Bloomsburg University’s Joan Miller and Mary Katherine Duncan on “Good Work”

By Daniel Mucinskas

Over the past several years, our colleagues Dr. Joan Miller and Dr. Mary Katherine Duncan (along with Dr. Jennifer Johnson) have been working on a set of Good Work-related endeavors at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. We spoke with Joan and Mary Katherine about the latest news from their respective projects and their enduring commitment to encouraging “good” in the world. In the Q&A below, we discuss Bloomsburg University’s Good Work Initiative, a planned study of Good Work in nursing, a multiple intelligences curriculum for young people, and more!

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Q: Mary Katherine, we previously discussed the Bloomsburg University Good Work Initiative, which strives to help students understand excellence, ethics, and engagement (the 3 Es) as pillars of doing academic work that is “good.” The Good Work-related summer assignment for all incoming students is now in its fifth year. What are you envisioning for this year’s assignment?

MK: Good Work is now embedded into the core of Bloomsburg University’s identity; many faculty members and administrators are excited by the Good Work frameworks and incorporate the ideas into their own classrooms, projects, and goals. We have a high degree of institutional support and are excited that we can offer a Good Work assignment to incoming freshmen once again this year. It is an important part of our community to have our students understand the meaning of doing good both at the university and beyond.

This year, incoming students will read a two-page introduction to the concept of Good Work and complete a brief quiz to check their understanding of the 3 Es. Then, students will watch a YouTube video of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and write an analysis of factors that influenced Dr. Pausch’s pursuit of Good Work. Students will next reflect on factors that influenced their own pursuits of academic excellence, ethics, and engagement during their junior and senior years of high school. Finally, students will be directed to the BU Good Work Initiative website to learn more about campus-based resources designed to support their academic and professional Good Work.

Q: Joan, your major focus has been on the encouragement of Good Work in the nursing profession. What is the latest on that front?

Joan: I am planning an international qualitative study of Good Work in Nursing that I hope to start this year, using the same interview protocol that was used in the original Good Work study and also in my own previous study (see my article “Opportunities and Obstacles for Good Work in Nursing”). Through this new line of research, I hope to gain a cross-cultural perspective from several different countries concerning what values and beliefs brought people into the nursing profession, what opportunities/supports and obstacles they have, and how they overcome challenges.

Q: You have each been involved in a “Playing with MI (Multiple Intelligences) Smarts” curriculum that you have created to teach students about their intelligences and doing good. How has this been used?

MK: The curriculum was engendered by the Bloomsburg University Toy Library, a lending library of literacy and play resources that I founded in 2010 after Howard Gardner visited our school to talk about MI theory and the Good Project. The library has been popular with faculty, students, professionals, and paraprofessional working with individuals of all developmental ages and abilities. One of our central objectives for the Toy Library is to help people understand that everyone is “smart” in different ways, and we should each have the ability to appreciate our own smarts and those of others.

Using some of the toys, games, and resources from the library, we have worked with elementary school children in after-school care in what we call “Playing with MI Smarts,” facilitating an exploration of their unique intelligences and strengths through shared reading and play. We then have a discussion together with the children about how they can use their discovered abilities to help people in their communities. For example, students have made greeting cards and scrapbooks for children in foster care and handmade interactive children’s books for new and expectant mothers.

Joan: Playing with MI Smarts was also used with children of parents who were enrolled in “Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World,” a program for individuals who are in or close to poverty. They explore personal and community resources available to help them break the poverty cycle. We really saw that the young people were engaged and happy to be participating in “Playing with MI Smarts.” Currently, we are exploring ways to integrate the “Getting Ahead” and “Playing with MI Smarts” programs into the local school system.

Over spring break, with students from the Bloomsburg University Honors Program, we took “Playing with MI Smarts” to two elementary schools in Jamaica. It was challenging to implement the lessons with large numbers of students in the Jamaican classes. Now we are thinking about how to adapt in the future to accommodate larger numbers of students.

Q: What other related activities can you share with us?

