Tag Archives: social and emotional learning

Buried treasure

  By laurelfelt | February 12, 2012 - 6:21 pm | , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

In 1990, when my older brother Benjy was 14 years old, he interviewed our Grandpa Ray and wrote a short essay about his life. Last year my mom unearthed it, squirreled away in some nook of Benjy’s bedroom for more than two decades, and Benjy read parts aloud at the unveiling of Grandpa’s headstone in May 2011. Earlier this morning, Dad scanned these seven pages. I’m grateful for this essay’s multiple windows into history. Not only does it depict the Depression and post-WWII eras that marked Grandpa’s life, but it also reminds us of Benjy’s world then — a world where he, as a high school freshman, had to laboriously and neatly handwrite multi-paged essays; a world where spellcheck wasn’t built into the platform upon which he was writing. (How could it be? It was a piece of ruled paper!)

This morning I told my young cousins, a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old who had awoken at 6:30 am in order to jump on my head, that I knew we were watching the NEW Scooby Doo (as opposed to the classic Scooby Doo) because Velma didn’t consult laptops back in my day — they hadn’t been invented yet. Last night, I told them a bedtime story that my Grandma Elly had imagined and related when my sister Sarah and I were little girls. All I could recall was the premise — there once were three Hawaiian sisters named Oola, Moola, and Leela — and I proceeded from there, making up as I went along and regularly asking the girls to fill in blanks. What do you think happened next? I would ask. Molly, a precocious first-grader, contributed a storyline in which baby Leela continued fishing while her older sisters built up the fire for cooking. In addition to netting fish after giant fish, she also attracted a shark! Leela had to bonk him on the head with her little fishing pole to keep him back. When the sisters returned home with fish and tales, no one believed Leela’s story. Personally, that’s where I thought Molly would leave it. But she threw in a detail: “Here’s a video!” Leela said. “See!” And she showed the footage to her parents.

I smiled. When we were Molly’s and Sadie’s ages, Sarah and I never would have thought to suggest such corroborating evidence — videography wasn’t ubiquitous back then. Moreover, Oola, Moola, and Leela were indigenous peasant girls who lived in Hawaii. I’m not sure if Sarah and I would have granted them the technology of even the fork… I also thought that Oola, Moola, and Leela were from the past. I don’t know if Grandma stipulated that, or if I’d assumed that since their life seemed so tranquil and tied to the earth, or if Grandma’s age and the classic quality of her warm voice (I loved my grandma’s voice) led me to associate all of her stories with days of yore.

It doesn’t matter. It’s interesting but it doesn’t matter. What matters is love and family and creativity and storytelling. I’ve always mourned the fact that my grandma, who had been an elementary school teacher and children’s librarian, never got to realize her aspiration of publishing children’s books. I dreamed of getting them published posthumously — I wanted to do her that service. But I realize now that both the stories our grandparents lived and the stories they told live on. I thank my brother and sister, our parents, and the rest of our family for facilitating that beautiful truth.

NOTE: As I scrutinize the date of this essay, I realize the context in which Benjy wrote it. Grandpa Justin had passed away unexpectedly, the result of a stroke tragically mistreated, in January of 1990. Grandma Elly, who’d been struggling against breast cancer for years, moved in with us immediately after. Her older sister Pearl, whose voice to this day sounds just like my grandma’s and moves me nearly to tears every time I talk to her on the phone, also took up residency in our house. But despite these efforts and my grandmother’s powerful will, we lost her a few months later, in June of 1990. This essay’s date: October 1990.

After Dad’s parents could no longer testify, Benjy made sure that we heard from Mom’s.

NOTE: Benjy got his wish — partially. His older daughter, Lyla, was a baby when Grandpa Ray died. Benjy’s younger daughter, Violet, never got to meet her great-grandpa. But maybe someday, if we keep telling these stories, she will.

Justification

  By laurelfelt | January 26, 2012 - 5:32 pm | , , , , ,
Leave a comment

As I tore apart my computer in search of texts to enrich my article for Learning, Media, and Technology, I found this piece which I delivered (or didn’t — I have a habit of jumping off-book and riffing in front of a live audience) before the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees on April 15, 2011.

I’ve always wanted to make the world a better place, and thought that the way we raise children is central to any/all such undertakings. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I studied Education & Social Policy, with minors in political science and French. I did original, on-site research for my honors thesis, visiting child care centers in Paris, Oslo, and urban Chicago. I reviewed the way each culture balanced the social-emotional and the cognitive — Were they tensions in opposition? Were they intertwined partners?

Spongebob Squarepants got me to graduate school. My friend Jenn and I were babysitting a bunch of five-year-olds and, while we happened to be on the street of a housing project in Boston, I suspected that this scene could have unfolded anywhere in America, maybe anywhere around the world…

Here we go round the mulberry bush… the ice cream truck chimed. My friend Jenn asked the kids what they wanted.

“Spongebob!” they cried, eyes glued to the image of a frozen treat shaped like he who lives in a pineapple under the sea.
“They’re out of Spongebob,” Jenn explained patiently. “What’s your next choice?”
“Dora!”

