Transcript
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Hey, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome to our latest episode of Mind Food, your space for easily digestible content.
Speaker: This discussion is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Michael Dippold, Ezra Friedlander, and Sue Woltanski.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about Human Restoration Project at humanrestorationproject.org, and be sure to support our end-of-year funding drive, which you can find at humanrestorationproject.org slash support.
Speaker: Anyways, this is our latest discussion of Mind Food.
Speaker: And today, Nick and I are going to be talking about our top three picks for places to learn about education.
Speaker: And there's only two rules behind this, and here's our methodology.
Speaker: So Nick and I are going to be looking at other fields or professions and providing examples of what we can transform or learn from that.
Speaker: This very much is an expansion, to get really academic here for a second, of this idea of semiotic domains, which is the idea that you learn a lot from other related fields as opposed to just drilling over and over people in your field.
Speaker: So if you go to a conference and you're like, hey, I'm going to learn more about teaching math.
Speaker: So you go to a conference about teaching math.
Speaker: After a certain number of conferences, you're likely to not find that many different people that you could talk to where you're going to learn something that's really that new.
Speaker: You're reaching a point of diminishing returns.
Speaker: Instead, the argument of semiotic domains goes that I could go to another related field, for example, maybe a philosopher, like a philosopher's conference, who's talking maybe about like theoretics and concepts of maybe space time.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's something like really random.
Speaker: You're not only going to learn a lot about that topic.
Speaker: You're also going to be able to apply it to your understanding of math and transform it to learn something even more in your own field.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the idea like you have your bubble of professional practice that you're an expert in.
Speaker: And the idea is that to be able to grow that bubble, you can only do so much inside of that bubble.
Speaker: But to be able to grow it, you need to reach out and make connections to other semiotic domains that you're not an expert in.
Speaker: And that will, in turn, like the dialogue between the discourse between those two domains will actually grow your own practice in your own as you, you know, become more of an expert in the other ones, then you grow in your own professional practice and become better at that too.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, a tangible example would be if you're learning how to play an instrument, let's say the piano, something that's semi outside of your semi-automatic domain might be learning how to play the drums.
Speaker: You're going to learn a lot about like rhythm and technique that you would learn in drumming that then you could apply to piano.
Speaker: And what's really important to understand about semi-automatic domains is that it's not that you're just going to become a better piano player.
Speaker: You're going to transform the way that you play piano because of the way that you learn how to play drums and vice versa.
Speaker: So here's an example, and this is something we have a whole video on that you can find on our YouTube channel, and that's over video game design.
Speaker: So video game designers do a lot of stuff that's honestly really similar to education, but one thing that all video game designers basically have to do is have a tutorial.
Speaker: There has to be a way to learn how the game that you created is played.
Speaker: And one specific thing I think teachers can really draw a lot from is this idea of teaching player mechanics through action or through trial and error.
Speaker: And in this example, I have it on a screen here.
Speaker: There's a lot of examples of bad video game tutorials, like where text just comes up to the screen and tells you what to do, and then you just kind of figure it out.
Speaker: But Nintendo specifically is really good about this idea of trial and error.
Speaker: And in every single Nintendo game, pretty much, there is usually a video of what it is that you're supposed to do playing at somewhere on the screen, and then you just do it.
Speaker: And then the game makes you do that exact same thing over and over and over again.
Speaker: So in the example I have on screen here, like it's teaching you how to jump.
Speaker: So you have to jump up this like little tiny cliff ledge in order to get to a coin.
Speaker: And there's a video playing showing Kirby jumping, and you will sit there until you figure it out.
Speaker: And then moments later, when you know you're going to jump again to get up another cliff, and then it's going to take you through a variety of different things that are going to challenge your ability to figure out how to jump, like crossing a larger gap, or maybe like how to go up even higher, which is spamming the jump button because Kirby can like float slash fly, right?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: The way that we can think about that as an educator is that how much of education is learning by reading a giant descriptive task of that thing and then either never applying it or never having the opportunity for trial and error.
Speaker: Like what is the jumping equivalent in a history course or something?
Speaker: I think I've been playing a lot of Ori and the Will of the Wisps with my son.
Speaker: For some reason, he likes that.
Speaker: But it's challenging for him, especially the more you progress and the more complex the game gets, my goodness.
Speaker: But what's cool about that, I noticed while I was playing with him, is as you reach these iridescent trees and it's like this sign where you're going to unlock this new power.
Speaker: But what's cool is that when you unlock that power, very often you're in a location in the game because it's very much like a game about traversal.