Joan: I recently returned from the University of Pécs in Hungary. I have been teaching a joint course with a professor from the University of Pécs. Together, we explore the 3 Es of Good Work and minds needed to navigate a global community. We anticipate continued collaboration. In the fall, I will give a guest lecture focused on Good Work and ways to cultivate respectful minds as the international students from the University of Pécs adapt to cross-cultural communication.

MK: Dr. Jennifer and I worked with a team of undergraduate students on a study examining motivators and challenges to psychology majors’ pursuits of excellent, ethical, and engaged academic work. Findings were presented at the Eastern Psychology Association Conference in March 2016.

I also still teach my annual Good Work seminar, structured around the 3 Es, to junior and senior psychology majors. As the Distinguished Professor of Good Work, thanks to the generosity of Joan and her husband Fred, I will continue to expand Good Work into other arenas

Bringing Digital Citizenship to Young Students

By Carmela Curatola Knowles

Carmela Curatola Knowles is a Technology Integration Specialist and experienced educator in Southeastern Pennsylvania. In this guest blog, Carmela describes her passion for early digital citizenship education and a book series that she created to help young students understand the implications of their online actions.

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The school year is coming to a close. Before we realize it, some children will be heading to camp, while others will engage in sports, arts, or other activities over the summer. One thing many children 10 or older have in common is that they have or will soon be getting their own cell phones to communicate with adults and with one another. But do they have the foundational skills they need to understand the responsibilities that accompany the use of cell phones and other devices? We have become a connected society, and our children witness our connectedness on a daily basis. However, we have a long way to go in teaching young people about how to use devices ethically and in a way that cultivates empathy towards fellow users.

In my own experience as a teacher, I find that kids in kindergarten and elementary school bring a lot of digital knowledge to the table. Some want to be cool like their older siblings. Others seem to delight in exploring the Internet and accessing content or platforms that may not be age-appropriate; I have had 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade students speak of being on sites that require a minimum age of 13! When questioned, they brag about changing the birth date on the sign-up form. What happens in the unfortunate event that a problem occurs? When difficult situations arise, where will these children be looking for guidance? These are the types of questions we need to address in digital citizenship education.

Almost ten years ago, my colleagues and I received the following charge from the Director of Educational Technology at our public elementary school in Southeastern Pennsylvania: “We want to develop an Internet safety unit for our educational technology program.” This project started with identifying the skills to introduce at the Kindergarten level and then building the necessary scaffolding from 1st through 5th grade. This was about five years before the FCC changed its funding policies to require that students in schools that get Universal Service Fund assistance must receive internet safety instruction, so we were somewhat ahead of the curve and had a lot to figure out on our own.

To implement the unit, we wanted to include authentic online resources. However, after surfing the web and searching extensively, we discovered that there was, and to a large extent still is, a major focus on providing resources for digital citizenship at the middle and high school levels but not at the elementary level, even as more and more children as young as toddlers and even babies are exposed to and use technology on a daily basis. Furthermore, the resources that did exist did a poor job of engaging and teaching students while also making sure not to instill fear.

In order to meet our needs, I created a series of books, The Learning Adventures of Piano and Laylee, that centers on a neighborhood of talking puppies and kittens of all colors and abilities from diverse families. In writing this series, my focus was to embed the notion of tolerance and acceptance through everyday children’s play experiences. I used this premise to write about key digital citizenship topics, including internet safety, cyberbullying, copyright respect, acceptable use policies, and netiquette. Each book was designed with a curricular unit of lesson plans, activities, etc. for teachers and home schoolers. At present, I have another five books “on the burner” concerned with digital “paw prints,” digital storytelling, online researching, videoconferencing etiquette, and a visit by the characters to a fictional Museum of Technology.

I’ve used the published books with my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders, and I am continually surprised to witness their viewpoints about going online. In my Master’s research on cyberbullying, I found it incredulous that online users tend to think they are anonymous. Young people are oblivious to the fact that each computer has its own Internet address (IP address) and that police officials can actually identify a computer used to send harmful messages or other material. If we are not careful to educate young people about the rules and ethical dimensions of the online world, our children risk not understanding the complex interactive nature of the Internet, becoming desensitized to other people’s feelings and not taking respect, responsibility, or morality into account when engaging with others digitally.