POP! Goes the weasel!

That’d be Dora the Explorer, another children’s TV character who the youngsters could ice cream-ily cannibalize. Now, I’d been a kid who worshipped at the electric fireplace, effortlessly memorizing movie & TV dialogue, gobbling books, acting in plays. But I always, ALWAYS, had firm ideas about chocolate and vanilla. Was something different going on here?*

I started out by looking at the extent to which young people interacted with electronic media, analyzing children’s media content according to unsavory themes, like aggression, materialism, xenophobia, and stereotypical gender roles, which I continued at USC. Then I became interested in influencing the content itself, first through disseminating research to studios with Dr. Stacy Smith, then by supporting entertainment-education efforts with Dr. Sheila Murphy and Hollywood, Health & Society. From there I became interested in what people do with the content, and that’s what led me to Dr. Henry Jenkins and, in a sense, brought me back to square one. How do we make the world a better place, shift the way we raise children, address the social-emotional and the cognitive?

This skills-rich approach seems the way to go, in my opinion. Not only is each person, each community, and each moment in time distinct, but people hate being told from on high what to do. It doesn’t make sense to come up with one fixed set of solutions, one “universal” plan, and tell every person out there to do it. It just doesn’t work. But let’s say you help them to develop skills, fundamental capacities for diverse application. Then individuals’ and communities’ possibilities are limitless. They can realize their own potential, and build their own solutions that reflect their unique circumstances.

At RFK Community Schools, via the Explore Locally, Excel Digitally after-school program, I’m helping those skills to take hold. The skills pertain to social-emotional competence (SELs; self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making), and new media literacies (NMLs; defined as “a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape” (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Weigel & Robison, 2006, p. 4)). Despite the words “new” and “media” in their label, NMLs are neither new nor exclusively for or about media. They’re especially useful in the context of new media, but they’re fundamental, time-honored, digitally agnostic skills. They’re about enriching learners with useful, versatile capacities that help them think sharper, work better, and appreciate fuller the ethical ramifications of their actions.

As thirteen-year-old me once sang in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, playing the role of Mrs. MacAfee in Harand Theater Camp’s summer 1993 production of Bye Bye Birdie, “I don’t know what’s wrong these kids today!”

Onward

  By laurelfelt | January 10, 2012 - 9:49 pm | , , , ,
Leave a comment


The University of Southern California (USC) is well known for football, and all of the glory and scandal that comes with it. Some folks also associate USC with privilege and derisively refer to it as the “University of Spoiled Children.”

But USC knows, as I have learned well, that you can’t just rest on your laurels.* We must look to the future.

The Strategic Vision identifies three paths forward, which constitute the heart of our academic vision.

Transforming Education for a Rapidly Changing World highlights building the ranks of transformative faculty and reinventing education at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. It also focuses on the need to insure student access to education and our commitment to accountability.

Creating Scholarship with Consequence emphasizes the growing importance of translational research, creative work and professional practice that make a significant impact on society. This will require increasingly more interdisciplinary and inter-professional collaboration.

Connecting the Individual to the World calls for promoting local and global engagement to foster mutual understanding. This begins with self-knowledge and self-reflection, critical thought, appreciation of diversity, aesthetic sensibility, civility, and empathy across all spheres of life. Given the broad scope and depth of our academic programs, we must not lose sight of the importance of cultivating human wholeness.
-Elizabeth Garrett, USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, 1/9/12

These values echo my own and if I were more jingoistic, I might be inclined to say something like “I am USC.”

My latest inspiration for my dissertation reflects this commitment to transformative education, meaningful contribution, and human wholeness. It incorporates positive deviance, participatory action research, participatory design, participatory culture, participatory learning, serious games, and social and emotional competence.

Project Plan:

1. Gather baseline data on a youth population (utilize multiple methods to triangulate members’ capacity to emotionally regulate and perform in Dojo).
2. Identify positive deviants (PD’s), or those whose adeptness at emotional regulation qualifies as aberrational; in other words, individuals who thrive despite the odds, without access to special resources.
3. Identify their emotional regulation strategies — How do they do what they do?
4. Work with these PD’s to suggest game design modifications and curriculum components for Dojo.
5. Liaise with GameDesk developers regarding game design modifications and take lead on realizing complementary curriculum.
6. Facilitate outreach efforts with PD’s and other interested youths, spreading the word about Dojo and PD’s emotional regulation strategies.
7. Gather endline data on youth population (utilize multiple methods to triangulate members’ capacity to emotionally regulate and perform in Dojo).

Of course, this plan is ambitious and will undergo intensive revision — part of the process. For now, this is the blue sky I’m eyeballing.

Fight on.

*Pun absolutely intended.

