January 22, 2019 by Rafi Santo - 0 comments

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.

September 14, 2016 by Dixie - 0 comments

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

We 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 →

April 13, 2015 by Dixie - 2 Comments

[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, members 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.

Challenges 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!

February 25, 2015 by Dixie - 3 Comments

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

Hive 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 →

December 1, 2014 by Dixie - 1 Comment

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

Mentoring 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 →

April 24, 2014 by Dixie - 2 Comments

[brief] Youth Trajectories Interim Brief #2: Mapping Social Learning Ecologies of Youth

We are excited to share our latest research report, the fourth in a series of interim briefs related to our Networked Innovation and Youth Trajectories strands of research. As we’ve mentioned before, HRL is committed to sharing, early and often, data and findings that we hope will feel relevant and useful to the Hive community.

In this brief, we discuss our recent work exploring how adults and peers have supported youth who participate in Hive NYC-affiliated activities. Drawing from interviews conducted with our case study youth (read more about them in our first Youth Trajectories brief), we articulate a set of 16 supportive roles—encompassing Material, Knowledge Building, Emotional, Brokering and Institutional forms of support—that our youth identified as being important to them.

We also describe how we developed visualizations of these supportive roles and the adults and peers behind them, forming maps of something we call a young person’s social learning ecology (SLE). These SLE maps may be used to better understand and characterize aspects of a young person’s SLE such as redundancy of support and diversity of sources that we hypothesize may be consequential to sustained engagement in certain activities. Also, comparing a youth’s SLE map at different time periods demonstrates the dynamic nature of social learning ecologies generally and how certain providers (and thus forms of support) may be more transient in a young person’s life than others. Overall, we hope the findings summarized here may provide the Hive community with some useful insights into how a young person’s social learning ecology, with Hive educators as a critical aspect of it, may intersect with one’s ability to engage in interest-related pursuits.

As always, we welcome any feedback, thoughts or questions you may have about this or any aspect of our work!

April 1, 2014 by Dixie - 1 Comment

Hive Research Lab at the AERA 2014 Annual Meeting

Hive Research Lab will be heading to Philly this week for the American Educational Research Association’s 2014 Annual Meeting.

We’re very excited to ‘debut’ our work on Youth Trajectories and Networked Innovation to the educational research community (and for some reason, despite the hundreds of presentation slots, we ended up getting triple-booked on Friday!)

The theme of the meeting this year is “The Power of Education Research for Innovation in Practice and Policy.” Check out the official meeting page, which also includes an online and printable program.

Here’s a run-down of our presentations and posters:

Friday, April 4

8:15 to 9:45am, Convention Center, 200 Level, Hall E
Poster Session 3
Poster: “‘Both R&D and Retail’: Hive NYC Learning Network as Infrastructure for Learning Innovation,” Rafi Santo, IU (presenting author); Dixie Ching, NYU; Kylie Pepper, IU; Christopher Hoadley, NYU

10:35am to 12:05pm, Marriott, Fifth Level, Grand Ballroom H
Symposium: Pathways, Trajectories, Ecologies, Oh My! Bridging Theories and Methods for Studying Youth Learning Lives
Chairs: Kylie Peppler, IU; Christopher Hoadley, NYU
Discussant: Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Presentations:

“Leveraging Youths’ Repertories of Practice: Toward Connected and Consequential Learning,” Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of Colorado-Boulder
“Trajectories of Family Learning Through Making,” Lisa Brahms, University of Pittsburgh
“Trajectories of Science Learning Activation in Scientists and Engineers,” Lynette Jacobs-Priebe, University of Pittsburgh
“Connected Play: Making Visible Trajectories of Participation,” Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania; Deborah A. Fields, Utah State University
“Connecting Opportunity: Identifying and Mapping Supportive Roles for Sustaining Interest-Driven Pursuits,” Dixie Ching, NYU (presenting author); Rafi Santo, IU; Christopher Hoadley, NYU; Kylie Peppler, IU

10:35am to 12:05pm, Convention Center, 100 Level, 122A
Invited Session: Innovations in Learning in the Digital Age
Chair: Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Presentation: “Both R&D and Retail’: Hive NYC Learning Network as Infrastructure for Learning Innovation,” Rafi Santo, IU (presenting author); Dixie Ching, NYU; Kylie Peppler, IU; Christopher Hoadley, NYU

Other participants: GlassLab, Jessica Lindl, Institute of Play; iCivics. Jeff Curley, iCivics; Open Badges, Erin Knight, Mozilla Foundation; Educurious, L. Michael Golden, Educurious.

Sunday, April 6
4:05 to 5:35pm, Marriott, Fourth Level, Franklin 6
Symposium: Space and Technologies for Learning in Schools, Museums, and Workplaces: Recent Approaches in Design-Based Research
Presentation: “Designing Academic Technology-Rich Spaces to Facilitate Cross-Departmental Interactions,” Christopher Hoadley, NYU; Matt Lucas, NYU

Monday, April 7
12:25 to 1:55pm, Marriott, Fourth Level, Franklin 13
Symposium: Learning in the Making: Studying, Understanding, and Designing Makerspaces
Discussant: Christopher Hoadley, NYU [substituting for Kylie Peppler]

February 24, 2014 by Dixie - 3 Comments

[brief] Youth Trajectories Interim Brief #1 – Introduction to Case Portraits of Hive Youth

As we mentioned in a previous post, we’re currently working on sharing interim briefs related to the Lab’s two research areas: supporting youth trajectories and pathways, and developing the Hive as a context for networked innovation. These briefs are based on early observations and conceptualizations and are designed to provide the Hive NYC community with ongoing frameworks, findings and recommendations as part of a broader effort to connect current research and emerging findings to issues of practical importance.