So how do we know when our children are listening to us and thinking about being safe online? When they give us advice for being safe online, we know they are absorbing the concept that we each have a responsibility for cyber safety. One of my favorite examples involves a six year old boy who counsels his mom to refrain from using all capital letters while texting because he learned that it is interpreted that you are yelling at the recipient. Another more recent experience was a ten year old student who advised me sternly not to allow another student to go onto a certain online gaming program because strangers talk to the gamers, using inappropriate language.

Many adults say and believe that kids know more about computers than they do. But what we as adults need to remember is that our kids might know how to play games and watch videos online, but it is the exceptional child that understands how to navigate a computer: how to save a file properly so they can access it again independently, or how to assess available apps and software for a potential need without adult guidance. And this is fine, because they need to be coached in to understand technology just as they need to be coached to read, write, and perform mathematical operations. Yet what these young people need most is for trusted adults to be guiding compasses who can interpret experiences and interactions they will most likely encounter as Internet users and build a framework of trust and support. The purpose of starting these conversations at a young age is so we can foster continued discussions throughout our children’s growing years. As children become teens, an established foundational trust with parents/guardians is the inner voice that helps young people determine when it’s time to ask for help.

Bridging the Digital Divide: A Student Film Festival on Digital Citizenship

By Johanna Mustacchi

Johanna Mustacchi has been an educator in the Croton-Harmon, New York, school district for the past two decades. She teaches Media Literacy and Communications Skills, Digital Citizenship and Mindfulness at the Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School and has written several times for Educational Leadership magazine on the teaching of media literacy and digital citizenship. She is a member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education and is on the advisory panel of Mindful.org. Johanna is deeply committed to helping young people develop a greater awareness of themselves and the world around them. She can be reached at Johanna.Mustacchi@chufsd.org.

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When a student wants to avoid engagement in a class discussion because she feels unprepared, she looks down at her notebook. The trick is to not make eye contact with the teacher.

In the technology-rich world populated by their children, parents often feel so unprepared to engage in important discussions about responsible, safe and ethical use of digital media, they, too, “look down.”

The current generation of youth lives in the digital universe with surprisingly minimal guidance. Over the years, I have spoken to countless parents who are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of online issues and challenges their children face with few navigation tools. While parents may understand that many of the same rules apply between traditional citizenship and digital citizenship, the lines are blurred for children who often behave quite differently online when “no one is looking” than they would in person. I once had a student blurt out in a class on online piracy, “I’m not paying a thousand dollars for a thousand songs!” Needless to say, a lesson on the ethical dimensions of media downloads ensued. As Nancy Willard states in her Education World article “Why Teens Make Unsafe Choices Online,” without tangible feedback, teenagers’ brains lack the development to process the repercussions of their online behavior. Parents can use their wisdom and life experience to provide the moral compass their children need to expertly steer their digital lives.

Over the past school year, I and four of my colleagues worked to build a bridge over the digital divide between parents and children, using a showcase for student creativity and work as the arena for meaningful and honest dialogue about citizenship in our digital world.

I cannot underplay the enormous influence Carrie James’s book Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap played in the genesis of an event that drew 150 parents, students and community members. After reading the book a year ago, I contacted Dr. James explaining that, while I completely agreed with her call to action to bring parents into the conversation, I wanted her to know how difficult it is to generate parental interest in school events that are not centered around the arts or sports. Taking her sage advice, I followed her prescriptions and can now report on the success of an event that had students “acknowledge and explore the moral and ethical dimensions of online life…” (Chapter 5 of Disconnected). 

Focus Groups

Ten months prior to our event (which turned out to be a film festival focused on digital citizenship), two school counselors and I assembled four small focus groups of students in 5th through 8th grade. We gathered information about how students in these age groups spend their online time, including the role, or lack of role, their parents played.

