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Announcing “Brokering Youth Pathways: A toolkit for connecting youth to future opportunity”

We’re excited to announce the release of Brokering Youth Pathways: A toolkit for connecting youth to future opportunity. The result of two years of collaborative research and design with members of the Hive NYC Learning Network and with support from the Spencer Foundation, Brokering Youth Pathways was created to share tools and techniques around the youth development practice of “brokering”, or connecting youth to future learning opportunities and resources.

The toolkit shares ways that various out-of-school educators and professionals have approached the challenge of brokering. We provide a framework, practice briefs and reports that focus on a range of issues and challenges related to connecting youth to opportunity.

For instance, many youth development organizations, especially those with a tech focus, are interested in connecting youth to internships. But we know that the tech sector hasn’t always been great at inclusion of youth from disinvested communities, so how can we identify an organization that would be a good internship site? We co-wrote up a brief based on research we did with Scope of Work on this, and share four characteristics to look at in potential internship sites – their mission, staff diversity and cultural competency, a youth development orientation, and a positive workplace “vibe”, as youth in our study called it.

What about if you’re a teaching artist working in a classroom for just a couple of weeks, but want youth to be able to know what kinds of institution and opportunities you might be able to connect them to? Our brief on the topic, based on work with Beam Center, gives tips on doing this, like making sure your staff have an internal understanding of what pathway opportunities your organization can offer.

Do you engage youth in things like one day hack jams or maker events, and want to think about how help them stay engaged in making practices? It’s harder than it sounds. You can read a design case we co-wrote with Mouse about the challenges associated with supporting youth to “keep making” after they leave an event.

We also highlight the results of longitudinal research we conducted with youth, which looked at the phenomenon of “interest signaling”. Interest signalling includes practices, intentional or not, that result in educators and other adults giving youth support around their interests, including brokering new learning experiences. As simple as asking for a business card or as complex as maintaining a social media presence, we highlight interest signaling as a critical factor in brokering future learning, exploring how it plays out for youth with different levels of interest, and different orientations towards help-seeking.

Whether you’re an on-the-ground educator, an organizational leader, a researcher or just someone invested in the question of how youth get connected to learning opportunities and build social capital, we hope you find something useful in this toolkit.

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Hive Research Lab at AERA 2017

Web Rotator

We are so excited to present our latest findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Fri, April 28

8:15 to 10:15am, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Structured Poster Session: CS4All, but Why? Exploring How Different Visions, Motivations, and Ideologies of Computer Science Education Impact Implementation Contexts

Chair: Leigh Ann DeLyser (New York University)

Discussant: Christopher Hoadley (New York University)

10:35am to 12:05pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Structured Poster Session: Crossing Boundaries and Increasing Impact: Lessons From Successful Research-Practice Partnerships

Chair: Matthew Holsapple (Spencer Foundation)

Discussant: Saskia Thompson (MDRC), Ruth Lopez Turley, Rice University

Sat, April 29

10:35am to 12:05pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Structured Poster Session: Innovations in Methods and Approaches to Tracing Youth Pathways Into STEM

Chair: Karen M. Hammerness (American Museum of Natural History)

Discussant: Vera Safa Michalchik (SRI International)

2:45 to 4:15pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Room 221 D

Structured Poster Session: Fostering Networks and Collectives in the Out-of-School Sector: Achieving Equity, Innovation, and Learning Ecosystems Through Large-Scale Collaborations

Chairs: Rafi Santo (Indiana University), Dixie Ching (New York University)

Discussant: Jennifer Russell (Pittsburgh University)

 

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Announcing the Building Youth Pathways in Computer Science and Digital Making (CS-Paths) initiative

CS-Paths site banner 2We are excited to announce and invite participation in the Building Youth Pathways in Computer Science and Digital Making (CS-Paths) initiative, a partnership between Hive Research Lab and the Mozilla Hive New York City Learning Network to support the learning and identity building trajectories of teens engaging in computing  and digital making programs. Through this initiative, supported by the Spencer Foundation, Capital One Investing for Good and the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund, we hope to develop and share best practices to help out-of-school organizations create opportunities for learning computer science and digital media making that span multiple experiences and settings. We see organizations like those in Hive NYC as critical nodes within larger city-wide learning ecosystems around technology and as key actors able to ensure that youth from non-dominant communities thrive in these ecosystems.