Speaker: is where, yeah, you have to use that power to move out of that zone and into the next thing.
Speaker: So you actually have to apply it to be able to even leave that place where you just got that new power.
Speaker: And then very often, it's like the key to unlocking the very next part of the map.
Speaker: It's like, oh, you got this new power.
Speaker: Now you have to apply it in all these new ways in this new area.
Speaker: realm that we're gaining you access to.
Speaker: But the cool part is then, very often, you have to traverse back across the game and you find that you can use those new tools and techniques to access parts of the map or do things that you couldn't before, even in parts of the game that you have played in Access Unlocked previously.
Speaker: So there's this cool loop of iteration and interaction as you build in both your strength of your character and your skill as a player.
Speaker: That's just really rewarding for the player.
Speaker: And if you want to learn more about that, go check out like our massive video slash deep dive into it.
Speaker: But it's my hope that as Nick and I share these examples, both to each other, but also you as the listener, make those connections as a skilled educator.
Speaker: So you listen to this stuff and you're like, oh, that makes me think a little bit differently about this, even in the short time that we're describing this content.
Speaker: So that said, here's our top three examples of other things we can pull from other fields.
Speaker: With that said, I'm going to start off with my number three, and then we'll go back and forth.
Speaker: So I know it's kind of a cop-out because it's very similar to video game design, but there is a difference in terms of how board games are designed.
Speaker: And Nick, as you know, I have a pretty substantial board game collection, huge board game fan.
Speaker: And whenever I'm playing board games, I think a lot about education as well.
Speaker: And the one specific example I want to talk about is this idea of keeping players at the table.
Speaker: So unlike a video game, which the majority of which are designed to be played online now, in a video game, like if you lose, you get to start right over.
Speaker: Like you go back into a lobby, like a different lobby, or maybe there's like a respawn system.
Speaker: It ensures that you keep playing it.
Speaker: But in board games, if you lose early on in the game, you're just going to be sitting there awkwardly at a table while all of your friends get to keep playing the game.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Most modern board games recognize that and have tried to remedy it.
Speaker: So like an old school of example would be like Monopoly.
Speaker: If you lose Monopoly, I guess you just sit there or you go like walk in the other room awkwardly because Monopoly is not a fun game, objectively.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, but the, what I want to paint a picture of is a social deduction game.
Speaker: Now I don't have enough friends that are interested in board games, sadly to play a lot of social deduction games.
Speaker: So it's not my favorite genre, but it is a good example of games that are often played in school.
Speaker: Sometimes, um, did you ever play like mafia or, uh, one night werewolf or any of those kinds of games with kids?
Speaker: Yeah, the werewolf one, yes.
Speaker: So as you probably know, like in Mafia or Werewolf, which are very similar to each other, the way it works is that one player is the killer.
Speaker: All the other players tend to be just like civilians or they have specialized roles.
Speaker: And each night within the game world, the werewolf will kill one of the players.
Speaker: That player is then out of the game.
Speaker: And then people vote on who that player might be that is the killer.
Speaker: And there's different roles that can investigate, et cetera.
Speaker: The problem with that game is that if you're killed by the werewolf or by the mafia member, you just sit there and watch, which is not a very fun interaction.
Speaker: And having played this with kids over many, many, many years, kids love it.
Speaker: But if you're the first one out, it sucks.
Speaker: Another example of this, of a game that's iterated upon that, and in my opinion, approved it is Deception Murder in Hong Kong.
Speaker: Have you played this?
Speaker: Oh, I haven't.
Speaker: So Deception Murder in Hong Kong is a very similar premise.
Speaker: It's a game where there's a crime scene investigation.
Speaker: And at the beginning of the game, one of the players is a murderer.
Speaker: They choose like their their method of making a kill.
Speaker: And then overnight, a forensic scientist who's one of the players is.
Speaker: finds the murder weapon and the location, presents the evidence to the other players and shows them what happens.
Speaker: And the goal of this game is that the other players have to figure out through the forensic investigator by asking them a series of questions who the other murderer is.
Speaker: So it basically goes around the table.
Speaker: Everyone has to present what they think it was and how they think it occurred.
Speaker: And over time, the forensic investigator can take away specific clues.
Speaker: They can't communicate directly.
Speaker: They can take away certain things.
Speaker: They try to contradict the murderer.
Speaker: It's always difficult to explain a board game, but what this game does is that it allows the player to always remain in the action because the decision isn't made until the end of the game technically on who is actually going to be out.
