Designed to Learn by Lindsay Portnoy

Author:Lindsay Portnoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416628279
Publisher: ASCD
Published: 2019-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 5

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Identify and Research: Symptom or Root Cause?

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Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Zora Neale Hurston

When Quest to Learn (Q2L) teacher Andrea Henkel presented the podcast project to her 7th graders in 2014, the prompt was simple: Interview a person in your life who was affected by 2012 Hurricane Sandy or by September 11, 2001. The podcast project was an extension of a unit on understanding and communicating narratives. The school, which is in New York and encompasses grades 6–12, is founded on the philosophy of systems thinking and design, as evidenced by the projects students engage in daily. The podcast project was ripe for cultivating understanding and empathy. Students would consider one of the two events proposed to understand the vastly different experiences of people whose lives were directly affected by those events.

The project was an intensive weeklong immersive experience, which Quest to Learn calls a Boss Level experience. Henkel's goal was to increase students' abilities to listen, talk to others, and synthesize their learning as they came to understand the lived experiences of others. Students interviewed a fellow New Yorker who recounted his experience overcoming a difficult time in his city's history. Others interviewed students and faculty at a school in the Rockaways that had been shut down after Hurricane Sandy. But then news broke about Eric Garner, a black man who died as a result of being held in a chokehold by a policeman during an arrest. Three students, one of whom actually knew one of Garner's children, felt passionate about digging into people's reactions to this event.

Garner's death sparked renewed anger, frustration, and fear in the minds of many New Yorkers. Although several students continued to focus on Hurricane Sandy and September 11, interviewing people who recalled losing their homes because of the storm or seeing posters of missing loved ones in the days after the terrorist attacks, those interviews took a backseat to the breathlessness and injustice these three students felt. Empowered by their new tools, these students worked to collect stories from their neighbors, relatives, and peers about the Garner event. The two original prompts were widened to include a third one, which addressed the root cause of the discomfort that many were feeling in the wake of Garner's death, a discomfort that would give new impetus to the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. Student interviews were cathartic for the interviewees and a deep learning experience for the student interviewers. They also helped students shed light on the distinction between symptoms and root causes of problems facing these learners and their community.

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