With national and local calls to provide meaningful computer science learning experiences to all students, this project aims to address key problems around ensuring equitable access. CS-Paths is included in the White House announcement today that charts progress on President Obama’s Computer Science for All Initiative, alongside incredible work happening across the country, including from many organizations connected the Hive NYC. You can see the full fact sheet that includes our work here.

In this post, we provide some history leading up to this initiative, as well as describe the general activities and intended outcomes of CS-Paths. For New York City-based educators and informal learning organizations who would like to learn more, please consider attending our information session on September 29th, 10am-noon, at MAGNET in downtown Brooklyn.

Continue reading →

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Hive Research Lab at AERA 2016

AERA 2016 bannerWhile the blog has a bit quiet in the past months as the Hive Research Lab team has been engaged in data analysis and writing (including two dissertations!), we’ll be presenting a good bit of what we’ve been working on at the upcoming American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. If you’re coming to the conference, we invite you to check out our sessions (details below). The presentations cover all three of our core research areas, including better understanding the relationships between organizational networks and educational innovation, youth pathways and trajectories around digital making and the design of research-practice partnerships in educational networks.

Saturday April 9th

Enabling Equitable Knowledge Building in Research-Practice Partnerships through Community White Paper Routines

 

Authors: Rafi Santo (Indiana University), Dixie Ching (New York University), Kylie Peppler (Indiana University), Chris Hoadley (New York University)

Time: 4:05-5:35

Structured Poster Session: Strategies for Promoting and Studying Equity in Design-Oriented Research-Practice Partnerships

Chairs: William Penuel (CU-Boulder), Jean Ryoo (Exploratorium), Molly Shea (CU-Boulder)

Location: Convention Center, Level One, Room 102 B

Monday April 11th

“A City-wide Laboratory”: Scaling Digital Learning through Inter-organizational Collaboration in the Hive NYC Learning Network

 

Authors: Rafi Santo (Indiana University), Kylie Peppler (Indiana University), Dixie Ching (New York University), Chris Hoadley (New York University).

Time: 11:45-1:15

Symposium: Scaling Up Digital Media Innovations

Chair: Cynthia Coburn (Northwestern University)

Location: Marriott Marquis, Level Four, Capitol

Tuesday April 12th

Brokering Learning Opportunities within an Out-of-School Network: A Conceptual Model for Supporting Youth Interest-Driven Learning

 

Authors: Dixie Ching (New York University), Rafi Santo (Indiana University),  Chris Hoadley (New York University), Kylie Peppler (Indiana University).

Time: 8:15-9:45

Structured Poster Session: Brokering Future Learning Opportunities: Theoretical and Practical Considerations for Linking Youth to Out-of-School Time Opportunities

Chairs: Denise Nacu (Depaul University), Katie Van Horn (CU-Boulder)

Location: Convention Center, Level One, Room 103 A

Tuesday April 12th

Maybe a Maker Space? How an Out-of-School Center Engaged in Organizational Learning around Maker Education

 

Authors: Rafi Santo (Indiana University), Dixie Ching (New York University), Kylie Peppler (Indiana University), Chris Hoadley (New York University)

Time: 10:35-12:05

Roundtable: Media, Culture and Learning SIG Roundtable – Gaming, Community, and Civic Engagement

Chair: Christopher Carl Blakesley

Location: Convention Center, Level Three, Ballroom A

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[report] Leveraging Hive’s Collective Intelligence To Better Measure Connected Learning

Educators at the January 2015 Hive NYC meet-up brainstorm indicators for Connected Learning

Educators at the January 2015 Hive NYC meet-up brainstorm indicators for Connected Learning