Speaker: Like one player isn't being eliminated over time.
Speaker: You're voting.
Speaker: What do you think the connection is here to education?
Speaker: I think in this case, right, keeping players at the table is like, how do we recruit player or student engagement throughout the duration of a course or the duration of an activity without alienating kids, without.
Speaker: creating winners and losers without creating cycles that cause kids to fail early or to lose the game early and then end up staying out of it, getting bored and doing something else is kind of the analogy that I'm making, right?
Speaker: It's how do we keep students engaged is kind of the equivalent of how do we keep players at the table.
Speaker: Am I reading that right?
Speaker: Yeah, I think to add on as well, it also just when we're designing activities or like a lesson or something,
Speaker: It's ensuring that kids always have something to do.
Speaker: So like when we're designing a lesson, the agency is constantly at the hands of the students and no one ever is taken out of that space.
Speaker: It's really like that universal design for learning component where...
Speaker: Like you said, the agency is with the kid to be able to recruit multiple means of engagement, interaction, expression, whatever.
Speaker: So they make choices about how to fluidly move from one task to the next.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I think that's a good summary.
Speaker: Let's go on your number three.
Speaker: Now, if this was supposed to be numbered, this would be my number one.
Speaker: They're not in any order for me.
Speaker: They're not tiered.
Speaker: when I thought about arts and music and education, I think what it brings to educate, I'll start with this, is just the sense that, right, like art is all about communication and meaning making and like sense making about the thing, like, how am I going to, you know, express a particular idea with a tool for an audience, right, depending on what it is that you're gonna do, if it's a physical medium, if it's a digital medium, if it's music, or if it's written or whatever, right, the
Speaker: the arts, um, allow you to express yourself in all those different ways.
Speaker: But, um, uh, uh, but also take into effect like, you know, your own context.
Speaker: And let's see here.
Speaker: The other thing that I have on here on the far, on the left is actually an album cover from a band that is probably going to get like a lot of, uh, play in the metal album of the year, um, scene, which is a band from the Czech Republic.
Speaker: They're called, uh, Malo Carpetan.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly or not.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But what's really cool is that they, their music is all in Czech.
Speaker: So it's all Czech language.
Speaker: But this album actually tells stories from like the Protestant Reformation.
Speaker: If you go through and read, if you go through and read the lyrical themes in English, obviously for me,
Speaker: it's telling stories about Habsburgs and King Philip and like all these other kinds of things on the musical backdrop of metal.
Speaker: And I've really found too that, you know, metal music, heavy metal music draws from so many different walks of life, right?
Speaker: It's an expression of all these different cultures, but within this common language of, you know, like pounding drum rhythms, distorted guitars, you know, et cetera.
Speaker: Like I could listen to metal music that's influenced by,
Speaker: you know, Japanese culture and Japanese historical theme expressed through this.
Speaker: I can think of bands that have done the same for Chinese history.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're using semiotic domains in the opposite way.
Speaker: Like they're transforming their understanding of music by understanding historical context, both
Speaker: musically because I'm sure they use like motifs I mean metal is probably the closest thing to classical music that exists in terms of that genre there's a lot of overlap between like the opera metal and classical music interests and fields yeah and then there's also like I think like a little more mainstream but like Queen is pretty famous for incorporating operatic elements into their work as a classic rock group
Speaker: And it's like, it's very apparent how that transforms the way that you listen to their music.
Speaker: And so that's, I just think the more that the educators can dive into just like other, other cultures or other, you know, especially arts and music from all those other things are a way of understanding that.
Speaker: not only then those other, you know, ways of expressing, but then thinking critically about the ways that we can construct our own spaces, right?
Speaker: And like the stories that we tell and how we tell them and, you know, the signs and symbols and the means.
Speaker: And you even said like motifs, right?
Speaker: So we can understand our own culture and the ways that we communicate and the way that we tell stories.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, there's two quick examples that come to mind right away, which is the first is if you're using, I think oftentimes music and sound are left out of our thinking when it comes to lesson planning or school design.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, yeah, I remember this is a really basic example, but whenever I would talk about the different decades, especially like like the 1920s onward in the United States.
Speaker: we would analyze music from each decade period.
Speaker: So like we'd look at protest songs from the 1930s or we would look at like the rock and roll themes, the 1960s, et cetera.
Speaker: And it's both literally being able to hear it and hearing like the motifs and talking about like the history of music and where it comes from and like how jazz leads into rock and roll, et cetera.
