Mapping Stakeholder Relations
Stakeholders 1.0
In this class, we started by mapping our stakeholders. From there we started answering the following questions. Disclaimer: these are assumptions we need to test.
- In what contexts do/don’t they learn/teach?
Do: one-off sustainability projects and field trips
Don’t: Sustainability not part of the core curriculum (the day to day), local resources not fully utilized (NGOs in the area working with sustainable goals)
- What do/don’t they know about your topic?
Do: know the low-hanging fruit (e.g. reduce, reuse, recycle)
Don’t: know how to effectively plan and implement change or don’t have time and resources
- What does/doesn’t interest them about the topic?
Interest: create a meaningful impact on the world, publicity opportunities, engaged and passionate students able to explore their interests
Dis-interest: difficult large-scale topic to tackle, not interested in spending a lot of time planning classes.
- What does/doesn’t work in current modes of learning about your topic (if they exist)?
Works: engaged hands on learning experiences (intrinsic motivation)
Doesn’t work: telling students what they should do (only extrinsic motivation), theoretical sustainability: thou shall NOT waste
Topic of Exploration
This allowed us to refine our problem statement and the question that we want to explore with this topic.
How might we help educators integrate sustainability into their core curriculum?
Our current hypothesis with why it is hard for teachers to currently implement sustainability into their curriculum is that they don’t have the resources or time to put this into action. So how might we lower the barrier?
We also tried to relate our question to the Sustainable Development Goals. And feel we are touching upon three main goals: Number 4: Quality Education, Number 12: Sustainable consumption & production, and Number 16: Peace, justice, and strong institutions. This helped us ground our initial assumptions of our stakeholders in prior research done by the UN.
Stakeholders 2.0
We also started to make a distinction between main stakeholders and secondary stakeholders. The three main stakeholders we choose to explore are:
- Teachers
- Local resources (businesses, maker spaces, libraries, public areas, etc.)
- School administration
In this mix, we believe we have representation from top-down as well as bottom-up stakeholders. Additionally, adding the local resources into the triangle will ground our project with something tangible and place-based. Through that, we hope to add value because we feel collaboration amongst stakeholders is key to the success of the longevity of the (sustainability) project.
We also explored the question of what school system we wanted to explore. e.g. elementary school, high school, college, or even lifelong learning? We haven’t made a final decision yet in this area, but are also considering who we have access to: we have access to professors at CMU, and Laurel’s mother is an elementary school teacher, so we have a couple of leads. It might also be interesting how we can connect these age groups and share resources intergenerationally.
Hopes and Fears
After deciding on the main stakeholders we started speculating on the hopes and aspirations (green post-its 🟩 ) and fears and concerns (red post-its 🟥 ) of our stakeholders. A couple of highlights per stakeholder include:
Teachers
🟩 Future-proofing education, Teach students relevant skills, enjoy teaching interesting subjects.
🟥 Sustainability is a distraction — derail student's education, or they don’t engage at all, not given recognition (or compensation) for hard work, not able to find the right resources or make the most out of available (local) resources.
School Administration
🟩 Improving their reputation/ranking, cohesive strategy between grades, effective communication between families, faculty, and teachers.
🟥 Losing time/money, upset parents.
Local Resources
🟩 More awareness of spaces — publicity, increased membership (& profit).
🟥 Getting swallowed by the “big guy”, becoming irrelevant.
Takeaways from Dirksen reading
- Extrinsic/intrinsic motivation
- Scaffolding
- Push/pull mechanisms
- Context for learning — what are their past experiences? — not starting from zero, but where are you starting from? — Leverage schema
- Closets
- Feedback loops — make sure the information flows both ways