This past winter, Hive Research Lab had the opportunity to collaborate with folks from the Connected Learning Research Network (CLRN) Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning team at the University of Colorado-Boulder and SRI International on a process they were going through to improve a survey instrument around Connected Learning. The team, led by Bill Penuel at CU-Boulder, had been working to figure out how the survey could do two things. First, it aimed to measure which Connected Learning design principles a young person experienced in a program or activity. And second, it sought to understand whether that young person was experiencing valued outcomes in four areas: deepening civic engagement, advancing career goals and goal discovery, increasing academic success and bonding to school, and generally a deepening in satisfaction, fulfillment and joy.Screen Shot 2015-05-18 at 3.30.58 PM

But measurement instruments can only be effective if there’s clarity around what’s being measured –  similar to how curricula can only be judged as effective once there’s a actually good sense of what you’re trying to teach. At the time they came to us, the survey team’s understanding of outcomes of related to Connected Learning was evolving along with the larger network of scholars that were part of the CLRN. As a result, parts of the instrument weren’t working perfectly, particularly some of the questions related to measuring the valued outcomes mentioned above. So the team was iterating on various parts of the survey, figuring out what was and wasn’t working from a measurement standpoint, what wasn’t matching with qualitative findings and grappling how to address those issues.

The challenge was determining what a young person could say or do that would be a good indicator that certain outcomes were happening for them, while also not creating a situation where every young person taking the survey reported that those outcomes are occurring when it’s not possible for that to be the case (a statistical phenomenon called ‘ceiling effects’).

The approach the CLRN team wanted to take to solving this issue and to improving the survey was to bring in the views of both young people and on the ground educators that are closest to these issues. Rather than going back to the literature, or talking more to statisticians and psychometricians, they took a community-oriented and participatory approach – talk directly to educators and young people about what they’ve heard (or said themselves) that have been indicators that things are going well, or not so well, around a particular area for a young person like being civically involved or having a sense of future career goals. The purpose was both to help clarify the outcomes to be measured and to help design new survey items around those outcomes.

Hive educators share out things they're heard from youth that could be indicators around career outcomes

Hive educators share out things they’re heard from youth that could be indicators around career outcomes

So in a series of workshops that Hive Research Lab helped to design and facilitate in early 2015, youth and adults at the Colorado Alliance for Creative Youth Development and educators from Hive NYC shared perspectives and accounts from their experience. From there, the survey development team, and the broader Connected Learning Research Network, built on what was shared in order to generate new, more valid survey items. The team just finished putting touches on a report that goes into more detail about the process of taking a participatory, community-based approach like this. It also includes the outcomes of the workshops: new survey items that educators can use to measure Connected Learning at their sites. You can check it out here.

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Hive Research Lab at the AERA 2015 Annual Meeting

AERA 2015 imageHive Research Lab will be heading to Chicago this week for the American Educational Research Association’s 2015  Annual Meeting.

The theme of the meeting this year is “Toward Justice: Culture, Language and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis”. Check out the official meeting page.

Here’s a run-down of where you can find our work at the conference:

Friday, April 17th

4:05 to 5:35pm, Sheraton, Second Level, Superior A

Symposium: Learning as Transformation: Examining How Youth Author New Learning Pathways/Ecologies in Science, Engineering, and Technology

Chair: Daniel Birmingham, Loyola University Chicago

Presentation: “From Half-Pipe to Full-fillment: Leveraging Interest-Driven Identities as a Strategy for Technology Learning”, Dixie Ching (NYU, presenting author), Rafi Santo (IU), Tal Bar-Zemer (Citylore), Jessica Forsyth (Harold Hunter Foundation), Chris Hoadley (NYU).

 

Saturday, April 18th

Sheraton, Ballroom Level, Sheraton V

Structured Poster Session: New Tools, New Voices: Innovations in Understanding and Analyzing Life-Wide Ecologies for Youth Interest-Driven Learning

Chairs: Kylie Peppler (IU), Chris Hoadley (NYU)

Poster: Affordances of Social Learning Ecology Maps for Examining the Importance of Social Support in the Pursuit of Digital Media Making Activities Dixie Ching, NYU (presenting author); Rafi Santo, IU; Kylie Peppler, IU; Christopher Hoadley, NYU

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[white paper] On-ramps, Lane Changes, Detours and Destinations – New Community-Developed White Paper on Supporting Pathways Through Brokering.