Speaker: And like why that is and how that works.
Speaker: But also then analyzing the lyrics and how the lyrics translate to historical context.
Speaker: Like there's a lot of,
Speaker: really interesting thematic stuff from music theory that also applies to the art world, but also applies to what's going on in history.
Speaker: There's also the element too, though, kind of expanding upon this, that I always found arts and music education to be perfect examples on why progressive education makes sense, because they are inherently progressive education.
Speaker: The way that you learn how to play an instrument or draw or illustrate or do graphic design has
Speaker: has to be in a progressive way or else it doesn't make any sense you don't spend 10 years learning from a workbook about scales and chords and then starting to play the instrument your senior year of high school you start right away in like third through fifth grade or something playing your instrument and then you learn the theory as you go in like short doses which is pretty much how you're supposed to do progressive education in all of the other subject areas you're applying early you're learning experientially you're reflecting on what you're doing and
Speaker: And you're performing as well, right?
Speaker: You're actually doing that thing for a real audience, a real group of people.
Speaker: All right, number two.
Speaker: My number two are building designers and city planners.
Speaker: So specific shout out here to Sophie Fenton, friend of the show, slash HRP person.
Speaker: Sophie's work is she has, I believe, a doctorate in education or something similar to it from Monash in Australia.
Speaker: And now she works to design buildings.
Speaker: Specifically, she designs a lot of schools.
Speaker: And a concept that she brought to my attention that I wasn't aware of is this idea called human-centered design, which is kind of a spinoff of design thinking generally.
Speaker: I'm actually going to play this video because it's not very long.
Speaker: Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving, one that starts with people and ends with innovative solutions tailored to meet their needs.
Speaker: When you understand the people you're trying to reach and then design from their perspective, not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but you'll come up with ideas that they'll embrace.
Speaker: Human-centered design is both how you think and what you do with it.
Speaker: It's a process that consists of three phases, inspiration,
Speaker: ideation, and implementation.
Speaker: The inspiration phase is about learning on the fly, opening yourself up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as long as you remain grounded in the desires of the people you're designing for, your ideas will evolve into the right solution.
Speaker: In the ideation phase, you'll come up with lots of ideas, some too crazy to work, some too crazy not to try, and you'll refine them, tossing out the bad and improving the good.
Speaker: Making things helps you learn, grow, and test your ideas.
Speaker: Building a simple prototype gets your idea tangible and gives you something to put right back into the hands of the folks you're designing for.
Speaker: Without their input, you won't know if your solution is on target or how to evolve your idea.
Speaker: Keep iterating, testing, and integrating feedback until you've got everything just right.
Speaker: During the implementation phase, you'll build partnerships,
Speaker: shore up your business model, and get your idea out into the world, which was always the goal in the first place.
Speaker: Anyone can practice human-centered design, and everyone benefits, because it gets us all to solutions that are adopted and embraced.
Speaker: So human-centered design, I should note, is not exclusive to building design, but it's something that building designers are thinking about.
Speaker: To expand upon this, and then I'm going to be curious to hear your thoughts about the education connection, there's an article, which I'll link into the show notes, called 11 Principles for Turning Public Buildings into Community Anchors, which is from the Project for Public Spaces.
Speaker: Just to read the first three, because they're really connected to this, but
Speaker: They talk about how the fact the community is the expert, and they bring up this example of designing a downtown public square in Fort Worth, Texas.
Speaker: And they talk about developing online surveys to figure out what people want to see and developing out drawings for that and how to bring people together.
Speaker: And how they want like a park-like setting for lunchtime use with food and information kiosks and a public plaza with trees, a quiet area, a city hall with fountains and a cafe, a major focal space.
Speaker: So it's defining with the community what they want to see and then developing out those spaces.
Speaker: How about how you're creating a space, not just a design?
Speaker: So people are thinking about words like safe, fun, beautiful, and welcoming.
Speaker: And those intangible qualities can be measured quantitatively in a variety of ways.
Speaker: So figuring out things like accessibility, comfort, sociability.
Speaker: And then finally, number three is that you can't do it alone.
Speaker: So it's all about this idea that it's built with community.
Speaker: You're designing public spaces for the public so you can bring people together so you actually need to talk to those people.
Speaker: to figure out what it is that you're going to build, like all the stakeholders, et cetera.
Speaker: I think what a lot of these offer, right, is a model.
Speaker: There might not be practices necessarily that port over, but there's a model of a way of doing and a way of thinking that we can bring back in to either designing school spaces, just like straight up, or redesigning school spaces, or thinking differently about school spaces.
