Supporting Youth Voices
This video was prepared for a MIT Media Lab member meeting in June 2020.
The past few months have been very unsettling and upsetting. The COVID pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and disrupted the lives of billions of people around the world, with the greatest hardships falling inequitably on those already facing challenges in their lives. Here in the United States, the horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others have highlighted the inequities, injustices, and systemic racism confronting Black people throughout their lives. At the same time, an accelerating assault on truth and reason and the rule of law raises serious concerns about the very future of democratic society.
These are huge systemic problems. No one person, or research group, or organization is going to solve these problems on their own. But everyone can, and must, find ways to contribute to positive change, to help to build a more just and more equitable future.
In our Lifelong Kindergarten research group, we are hoping to contribute through our efforts to transform learning and education — specifically by supporting young people in developing their voices, collaborating with one another, and expressing themselves creatively. We see young people as agents of change. We are committed to working with them, and with the educators and families who support them, to ensure that they develop the skills, the motivation, and the confidence they’ll need to lead fulfilling lives and to bring about meaningful change in society.
To develop their voices and to reach their full potential, young people need learning environments where they can work on projects, based on their passions, in collaboration with peers, in a playful spirit. To support these 4 P’s of creative learning, our research group developed the Scratch programming language and online community, which has become the world’s largest coding community for children. With Scratch, millions of children around the world are creating and sharing interactive stories, games, and animations. In the process, they are learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for everyone in today’s society.
In the past few months, as the pandemic forced schools to close, the Scratch online community has become busier than ever, with twice as much activity as a year ago. Confined to their homes and isolated from their friends, kids are coming to Scratch to connect and engage. We’ve been working hard to support them. Under the hashtag ScratchAtHome, we’ve been providing a collection of activities to engage children in creative learning experiences at home. We’ve also been running special editions of our online Learning Creative Learning course and our WeScratch workshops, to provide educators with a space for sharing ideas and learning from one another.
We’ve been heartened and inspired by the Scratch projects that young people have created over the past few months, sharing their thoughts and feelings about the pandemic, racial injustice, and other issues on their minds.
For example, a community member with username helloyowuzzup shared a project titled Random Acts of COVID Kindness! The project suggested ways for kids to use Scratch to make gifts for “someone who could use some cheering up.” The community rallied around the project, supporting one another. helloyowuzzup had previously created hundreds of other projects with Scratch, but this was her first Scratch project in three years. In the project, she explained that she was drawn back to Scratch, during the pandemic, by “a desire to create something and a need to spread kindness.” She wrote: “I’ve always been incredibly grateful for the community here that supported me in so many creative endeavors.”
In her use of Scratch, helloyowuzzup was not just learning to code. She was also developing and demonstrating kindness, empathy, collaboration, and creativity. These skills are more important now than ever before. The world needs more kindness, more empathy, more collaboration, more creativity, so that people can understand one another, work together, and develop creative solutions to our most pressing challenges. Scratchers like helloyowuzzup provide us with hope for the future.
In the Lifelong Kindergarten group, equity and empowerment have always been a core part of our mission. We have always tried to provide ALL children, from ALL backgrounds with opportunities to design, create, and express themselves. But we recognize that we need to do more. We need to be pro-actively antiracist in our policies and practices, to be more focused in our efforts to counter systemic injustices and inequities.
We are learning from and building on our work supporting The Clubhouse Network of after-school learning centers, where youth from low-income neighborhoods, predominantly Black and Brown, come together to explore, experiment, and express themselves, with support from staff and mentors from diverse backgrounds. Our PhD student Jaleesa Trapp, herself a former Clubhouse member, has been working with Clubhouse youth and mentors to develop antiracist learning activities and educator guides, to help youth uncover what Jaleesa calls “hidden pathways” — that is, knowledge and skills that youth already possess that can help them in developing expertise in STEM fields.
We’re also expanding our international efforts, to deepen and broaden pathways for creative learning. In Brazil, with support from the Lemann Foundation, we work closely with the Brazilian Creative Learning Network, a grassroots movement that implements playful, creative educational practices in schools and informal learning spaces. The network has reached more than 20,000 educators across Brazil, from communities in major urban centers to villages in the Amazon. More recently, with support from the LEGO Foundation, we have begun collaborating with educators and organizations in South Africa, centering the voices that have historically been furthest from educational justice.
We are saddened and angered by many recent events, but we’re also hopeful about future possibilities. Looking ahead, we are deeply committed to working together with youth and educators to build a more just and equitable future. We can’t imagine anything more important.