In the summer of 2014, Hive Research Lab facilitated a design charrette focused on supporting youth interest-driven learning trajectories in the Hive. As part of the preparation for the meeting, mRoad signs groupedembers were asked to provide illustrative examples of what successful pathways or trajectories looked like on the ground. From the extraordinarily rich stories that members provided emerged our latest publication, a community-developed white paper entitled: On-ramps, Lane Changes, Detours and Destinations: Building Connected Learning Pathways in Hive NYC through Brokering Future Learning Opportunities.

This paper [pdf, exec sum, handout] makes a strong case for the importance of brokering as a key strategy for supporting youths’ interests in sustained and robust ways. Brokering (1) connects youth to meaningful future learning opportunities including events, programs, internships, individuals, and institutions that will support their ongoing interest-driven learning; and (2) enriches youth social networks with adults and peers that are connected to or have knowledge of future learning opportunities. The paper emphasizes that the Hive NYC community—with its robust social network of educators and professionals—represents an impressive cache of human and social capital that could be leveraged more fully through brokering.

Screen Shot 2015-04-13 at 2.17.17 PMChallenges to brokering are discussed as well, including how a young person’s network orientation or help-seeking orientation may affect her ability to take up and navigate the opportunities brokered by high resource individuals. Several recommendations targeted towards individual organizations and the network are offered as generative starting points for thinking about ways to extend the impact of brokering.

We wish to thank the 70+ individuals (named in the Appendix) who engaged in the collaborative sensemaking discussions, reflective conversations, and feedback-giving that resulted in this paper. We hope this collective effort felt of value to all who participated and that HRL, as facilitators of the process, was able to capture adequately the thinking and expertise of the community.

And of course, we look forward to more conversations and collective knowledge building around this core youth development practice!

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Using a Collaborative Design Research Approach in Hive NYC: Hive Youth Meet-ups Case Study

RafiJuanHive Research Lab seeks to provide value to Hive members through the sharing of formative reports, acting as embedded research partners, and engaging in collaborative design research efforts with members. This post reports on our recent design and evaluation work with the Hive Youth Meet-up team—Juan Rubio from Global Kids, Chris Amos from Carnegie Hall, Brian Cohen from Beam Center, Erica Kermani from Eyebeam, and Zac Rudge from Parks and Recreation Computer Resource Centers. While Juan and Zac have provided wonderful perspectives on various aspects of the project (also see Global Kids’ Chanell Hastings’ recap of the first two meet-up events), here we focus on the design research process itself. Since this was one of the most substantive projects where we’ve applied this process, we wanted to document and reflect on how things played out and how these methods might be applied in other contexts within Hive. Continue reading →

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What me, mentor? Introducing the Connected Mentor Framework for out-of-school environments

CM_logoMentoring is often described in terms of its intensity: the long arc of interactions, the deep bonds that form, the great investments made on both sides. However, when reflecting on the range of experiences that youth have in out-of-school contexts like those found in Hive Learning Networks, one can point to many instances when adults mentor youth in ways that don’t quite fit the traditional model, but are still valuable in their own right. For example: the video game designer hired to run a 7-week program, who not only provided instruction but also created a temporary conversation space to ‘geek out’ about the latest video games and the game design industry itself. Or the fashion designer invited to speak at a youth event about his journey to owning a small business. Couldn’t such “mentoring moments” be just as valuable or consequential to a youth’s learning trajectory as more sustained mentoring?

This is the question that the Chicago-based Mentoring Working Group—Tené Gray, Director of Professional Development at the Digital Youth Network (DYN), Elsa Rodriguez, program manager at Hive Chicago, and Bernadette Sánchez, associate professor at DePaul University—set out to address. Their Connected Mentor site, which launches tomorrow, represents a synthesis of rich research and practical knowledge around mentoring, including a mentoring framework that was developed specifically for the out-of-school context.