Newsletters

In the fall of the new school year, I began posting on my school web pages a series of “digital citizenship” newsletters targeted to parents. Based on some of the results of our focus groups, and particularly upon my experience teaching media literacy and digital citizenship at our school for the past ten years, I focused the newsletters on provocative topics that would help parents begin conversations with their children at home. To help parents bolster their understanding of these issues, each newsletter provides links to topical articles, statistics, student voices (culled from survey questions I gave my own 8th grade students) and parent surveys. So far, I’ve published newsletters on the topics of sexting, online piracy and technology distractions.

Planning a Film Festival

About six months prior to the film festival, we assembled a team of two administrators, two school counselors and myself to plan an evening that would not only showcase student films, but also an 8th grade student poster session with activities related to digital citizenship, and a panel discussion with students speaking frankly about the role of technology in their lives.

We opened the festival up to all students in 5th through 8th grade, allowing them to sign up individually or in teams of up to four students; of the fifteen teams that originally signed up, nine actually made films. This high return was largely due to how we monitored student progress from day one, including three mandatory meetings and frequent check-ins with individual teams. To guide them, each team received a packet containing rules and criteria, as well as the judging rubric, storyboard template, information on film techniques, bibliography sample, and film submission form. Students received guidelines that included a brief discussion of digital citizenship with questions from which to choose and research for the subject of their no-more-than-two-minute films, divided under the categories of Privacy, Property, and Participation delineated in James’s book.

Marketing the Film Festival

To promote student interest, we focused the entire month prior to the festival as Digital Citizenship Month in our school’s thriving Advisory program. During their lunch periods, students watched and discussed videos on digital citizenship topics with our assistant principal, and during their Advisory classes, students participated in further activities. In addition, we advertised the film festival with flyers, daily announcements, website announcements, and a series of email blasts to all parents, including survey questions later used in the festival’s panel discussion. At the same time, my 8th grade students were in the process of creating cyber safety lessons for my 6th grade students. These students turned their lessons into highly engaging posters for the evening’s poster session, which they presented to visitors.

The Film Festival Evening

We divided the evening into three parts: the 8th grade poster session; a panel discussion featuring three 9th grade students (from our 8th grade focus group of the year before) answering parents’ questions; and the showing of the nine student films followed by certificates for all filmmakers and awards and prizes for the top three films. We had judged the films two days beforehand with the help of a faculty member from the Jacob Burns Film Center Media Arts Lab. The poster sessions and films focused on a broad range of issues, including plagiarism, piracy and fair use, phishing scams, cyber bullying, sexting, online grooming, catfishing and behavioral targeted advertising. We also put together a parent tips packet so that they would have additional material to take home and use as conversation starters with their children.

The Other Bridge

In addition to bridging the digital divide between parents and children, another important goal of the festival was to bridge the ethics gap apparent in the digital lives of youth, described by Dr. James. I noticed that gap closing over and again on that March evening, when 8th graders passionately taught mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers how to respond to an inappropriate text message; when our 9th grade guest speakers implored parents to pay attention to who their children are speaking to in their online games; and when 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade filmmakers created stories that highlighted some of their own experiences with ethics online. The film festival exposed parents and children to issues they may not have considered before, providing the opportunity for a more open dialogue.

The success of this event was summed up beautifully by one of the 6th grade filmmakers, who said, “I wanted to make a movie about cyberbullying because it’s a real issue. My favorite part of making the movie was that every day we would go to my friend’s house, and we would film little parts of it, and even though we were talking about a serious subject, it was still fun to do, because then I could educate my fellow classmates and tell them about it, but also in an okay way, not [in a way] that would make you feel really sad.”

Excellence, engagement and ethics all rolled into one.

Civic Education in the Digital Age

by Margaret Rundle

How, where, and what did you learn about civic life?

This was the opening question of a workshop titled Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age conducted at the Fall 2014 Project Zero Conference in San Francisco. The lively discussion that followed surfaced themes related to participants’ civic education: teacher-led lessons and in person conversations, whether at school, with family, or with religious groups, on the topics of facts about the government and voting were most common. After documenting these themes, attendees discussed the following questions:

1. Do you think your education prepared you to engage civically in today’s digital world?
2. What about the civic education received by students today?

A resounding NO was the consensus.