Speaker: But modeling that process as we go through other processes
Speaker: practices, whether it's about instruction or decision-making, PLCs, like whatever, like that human-centered design process could be an interesting model to try in other places and just see, you know, take what works and leave what doesn't.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there's the framework component and then there's also the literal component of what if educators and students were involved in the process of creating a school.
Speaker: What would that school literally physically look like, feel like, sound like?
Speaker: Because the way that schools are constructed aren't really conducive to the idea of public gathering for the most part.
Speaker: Usually the hardest part of working within a school to do the types of stuff that we're talking about is finding large public space and finding storage.
Speaker: Those are usually the two, like, what do I do in this scenario?
Speaker: Because they're designed to just be kind of sectioned out into small classrooms.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It is interesting that you mentioned, you know, that is a hurdle when we go into spaces and talk about it because very often, I think when you're in the context, you can't think about it any differently because you're so, you know, it's the water that you swim in.
Speaker: You can't think about how to use it.
Speaker: But very often the work that we do is just... Yeah, it's the work that we do when we talk with teachers or, you know, go to schools and kind of discuss with them these ideas.
Speaker: It's just like,
Speaker: well, what if we did this?
Speaker: And very often that's just kind of the push that they need then to open up their thinking about everything.
Speaker: And then, and then like all, everything's on the table then.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: You're number two.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: It is labor organizing.
Speaker: Um, is my number two.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And this is because in my experience there, there was not a better, nothing made me a better educator than being involved in organizing for, uh, my local union and then for state and like getting involved at the national level too.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And that's for so many different reasons, but I try to just emphasize a couple here.
Speaker: Like the first thing that's not even mentioned on my list here is just like that concept of solidarity, right?
Speaker: Like the notion that, um, you know, as educators, as like a professional class of people situated inside communities and students, there's really like, uh, a, an element here where, um,
Speaker: Like we kind of see ourselves all in this kind of fight together.
Speaker: How do we get students on board with practices?
Speaker: How do we make sure that school is not a system of structures and practices that are being done to them on a day to day?
Speaker: How do they have recourse if they feel like they're being, if their voices aren't being heard in those processes?
Speaker: So that concept of solidarity and then kind of importantly to just identifying shared goals and objectives.
Speaker: So it's like, hey, what is it that we want to do?
Speaker: What do we want to accomplish?
Speaker: And then how are we going to get there?
Speaker: How do we build consensus or provide pathways for difference within that range of opinions?
Speaker: Obviously, I was listening to a great podcast.
Speaker: They said democracy is like 60 people getting on a bus and then all having to decide where we're going to go.
Speaker: You know, like there's, you can only go one place and we all kind of have to get there together.
Speaker: So the classroom is really like a trial space for what that looks like.
Speaker: And I think for too, too many kids and, you know, for too many teachers, that looks like I'm the boss and you have to listen to me and the kids are the workers in this arrangement.
Speaker: They don't have any power.
Speaker: Well, that's great if we're training kids to go work in the Amazon warehouse, but it's another thing to, you know, if we want them to be actual participants in a democratic society, they need to know, have practices, principles, systems at play to see how they're going to work and how they can fit into it, how they can be active agents in that process.
Speaker: Something that we talk a lot about in our own professional development is this idea of radical transparency, which is a lot of times teachers will take on new initiatives that are meant at addressing student concerns and challenges.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Students don't know that those new initiatives are aimed at things that they were saying.
Speaker: So they just feel like there's this new hierarchical just thing that came out of nowhere that they're being subjected to and tested on as opposed to feeling a part of that experiment or a part of that new process.
Speaker: So being radically transparent means to be talking about with kids, hey, we're trying this together.
Speaker: Here's the reason why.
Speaker: And here's why I need your thoughts on it.
Speaker: And kids typically love that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Like they like being involved in shaping their classroom experience and being able to give you feedback, which leads to my number two, which is a huge part of labor organizing is staying connected together, like having spaces where you can meet up together both synchronously and asynchronously to communicate and staying involved with each other.
Speaker: And something I did in my last few years of teaching is I had a school discord, which comes with its own caveats.
Speaker: It's been improved a lot since then.
Speaker: But what I found was that kids would use that discord to learn from each other from an academic perspective.
Speaker: So like they would post their work and get feedback on it.
Speaker: But perhaps more importantly, it was a space for kids to talk to each other and build community.