As our own on-the-ground observations here in NYC indicate that many ‘fleeting’ interactions between youth and helpful individuals do provide key forms of support contributing to the ongoing pursuit of interest-driven activities, we find this framework provides a valuable foundation to begin teasing apart and further leveraging these relationships. Furthermore, this issue of common language is something we’ve seen as important for any type of coordinated action and so we applaud this effort to develop a powerful and shared language around the practice of mentoring.

Tene and Elsa were kind enough to chat with us about their work and give us some insight into their Connected Mentor Framework. Continue reading →

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HRL@Mozfest2014: A Network of Networks, a Hive of Hives

Global Hive Meetup @ MozFest 2014
Photo by Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network

As we’ve studied Hive NYC, one of the big achievements we’ve seen is what can happen when previously unconnected educational organizations come together from across a given city. Organizations just miles apart geographically may have previously seen themselves as being in different sub-fields, but in Hive created a shared community platform where they can exchange ideas, find the places they have common values and organize around collective goals. One of the biggest value propositions of Hive, as contrasted with, say, broader field-level structures like conferences or online communities, is its locality. From an organizational perspective, it’s an ongoing field-level community located right in the backyard of your city. This core feature, and value, of locality is what sets Hive apart in many ways in an increasingly ‘flat’ virtual world.

And so the idea of having a ‘global’ Hive movement can seem antithetical to this local commitment. The whole point of a Hive is rooted in the idea of educators and organizations being able to physically come together with regularity, easily collaborate and design solutions to local problems – wouldn’t some sort of ‘Hive global’ be missing the point that the model made in the first place?

What I saw at Mozfest made me think about this issue in a new way. It made me realize just how powerful it is to have interaction among the growing number of cities that have Hives, be they full fledged Hive Learning Networks (in NYC, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Toronto), emerging Hive Learning Communities (in Kansas City, Chattanooga, San Francisco-Bay Area, India) or bunches of others in places that are exploring like Denver, Seattle, Vancouver, Manchester, Berlin and elsewhere. What I saw at Mozfest was not some sort of unitary ‘Hive Global’, some singular über-community that subsumes the commitment to local urban community. Rather, the Hive track represented a ‘Hive of Hives’, with Hive members and leaders sharing, discussing and creating solutions to shared problems together, using common language and based in shared values.

Kevin Miklasz, a Hive NYC member, reflected beautifully on the power of Hives coming together in his post about the festival:

It’s like that feeling you have when you meet up with an old friend and pick up right where you left off, as if no time had gone by. Except we had never met before, but we were able to just pick things up and start going anyway. We talked about the same things, using the same language and ideas, and were comfortable using the same kinds of open-ended design-thinking techniques to work through problems.

The rich interactions amongst ‘Hivers’ at Mozfest was what has convinced me of the value of having a ‘network of networks’. People were not only able to talk about issues that were relevant to actors in every city (e.g., what are effective strategies for making learning relevant for youth?), but also for sharing ideas about how a Hive might work, and how it might organize itself (e.g., what are the ways that your Hive designs opportunities for members to share ideas?). The former example, sharing thoughts on common issues like pedagogical approaches, is certainly powerful. But it is also the kind of thing that happens at many conferences and workshops. But that latter issue – on how Hives might facilitate and organize themselves – this is the place where a ‘network of networks’ can act as a context to innovate on the Hive model, to share thoughts on what works and doesn’t when it comes to building a Hive in a city. A Hive of Hives acts as an infrastructure for innovation on the idea of Hive itself.

As more cities explore organizing Hives in their backyards, it will be critical that there is a common space where the ‘theory of Hive’ and the ideas that Hives care about can be discussed, debated, learned from and about, and most importantly, advanced. Just as a local Hive is a great opportunity for educational organizations and actors that are committed to exploring and inventing around ideas of Connected Learning and web literacy, a Hive of Hives presents a critical opportunity for those committed to such city-based models to share knowledge and collectively level up what Hives around the world can be.