Identifying Learning Gaps

Recap:

This week in class we gained a better understanding of our stakeholders’ issues/roadblocks that prevent them from reaching their goals in terms of sustainable learning and identified ways to solve them in a gap bridging exercise. We started off by identifying the current states of our stakeholders (students, community resources, teachers, and parents), then, based on those issues, we identified what the preferred situation would be. After that, we brainstormed different ways we could reach the preferred state from what the current state was.

Challenges and Initial Ideas

At first, we had difficulty narrowing our focus. We hadn’t decided the age group of the students we would be targeting, what types of resources would be shared, or what information would students learn from the resources. After doing individual research and coming together, we decided that we wanted to focus on students aged 15–22 and we would provide them with resources that would help them to understand systems thinking, wicked problems, and community impact/involvement.

The first challenge we identified was students feelings of powerlessness when facing wicked problems. As students within the age group that we want to target, we agreed that, when it came to making an impact on certain societal issues that we felt strongly about, it felt as though we were not in a position to carry out those changes, especially in high school because we lacked the resources and knowledge to know how to tackle those issues. We also felt that high school classes mainly focused on teaching the fundamentals of learning and that students would have difficulty applying the knowledge and skills they are learning in school to present day, societal issues. Taking small actionable steps toward tackling bigger issues was one thing we felt important to incorporate into our design solution because it may make hard to tackle issues seem more manageable. We visualized this as being a student taking 5–10 minutes out of their day to complete a task and then building up from there as they get more invested.

The second issue was incentivizing students to learn about systems thinking and wicked problems. We realized that although a common complaint among students was that the information they were learning in school wasn’t very applicable to present day issues, they may not know about systems thinking and how it could help them better understand world issues. They also might not feel incentivized to learn it because it would take time away from school learning or from extracurricular activities that would help them get into college or jobs. We felt that this would also be a concern for parents as well who want their children to attend college. We felt that by legitimizing our designed solution so that it can be something that students can put on their resume as some form of internship, training, or volunteer experience, then students and parents would see merit in investing time into it.

The third challenge we discovered was that there was a communication gap between students and educators. Educators and school/county administration are the groups involved in building the curriculum for students. Students are stakeholders in their own education, but they have very little say in what topics they learn or the activities they will do to learn them. Giving students more say in what they learn in school could make them feel more involved in their education and want to engage in class more. We also felt that teacher would benefit from resource sharing with other teachers to help build and diversify their lesson plans based on what students want to learn without them having to put in too much effort.