Speaker: So a lot of kids who
Speaker: or maybe a little more introverted, or folks who just prefer to chat online would really open up in those online spaces.
Speaker: And at all hours during the day, you would just get kids talking to each other about random stuff.
Speaker: And it's just really nice as an educator to be able to see that.
Speaker: You're seeing these new connections that would typically be made.
Speaker: And I could also elicit feedback there as well.
Speaker: whenever I would need it.
Speaker: So like there were times where it was like six or seven o'clock at night, I would be planning a lesson for the next day and I would just go on our class discord server and say, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this.
Speaker: Do you all want to do this?
Speaker: It sounds cool.
Speaker: And I would always get like 10 to 15 different responses from kids telling me either no, that's terrible or that's great.
Speaker: Um, which kind of leads me to my third day.
Speaker: My third anecdote is that when you lessen that hierarchy, it's not that the hierarchy doesn't exist because obviously a teacher has certain roles and responsibilities and so do students.
Speaker: But when you lessen that hierarchy, kids are going to be a lot more honest with you in hopefully kind ways where I would make proposals and kids would go like, no, I really don't want to do that.
Speaker: And that helped me shape and tailor the things I was doing, which ultimately made my job a lot more enjoyable.
Speaker: So I didn't feel like I was going in and just like subjecting kids to things they didn't want.
Speaker: We could do things that were purposeful and meaningful for that.
Speaker: It's again, modeling different ways of thinking, you know, that you wouldn't
Speaker: perhaps bring into educational, bring into education or bring into a classroom setting.
Speaker: But then once you realize how important they are to like the world outside of school, you realize that they're actually a vital part of classrooms and a vital part of education because they're running invisibly in there the whole time anyway.
Speaker: Before we shift to our number one, one more thing on that is it's really similar to how we try to model our own nonprofit work.
Speaker: Shout out, if you're on our Discord, you should join our Discord.
Speaker: The whole purpose of how we run our work is that we're hyper transparent about what we do and why we do it.
Speaker: And we also try to give folks as many opportunities as possible to share what they think and join an ongoing community.
Speaker: We see it as a grassroots movement.
Speaker: It's a collective group of people pushing for change.
Speaker: So I think we do, like, I'm pretty proud of the fact that our, I feel like our nonprofit work is much more transparent and open and
Speaker: and uh more of a community than perhaps other education non-profits that are out there all right so my number one are accessibility consultants or accessibility designers and this is something that i feel like i've grown a lot with especially in the last few years working at hrp i'm also partnering with our good friends at stim punks who have taught me a lot about these concepts and i think
Speaker: This could be in two different ways.
Speaker: I kind of cheated.
Speaker: I put two on here.
Speaker: But I think that one is more well-known and maybe the other one isn't.
Speaker: So I think when some people think about accessibility, generally, they might be thinking about like alt text or captioning from an education environment.
Speaker: which is still something that many people need to learn.
Speaker: So I'm not saying this is irrelevant, but like certainly like alt text is a big one.
Speaker: Like understanding like how do you write good alt text?
Speaker: Why is it important to use alt text in your work?
Speaker: Like how many of us actually put alt text within, let's say like a Google document or something on our images, et cetera.
Speaker: Like those things do matter for accessibility.
Speaker: And it seems like the thing with like turning on captions or using a microphone in a large space.
Speaker: The number of times where I do professional development or
Speaker: There's like a thing going on and then there's like a relatively small group of people and then someone hands you a mic and go like, well, I don't need a mic.
Speaker: I talk loud.
Speaker: That's anti-accessibility because you don't know if there's a person in there that really does need the mic in order to be able to hear you.
Speaker: And that's always very frustrating to me because I think that's a teacher thing.
Speaker: Teachers think they have this teacher voice and therefore they don't need microphones.
Speaker: But if you learn about accessibility, you recognize why that's a problem.
Speaker: I don't think they're doing it because they are anti-accessibility, to be fair.
Speaker: This is the reason why it's important to have this perspective.
Speaker: The perhaps more, not more interesting, but less well-known thing is also about how accessibility designers are thinking more innovatively about how they literally build spaces.
Speaker: So I found this video.
Speaker: This is fascinating to me.
Speaker: So this is from the Pittsburgh International Airport.
Speaker: And it's a space called Presley's Place.
Speaker: I mean, you'll see in the video, but it's interesting how they've contracted accessibility designers to think differently about flying.
Speaker: And I think as we watch this, it's interesting to note, like, what does this mean from a classroom education?