The workshop members then viewed examples of contemporary youth civic engagement, ranging from the Change.org petition calling for President Obama to address gun violence, to the Twitter hashtag campaign #Bringbackourgirls raising awareness of the Nigerian school girls who were kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram, to the Harry Potter Alliance call to action Odds in our Favor addressing economic inequality. Attendees brainstormed the features of the opportunities afforded by digital media for civic action: these actions are youth-led, and can involve anyone, anytime, anywhere, on any issue, in a multitude of ways.

The stark contrast between the civic education themes and digital civic opportunities illuminates the challenges facing educators who work with young people and support their civic development.

The workshop described above was a joint effort between our Good Participation (GP) Team at Project Zero and the Educating for Democracy in a Digital Age (EDDA) Team at Mills College. Both teams are part of the Educating for Participatory Politics (EPP) initiative, which explores how digital media are transforming civic and political life and the implications for educators preparing youth for democratic life. As part of the EPP initiative, the Good Participation team has collaborated with Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), an international educational and professional development organization, on developing curricular materials designed to support youth to develop the knowledge, skills, motivation, and reflective disposition to participate positively in civic life today. We created activities and lessons with a digital orientation that complement FHAO resources centered on the Holocaust and Human Behavior.

In pilot work with these materials, students reflected on their current digital footprint and how they are presenting themselves online. Furthermore, they used online discussion boards to share their ideas on how digital media is being used currently in local, national, and global events (such as in Baltimore and in the Middle East), and they imagined how digital media might have been used in the past (for example, how might social media have been used by different factions in WWII?). Students also planned how to take action on an issue they cared about, leveraging the opportunities afforded by new media. For instance, one group of students decided to tackle the lack of trauma centers in their city neighborhood.

The Good Participation and FHAO teams are planning workshops to introduce these resources to educators. We will be conducting our first mini-course at the Project Zero Classroom summer institute in July 2015. If you are interested in learning more about these resources and upcoming workshops and mini-courses, stay tuned for updates on the Good Project website, Facing History and Ourselves website, and the Educating for Participatory Politics website.

Learning about Good at Project Zero Classroom

By Paromita De

From July 21st-25th, 2014 the Harvard Graduate School of Education hosted Project Zero Classroom (PZC), an institute for educators to delve into Project Zero concepts and see how they can better understand and meet their students’ needs as learners. Plenary sessions and mini-courses during the institute focused on topics such as creativity, comprehension, causal thinking, global understanding, and ethics. Sessions led by Good Project researchers allowed educators to examine ways in which issues of “doing good” arise in professional and personal realms.

Three mini-courses during PZC were taught by Good Project researchers. “The Good Project: Ideas and Tools for a Good Life”, led by Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, gave participants an overview of different Good Project initiatives and themes through interactive exercises and discussions. For example, findings on the importance of quality time from the Good Project’s Quality study were illustrated through an activity where participants observed alignments or misalignments between their personal values and the amount of time they spent on different activities during the week (such as work, commuting, spending time with family, etc.). A second mini-course, “Teaching ‘Good Work’ in the Classroom: An Introduction to the Toolkit”, was led by Shernaz Minwalla of the University Liggett School in Michigan and allowed participants to examine what Good Work means to them. Through this session, participants discussed what Good Work might look like in different vocations, explored their values, and deliberated on sample dilemmas from the Good Work Toolkit. Carrie James and Katie Davis led a mini-course titled “Cultivating Digital Citizenship – Strategies for Approaching Dilemmas of Privacy and Identity Online”, during which participants reflected on digital ethical fault lines – ethical issues that arise in the use of digital media – such as “privacy” and “identity”.

Two plenary sessions led by Good Project researchers discussed the influence of digital media on youth. Carrie James’ plenary looked at how dialogue occurs in digital spaces – such as commenting on social media – and digital dialogue can be channeled to develop our social and civic voices. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis’ plenary featured findings from their books The App Generation and a recent Good Project study on creativity and how it has been influenced by changes in technology. Project Zero Classroom gave the Good Project an opportunity to connect with educators and share ideas for making “good” a priority in the work they do with students.