Auto-dialogue

  By laurelfelt | January 7, 2012 - 8:18 pm | , ,
Leave a comment

“Writing is, of course, Ev’s legacy. He used the process of putting felt tipped pen to paper as a means of threshing out the chaff, of refining his ideas, and, most bluntly, of thinking. Ev Rogers is an exemplar of E. M. Forster’s saying about human learning: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?” Ev understood better than most of us that we do not know and then commit to write; rather, writing like talking is thinking, process not outcome. Creativity, as Max Weber said and as we know, is about bringing intellect to bear on the persistent and emotional pursuit of an idea until you’ve got it right. That’s how Ev Rogers engaged himself on a daily basis.”
-Jim Dearing via Arvind Singhal

I talk to myself. A lot.

There, I said it. The jig is up! But evidently, this “quirk” of mine isn’t quite as far beyond the pale as I’d originally believed. Perhaps it isn’t even abnormal at all. (The fact that I audio-record my musings… well… now we might be getting into unique territory. But anyway.) The how of it, though, is worth closer examination. So is the why.

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Self-talk is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head every day. These automatic thoughts can be positive or negative.” The ramifications of their valence are serious. These stories we tell ourselves — about the world, notably about ourselves — structure our reality. Whether the world is a kind or mean place, whether effort can lead to change, whether we are good enough — those are difficult phenomena to measure objectively*, especially if they’re subconsciously articulated; mostly, we take these things on faith. And they not only impinge upon our psychic comfort, but they can sink or support our health. Some benefits that positive thinking may provide include:

Increased life span
Lower rates of depression
Lower levels of distress
Greater resistance to the common cold
Better psychological and physical well-being
Reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease
Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress

So how do we talk to ourselves? Gently? Harshly? Fairly? Rationally? In which modes — deliberately or subconsciously; textually (e.g., via journaling), orally (e.g., via narrating), expressively (e.g., via dancing or painting), or behaviorally (e.g., via self-caring or self-harming)?

For what purpose? Ev Rogers, mentor of my mentor, harnessed auto-dialogue to make sense of inchoate ideas and discover, in a sense, his own mind. Stuart Smalley, now Senator Franken’s (in)famous SNL character, tapped it to get through his day. In the emotion regulation game Dojo‘s current iteration, players are supposed to call upon positive self-talk in order to tolerate: a torrent of invasive questions, an unpredictable cyber handslap, and the temptation to slap back. I wonder whether this forum provides an ideal space for practicing positive self-talk. I wonder whether scenarios in which players must find the bright side in an ambiguous situation, or counter a derogation with an affirmation, might be more apt…

What happens when we steal the mic, capture the conversation, program our cerebral talkradio DJs to only (or mostly) give voice to our nascent, deep, unique truths… and rhapsodize about our beauty? How will our worlds change? Then how will we change the world?

*Is there such a thing as objectivity?
NOTE: This photo was taken in a museum in St. Louis, Senegal, Summer 2010. It reads (according to my imperfect translation skills): “With nothing but your voice/ You can fill the mountain/ and empty the sea,/ you can deliver to the sky/ all the the salt of the sea/ and bring back one great day/ the words of those absent.”

Numbers

  By laurelfelt | January 2, 2012 - 10:37 pm | , , , ,
Leave a comment
“A dominant group, controlling the production of knowledge, shapes the construction and distribution of numbers, in order to convey authority and legitimize certain perspectives” (Wilkins, 2008, p. 17).
“Dating is a numbers game” (conventional wisdom).

Our country may be terrible at math and lousy when it comes to balancing its checkbook — but boy does it love numbers! Numbers are messianic; numbers are truth. And, in certain circumstances, numbers can be bought and sold to the highest bidder! Step right up, step right up, shape em, bend em, bring em home to your kids. Insignificant details or calls to action — pick your flavor! They can even julienne fries!

The problem, of course, is there might be no “there” there. Not only do I distrust the methods that produced most numbers, but I distrust the interpretation of their significance. An unpublished manuscript by Dr. Karin Wilkins (2008) urges numerical literacy: “This literacy needs to advance us toward asking the fundamental questions that resist obedient acceptance of numbers as objective truth” (p. 21). A recent (and heavily trafficked) Op-Ed by Paul Krugman declares plainly, “nobody understands debt.”

In other words, the emperor has no clothes on; and who made him emperor anyway?

My colleagues and I have been on a literacies quest. We’ve been crusading for the new media literacies, which is related to media literacy and social and emotional literacy; now I think we have to add numerical literacy into the salad bowl (don’t you call it a melting pot!).

I also might have to launch my own Torpedo of Truth Tour when it comes to dating. Through literature reviews and participant-observation, I can affirm that dating is not merely a “numbers game.” Its sampling frame, communicative modes, discursive material, and experimental activities differ widely according to participants’ narratives or “dating scripts.” Thus, driving up your numbers will never produce the desired outcome if you’re fishing in the wrong pond, or dangling the wrong bait, or misunderstanding the nibble on the line. Considering contextual variables is more demanding to do, and more tongue-twisting to mention, than parroting a pithy formula, but them’s the breaks. Reliable facts rarely make good soundbytes.

We need to stop valuing mnemonics above reality. The world is gray; accept it. And somebody get that emperor a robe, for crying out loud. It’s getting embarrassing…