Speaker: For International Airport, I came up with the idea of a sensory room being put in the airport for all people with special needs.
Speaker: And it happened.
Speaker: Ready?
Speaker: One, two, three.
Speaker: Presley, he was diagnosed with autism when he was two.
Speaker: So when we went and tried to figure out how we were going to
Speaker: you know, adapt as a family with a child with special needs.
Speaker: We joined a preschool readiness program and when we went there the first day, it was a nightmare.
Speaker: Really quick, just to add context to this video if you can't see it, the space is divided into two separate areas.
Speaker: One side is a, like it's like a section of a plane, so like the plane sees etc.
Speaker: And then on the walls it looks like the rest of the plane like it's drawn in 3D, which is meant to be a space to experience what a plane is like before you get on it.
Speaker: And then the other side of the space, which we'll share here in a second, is like a
Speaker: a sensory space with lights and sounds and calming images, etc.
Speaker: But his teacher there, she showed us the sensory room.
Speaker: And when we went in and he was able to stay there and eventually come outside with everybody and play with the kids.
Speaker: And then each day he would just, that room helped him just like it is right now.
Speaker: So that's how I came up with the idea.
Speaker: I was sitting at work and thinking, you know, what can I do to help everybody, you know?
Speaker: And this sensory room, this room for children, for adults, for folks with sensory processing issues is the best in any airport anywhere in the world, hands down.
Speaker: And you guys all made that happen.
Speaker: It's just, it's overwhelming to think what kind of a difference this is going to make to families, to be able to travel, to the passengers on those planes who are sitting next to those families.
Speaker: There's a huge ripple effect of this.
Speaker: It's not about awareness, it's acceptance.
Speaker: We want to accept everybody that's different just because they look different or act different.
Speaker: They're no less than us.
Speaker: Pittsburgh International Airport accepted us in
Speaker: I have a huge family of special needs children and adults that we welcome here.
Speaker: So you guys did it.
Speaker: And I thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.
Speaker: You'll never understand how much.
Speaker: I love that idea of having little, little area that's modeled like the plane.
Speaker: So kids can experience that, especially, you know, for autistic kids and kids for whom those changes are or sensory processing disorder, you know, where those changes are,
Speaker: can be like catastrophic, right?
Speaker: Where they can set into motion some cascading, you know, effects that they need a lot of time and support to be able to recover from.
Speaker: Being able to experience it ahead of time and kind of know what to anticipate maybe helps lessen that anxiety.
Speaker: So that way, you know, they can better address the situation on a plane because a plane is the last place that you want to experience all those things all at the same time.
Speaker: Very hectic, very chaotic.
Speaker: You know, it could be loud.
Speaker: It could be
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's also a perfect example of why like designing at the margins benefits everyone.
Speaker: Because if I had children or like when I think of myself as a child, it probably would have been beneficial to have a room where I could see what the plane was like and talk about like how the seatbelt works and like where the luggage goes.
Speaker: Because out of all spaces that cause me personally stress, an airport is number one.
Speaker: I find airports to be
Speaker: It's not necessarily even the plane itself.
Speaker: It's the process of getting on the plane, having to go through TSA, having to like make sure you're not holding up the plane, having to find a spot for your luggage, having to get the seatbelt on, having to get past the people.
Speaker: Like it's it's a lot of just like really awkward and rushed social interactions all occurring at one time with a lot of very tired and usually very upset people.
Speaker: It's like the perfect storm of bad places to be.
Speaker: Having a space where you can practice is useful.
Speaker: And then there's also spaces like rocking chair type things.
Speaker: There's a quiet room.
Speaker: There's things that, this is not just designed for kids.
Speaker: It's also designed for adults where
Speaker: you know, you could go in there if you just wanted a quiet space.
Speaker: And that's, that's super useful.
Speaker: I mean, it's going back to that example of human centered design or universal design.
Speaker: I mean, those things that we think of being like accommodations actually just are better for everybody.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: Being able to have a ramp instead of just stairs, you know, makes it not only accessible to people who need that just to get into the building, but then they make deliveries easier.
Speaker: They make it so you can push, you know, a baby carriage up, a baby carriage.
Speaker: What is this like the 19th century?
Speaker: But push a fram up the thing.
Speaker: Same thing for elevators.
Speaker: Like I'm just thinking about real common things that like eliminate the need for all of like this patchwork.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And these are things that are shown time and time again.
Speaker: They benefit everyone.
Speaker: Another example I didn't put on here, but I considered is that in Japan, whenever you're riding the subway systems, whenever you're inside the station, you'll hear these constant bird chirps.
