180 minutes and the future of educationOn the afternoon of March 6th, I found myself at a fancy convention center in downtown Austin with 16 others of my classmates. For the past five months, we had worked on planning a 3-hour interactive session within SXSW’s education conference, and it was finally, almost happening.
It was 20 minutes until show time, and the team was bustling around the room, setting out materials, and doing final mic checks. As conference attendees started trickling in, I felt the energy in the room begin to heighten—turning our nervous jitters into excitement. After welcoming the attendees, we outlined the goals for our session that day:
Our first activity was the marshmallow tower building challenge—partly for fun and partly to create a comfortable team atmosphere for later discussions. For 21 frantic minutes, professionals in suits and business skirts hurriedly taped spaghetti noodles together—reaching across tables, yelling orders, and probably getting more exercise than they had the entire day. After we announced the winners and the room settled down, we started the small-group discussions. Each group began working through the Education by Design templates with discussions facilitated by a Minerva student. The conversations started, albeit superficially at first, but blossomed naturally within minutes. We moved from breaking down the components of active learning and applying new teaching techniques, to thinking about how physical space affects students and designing more effective learning spaces. Halfway through, I glanced up from my breakout discussion and looked around the room. The tables were filled with about 70+ attendees ranging from educators and administrators to industry leaders and start-up founders. What struck me was the level of engagement. You could almost feel the passion and drive these attendees had for learning how they could better play their part in improving education; They were hungry for change. As I listened back to the discussions in my group, I heard many voice their vision for how things could be better. Empathy was built around common narratives of feeling “stuck” within monetary, social, or administrative constraints. We talked, ranted, and brainstormed. We drew pictures of possible classroom layouts, discussed how to intervene at different levels of analysis, and learned magic tricks to practice examples of active learning. I saw eyes light up as educators imagined the possibilities they could open up for students. I saw ideas emerging from nodding agreement, rapidly-written takeaway responses, and after-session connections. It was more than I could’ve asked for. This process showed me that education is not unidimensional nor is it a “one-size fits all.” There is not one solution because there isn't just one problem. Education is a system, and although change is difficult, it is possible. But we need to see it as a constant work in progress—a co-designed initiative that brings together various stakeholders from the learning space to intentionally rethink what education needs to look like. Because that’s the sort of constant effort it’s going to take. Through almost six months of planning, our team put in long hours to design this summit, made sacrifices to attend meetings amidst academic workloads and stressed over some trivial logistical details. But those three hours in Austin Convention Center Room 9C made everything worth it because we realized—for the first time—that we were a part of something greater than ourselves. I saw that with a room full of passionate, driven, forward-thinking individuals, lofty goals seemed tangible. When you look in grand scheme of things, we were just 17 students working to design a session (out of hundreds) at SXSW. But this experienced showed me a glimpse into the work that lay ahead and gave me hope that those visions of making thing better, the bullet point “how might we questions,” and hastily sketched classroom drawings won’t just stay in room 9C.
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About MeThanks for visiting my blog! My name is Megan, I work in Marketing and I graduated as part of Minerva's class of 2021. Enjoy a collage of reflections, poetry, and late-night thoughts. Archives
October 2023
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