningful and relevant to local customs and experiences, like playing karom. Closing the loop gave content developers, technologists, and field researchers the chance to appreciate colleagues’ insights and expertise and to grow their professional capacities within the context of a broad community of collaborators studying a common problem.
You can compare and contrast our first two interventions for yourself by following these links:
Our third piece of curriculum is under development and should be ready to share soon. Here are the big ideas I’m keeping in mind as a contributor:
- Expect to get it wrong and count on others to help you get it right.
- Share ideas and keep asking, “How would you do that?”, until there’s consensus that it’s time to draft.
- Balance your contributions with a willingness to be helped into seeing connections that aren’t immediately apparent to you.
- Close the loop: respond thankfully and personally to the feedback you receive, offer feedback when it’s requested, answer questions, and ask your own when it’s right and collegial to do so without taking up all the air in a conversation.
- Otherwise, listen!
These are exactly the kinds of lessons I would have loved to had learned better as a teacher listening my students as colleagues in our classroom. Curriculum development and teaching both play much better as opportunities for open collaboration than as instances of authority or ownership over learning.
Thank you a million times over, Kenya Digital Skills Observatory community!