Speaker: And I thought to myself when I first got there, I was like, man, these birds never shut up.
Speaker: Like, it's just like constant every like 15 seconds.
Speaker: But they're artificial.
Speaker: What they are is they're birds, quote unquote, that chirp at the entrances to the station so that if you're blind or like hearing or vision impaired, you can be guided towards the entrance.
Speaker: But they serve a dual purpose that if there's like an earthquake or something,
Speaker: And you need to escape or get out of the station and like maybe something like collapsed, et cetera.
Speaker: That serves as a way to get you towards the exit as well.
Speaker: So a lot of examples of accessibility design benefiting everyone, not just those that explicitly are designed for it.
Speaker: Obviously, from a classroom angle, this one's interesting to me, and I pulled it out because the airport one is based around what someone saw in a classroom space.
Speaker: So having a sensory-friendly space in a classroom now being pulled towards airports, which could then be juxtaposed and pulled back into classrooms.
Speaker: We talk a lot about flexible seating.
Speaker: um and like flexible seating is another good example of something that benefits everyone it's beneficial to the sense that if you're someone who needs to like move around or like the rock around etc flexible seating can do that for you i also like to shake around and move constantly i hate sitting down for long periods of time like that benefits me too i i would just prefer that all chairs were like that or have the option to have chairs that are like
Speaker: Hell, I use a standing desk for that very purpose.
Speaker: So how many classrooms would benefit from having an accessibility consultant or the understanding of an accessibility consultant to redesign those spaces?
Speaker: Oh, I feel like my last one is pretty dumb now compared to compared to your last one.
Speaker: It touched on something that I thought was important that wasn't mentioned in my other ones that I thought we could really learn from a lot as educators.
Speaker: And that's just like the general field of of engineering.
Speaker: You know, I think.
Speaker: I'm not an engineer, but I have friends who are engineers and work in those spaces, but I have experience through it, through design thinking, project-based learning, just learning about how those fields have changed from a model that's going through this huge process of approvals and forms.
Speaker: Again, it used to be very hierarchical in these places where you get an order and you go through the thing and then you go through the whole process and you end with this finished product and then
Speaker: You know, if it's good or it's not like whatever, the one that's now a lot more flat and iterative.
Speaker: If you're engaging in project based learning, you're probably using the design thinking model.
Speaker: The design thinking model is technically the engineering design principles or the engineering design process rather.
Speaker: That's the same thing.
Speaker: That's where it comes from.
Speaker: So like the concept of experiential learning is very much paired intentionally with engineering.
Speaker: That's the pairing.
Speaker: It's also probably worth noting that a lot of higher education, workplace recruitment efforts, et cetera, are shifting to a portfolio model that wants to see what you can do as opposed to what you can show through a test or something like that.
Speaker: So like MIT, which recruits a lot of engineers, only takes a portfolio.
Speaker: You have to be able to showcase what you could actually do.
Speaker: You know, for as much as we caution, like schools should not look like workplaces.
Speaker: But I think it is interesting where industry is more responsive to better ways of practicing their craft.
Speaker: Like we can absolutely learn from that and borrow again those models and practices and processes.
Speaker: as they help benefit learners and then play a better role in the long run as then they can say, oh, I've been iterating my whole time in school.
Speaker: Iterating now in my field is just porting over the same, you know, it's just transitioning context.
Speaker: But it's not learning a new practice from start.
Speaker: So I think it can be beneficial for kids in classrooms.
Speaker: To summarize here at the end, the goal of this really is, again, to demonstrate that we can learn a lot by branching off into other fields and other professions, which makes it really interesting to pick up a book or watch a movie or documentary or something over something that's completely outside of the scope of what you typically would read or typically would do.
Speaker: I'm curious to hear more if you read anything interesting recently or know anything that we should reach out and look into when it comes to these semiotic domains.
Speaker: As a heads up, our video game video actually features a PDF that talks about semiotic domains and demonstrates a lot of examples of how you could incorporate this into your teaching and learning.
Speaker: So again, thank you for joining us.
Speaker: We appreciate you being here and we'll talk again soon.
Speaker: Thanks for listening and watching.
Speaker: As a reminder, we have our end of year donation drive going.
Speaker: If you want to donate to that, go ahead and visit humanrestorationproject.org slash support.
Speaker: And since we're a 501c3, your donations are tax-productive in the United States.
Speaker: So thanks.
Speaker: Have a good one.
