The Making of a Digital Educator

So how was I made into a digital educator? Upon reflection, in three phases.

PHASE ONE: In the first phase, in the second half of the ‘90s, I taught (on the side) undergraduate and extension courses on how to build web sites, using HTML, coding by scratch. No one taught me how to do that. I had an orientation for helping people, a performative nature, and an empathic perspective that helped me to see something complicated from a naive perspective. I had no idea if what I was doing was effective but I could tell I was having fun. Once, after teaching a group of seniors, one comment card reported, “I now understand I have no business making web sites,” which told me I was doing something right – she had entered the course riding a wave of hype and family expectations and left with enough agency to make a decision on her own

After a few years, I ended up teaching a group of teachers. Afterwards, one told me “You’re a master teacher. And we should know, we’re teachers.” That was flattering, and floored me. I had never had any professional feedback on what I was doing, even that general, and I felt I still had no idea what I was doing. This gave me the confidence to leave the professional world of web design (my day job) and strike out in the world of education.

PHASE TWO: In my second phase of becoming a digital educator, I was trained to be an outstanding youth development professional at Global Kids, an after school program in NYC that trained urban youth to become community leaders and global citizens.

Every school year began with an intensive 2-3 week long staff training period, for staff both old and new. This included such thing as:

– Learning (and reviewing) the basics of youth development pedagogy and practices
– Learning how to create project-based programs
– Standards for writing and sharing curricula
– Once we were more seasoned, developing and running these very staff trainings.
– How to support experiential learning – how to start with a personal, albeit abstract, experience and scaffold that towards understanding of a learning objective
– How to take a rotely taught lesson and make it interactive

Through strong supervising we all had the opportunities to develop:

– classroom management skills
– co-teaching skills (all programs were run by two staff, always)
– crisis management skills
– youth recruitment and retention techniques
– and more program management skills

In our facilitation pairs, our practices were further developed by:

– collaborating on curricula design and delivery
– after every session, taking the time to ask first “what went well” and then “what could we have done differently”
– thinking together about program challenges, or struggles with a particular youth

Outside the organizations, we were encouraged to access other resources, like additional youth development trainings, attending and presenting at conferences, and more.

I was at Global Kids for a dozen years. My training did not conclude after my first year, but was an on-going process that never ended. Doing the work MEANT being part of a reflective and training process that always upped my game.

PHASE THREE: While I was being trained in youth development and project-based learning, I was learning how to incorporate media education or media production – in essence, how to be a digital educator – but in a totally different way.

In this third phase, which overlapped with the second, I set out to learn how to combine what I did before GK – web design – with my emerging skill set – youth development. I looked around and saw that Media Literacy was a strong and vast space that I could draw from. The Web was just another medium, like movies, television and radio – to which later I would add podcasts, digital games, virtual worlds and all that followed.

While youth development came through a formal staff development process, for digital learning I was largely on my own. I watched my peers and read their curriculum. I familiarized myself with their key questions – who benefits from the creation of media and how can the disempowered gain authority and agency by producing their own? Through NYC peers in collectives like Hive I saw what the end product was suppose to look like – a polished media product with a youth face connected to its production. I attended workshops at conferences and gatherings, and learned by osmosis (experience). And I mentored my staff.

At the same time, I learned about design practices, about working with youth to achieve educational goals through media production. As with learning how to be a digital educator, I was largely left to my own devices. I was lucky to be at an IDEO-designed training for the organization that grew into the Hive Network, and that began a passion for design practices.

Very little I learned in phase 3 was like phase 2. I’ve trained dozens of staff since then to be digital educators – to be able to incorporate emerging media into educational programs, to understand what they afford towards the intended learning goals and to keep the learner first – but not within an embedded practice like GK developed to teach youth development.

Today, at the #2016DML conference, there are a half-dozen of us who have “graduated” from GK and now work in museums, libraries, or academia, bringing digital learning into different spheres. Youth development is the air we all breathe. And we hold deep appreciation to GK and its practices for the training we received.

Yet when we ask how we learned to be digital educators, we each point to someone else at the table. We learned it through mentorship, through an apprenticeship model.