This is the first brief related to the YT strand and it generally serves as an introduction to our amazing “Hive Five,” a group of youth who have agreed to let us talk to them on a regular basis about their developing interests and the ways they are engaging with them. This brief provides an overview of how they discovered and got involved in Hive programs, what their experiences in these program were like, and what happened after the program ended. In future briefs, as we continue to describe the moves they are making to pursue their passions, we will pay particular attention to the ways they are leveraging their ‘social learning ecology’ (i.e, their circle of family adults, non-family adults and fellow peers) in order to do so.

We hope our briefs are useful to the Hive community and welcome any feedback to make them even more helpful in the future. We also would like to take this opportunity to thank all the Hive members who sat down with us and allowed us into their program spaces in order to help us round out the picture. Also, of course, it is such a privilege to be able to spend time with these incredible young people and to be let into a part of their lives. We hope you enjoy learning about (and from) them as much as we do.

February 13, 2014 by Dixie - 3 Comments

Introducing our Jumpstart series! Jumpstarting Hive Pop-ups, Hack Jams and Maker Parties

As research partners of Hive NYC, we are invested in linking research to practice in order to address the network goals of supporting youth interest-driven pathways and strengthening Hive as a context for networked innovation. As part of that effect, we aim to regularly experiment with different kinds of knowledge production and sharing with the Hive NYC community. Here, we’re excited to introduce one of these experiments: HRL Jumpstarts, a series of tip sheets that we hope capture “good practices” of interest to the Hive NYC community. In essence, HRL Jumpstarts combine our fieldwork observations of Hive members doing their work and encountering challenges with our understanding of what existing literature recommends in order to come up with “conjectures,” or best guesses, as to what might support the work of the Hive.

Our first Jumpstart, available here and by clicking the image to the right, addresses Hive one-day events, which include Pop-Ups, Hack Jams and Maker Parties, with suggestions for both the host of the event as well as participants who are manning tables or stations. Much appreciation to the über-talented Jess Klein for creating such a playful visual template for us. We hope the community finds the suggestions we pulled together useful — we welcome any and all feedback! Also, as we’ll be releasing other Jumpstarts in the future, please tell us what you think could use a good jump start!

Our process

As ‘working open’ is a value that we share with the Hive NYC network overall, below we provide a recap of the process we underwent to create this Jumpstart.

In early November, Rafi Santo and I brainstormed some guidelines for what could be included in Jumpstarts, based on articles we’ve read, things we’ve observed occurring in the Hive and conversations we’ve had with Hive members. The primary guideline was that each suggestion should support our two research strands: Supporting youth interest-driven learning pathways and furthering innovation in the Hive network. Our first brainstorm of potential ways to support day-long events produced far too many candidates, and in the end we decided that 16 suggestions was probably a good target number to shoot for. After several rounds of revisions, we landed on a reasonable first draft for feedback from the Hive community.

At the November Hive community meet-up at WNET, we debuted our “Cheat Sheet” (the original framing we’d come up with) to Hive members and the responses overall seemed to indicate that this would be a useful resource (phew!). We passed out hardcopies and had members meet in small groups to “hack” the cheat sheet for about 10 minutes, then we all came back together for a whole group discussion. The feedback everyone gave was fantastic and helped us see where there were points of confusion. We took notes during the discussion and collected all the sheets people had marked up and any notes people had taken on our behalf (thank you again!)

In early December, we took every piece of feedback from the meet-up notes as well as the “hacked” cheat sheets where people wrote their thoughts and put them all into a google doc, grouping similar points and adding “+1s” to ones we thought were especially valuable. If multiple people seemed to say the same thing, that also signaled us that that was an important issue to pay attention to (for example: changing the “cheat sheet” framing to avoid the perception that this set of tips covered everything about such events; another one was clarifying the two roles, event host and station facilitator, that we were making recommendations for). We then discussed the consolidated and prioritized feedback and tried to come to some sort of consensus around how to change our current version while still keeping it short, sweet and usable.

Come mid-December, we were ready for the fun part — making our content look pretty! Lucky for us, Jess Klein had some spare cycles to work out a template for us, coming up with several great options, including a “recipe”-like format that would allow folks to cut out various tips and use them like a deck of cards, as well as the version we ended up with, which featured an array of colorful hexagons (a Hive visual brand “go-to”). In the end, we really liked the playful and flexible aspect of the hexagon design. Also, because it doesn’t use a ‘bullet-list’ convention, it encouraged us to pare down our sentences as much as possible.

Since we now have a word template, we’ll be able to pump out future Jumpstarts a bit more quickly than this first one. We’re looking forward to sharing more down the line!