If you’re familiar with that dependency, you might also know that, as the article mentions, 2010 marked a moment when our broad-reaching reliance on FRL needed to change but didn’t. Partly because the US amended school-lunch legislation to add that, if a school had at least 40% of its students qualifying for federal assistance, it would be 100% FRL. Around that time, many of us worked at non-profits that determined “need” based on that metric, so when cities began implementing the change to 100% FRL programs, they flung an off-course meteor toward logic models and reports all over the country, threatening to leave a gaping hole in our approximation of who is being served.

There were other problems, too. Notoriously, FRL doesn’t capture a dynamic picture of the schools and communities that so many non-profits serve and support. Many principals have expressed to me how unreliable the participation data are, because only a fraction of students were picking up free lunches due to stigma or quality of the offering and how hard it was to account for “opt-in,” whether it was automated or not.

For years, the cost of the fed’s administration around free-lunch programs has been a hot debate, and so while I would deem schools-as-food-source to be one of the great successes in matching public policy to our infrastructure, it’s fair to say that better data can offer educators stronger ways to characterize communities’, schools’, and individuals’ relative advantages and disadvantages in building more equitable education infrastructure. That’s the project we’ve kicked off this year, because we believe that better use of data can strengthen organizations, interventions, and efficacy research, not to mention better characterizing the intricate nature of challenges that communities and aspiring talent face.

Why NAF Cares

For 40 years, NAF (formerly National Academy Foundation) has been fostering a network of career academies in public high schools across the US that empower districts to build “open enrollment” options for career-themed learning with two central needs in mind. One, narrowing the gap between employers and school curriculum, and two, ensuring equitable opportunity to launch a prosperous career for every student who wants to, despite how clear that path might’ve been for them before landing at a NAF academy. In a nutshell, knowing which schools and which students would stand to benefit most from added structure and support — models that work at propelling students to and through high school graduation — is mission-critical to us.

But the FRL proxy hasn’t historically been merely a signal for where poverty exists at the crossroads of schooling. Like any proxy, it has side-effects that can be unintended and detrimental. In the 21st century, with the heartbeat of social justice ideals as our cadence forward, education organizations all need to contribute to a new paradigm where “more mission” requires more vivid depictions of the actual circumstance where students, principals, and educators of all kinds work tirelessly to realize equity. FRL is the kind of proxy that, without supplemental data, keeps organizations from being truly responsive to the needs of schools and communities.

What we’re working on won’t change all of that on its own, or right away, but I hope it’s a call to action for others — non-profits, researchers, partnerships of all kinds — to step forward with us and contribute more refined tools for carving away what barriers we’ve allowed to exist for too long.

What would success look like?

A few years ago, I stumbled into an exhibit at SF MOMA featuring the best-known photorealist of our time, Chuck Close. What any layperson like me would marvel at upon seeing Close’s art for the first time in-person is the relationship between one small detail of his work to the whole. Close up (no way to avoid the pun), you see beautiful swirling shades of color, art in-and-of-themselves. And, if you’re like me, you step back in disbelief, realizing that every point of material on the canvas has been delicately orchestrated to reveal something bigger.

Success for this project is a contribution to our field — whether you see it as Career and Technical Education, youth development, or K–12 broadly — that sharpens the picture where it matters. For reporting purposes, so that we know what factors of our programming are successful for which students in what context. For program design, so that we can more clearly differentiate what scales well and for whom. For fiscal and human resource strategy, so that we can invest our resources in young learners with huge aspirations but barriers just as big, which might be similar but never exactly the same from one community to the next. And for mission, doing as any organization that continues to be relevant must, knowing more clearly what factors drive or stand in the way of our mission as we evolve.

We’re working on a tool that will draw from open data sets to offer a more thorough picture of what factors set context for our schools and the talented individuals doing everything possible to realize their potential toward great careers and important contributions to community and society. In research terms, we’re working towards a composite index, one that draws from multiple data points much like the Washington Monthly college index or the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy equity in special education index.

A composite index reflects variables of interest in multiple domains, which are standardized and then combined, allowing a large amount of data to be summarized. Each domain has one or more indicators, each of which has one or more measures (sometimes called metrics), each of which has one or more data sources.

Success for us means we’ve identified thoughtful indicators, along with data that have strong attributes for maintenance, upkeep, and reliability over time. We’re not seeking to build something perfect, as no data perfectly summarize the human condition for anyone — we’re seeking something better than free tater tots and apple slices.

About Our Partners

We’re excited to be working with a talented team of data and social scientists with a combined decades of experience doing this kind of work for cities; institutions, including the United Nations; and a broad list of stakeholders in the public sector. The NYU Marron Institute conducts innovative applied research, working with cities to take on critical challenges of urban living. Currently, the Marron Institute has four major research programs focused on urban planning, environmental health, civic analytics, and public-sector performance and innovation.

Earlier this year, we enlisted the help of an extremely talented Research Advisory Team, comprising scholars and practitioners from non-profit, K–12, and the post-secondary landscape. And, of course, our network. NAF Academies are 620 strong in more than 400 schools nationally. Our work to make this contribution would not be complete without involving our members in our progress.

And YOU. On LinkedIn we hope you’d find us and follow NAF Research & Tech for updates and ways you might get involved and keep track of our progress. We’re eager to share what we create so you can help us make it even better.

Everyone in my house is desperately squeezing the final days of summer into a chaotic elixir of pool trips, screentime, and extra sleep. Truth is: about this time each year, I’m itching for school startup. There’s an order to my little bubble when I’m slathering alt-peanut butter onto sandwiches in the dark, wee hours of the morning. The heat subsides, the sunscreen dries up, and we all charge forward, stowing the recliners and leaning into what’s ahead.

No Such Thing celebrated its one-year anniversary in August, and there’s a lot to be grateful for in hindsight. Not least, the many collaborators who’ve made each episode an important step in the journey to make meaning in this space of learning and education reform for the digital age. In the spirit of a new school year. Here are five episodes of the No Such Thing Podcast from the vault that may work to jumpstart your re-entry.

Episode 19: The New Education

A live interview with Professor Cathy N. Davidson, Director of The Futures Initiative at City University of New York, and one of the country’s most respected scholars on the topic of higher education reform. We’re joined by Temitayo Fagbenle, a Queens College student and award winning youth journalist with WNYC’s Radio Rookies. In The New Education, Cathy N. Davidson reveals that we desperately need a revolution in higher learning if we want our students to succeed in our age of precarious work and technological disruption.

Episode 8: The Networking of Humanity

Chris Lawrence is the Vice President of Mozilla Foundation’s Leadership Network, and he’s joined by fellow web citizens, Iliana Lugo and Charles Canario, to discuss “Internet Health” and a host of issues related to learning and literacy in the digital age. Is information on the internet a public resource? Why should we care about issues of privacy on the web? What are the skills that all of us can support as learners of all ages grow with the culture of the web? Charles and Iliana share their perspectives about these issues and more, and we find out that one of us is considering an anonymous web identity to carry out their aspirations as a LARPER.Episode 11: Maker Ed in NYC Schools

Episode 11: Maker Ed in NYC Schools

After decades of experience in the NYC public school system, these three educators are hopeful that “Maker Education,” the field’s instantiation of the popular tinker movement re-constituted by the commercial Make Magazine and Maker Faire, holds promise for reforming aspects of how we teach and learn. Dr. Lou Lahana, Lori Stahl-VanBrackle, and Iliana Villegas don’t agree on every aspect of the present or future of Maker Ed, but together with thousands of educators nationally, are writing the playbook as they go. This conversation unpacks the specifics issues that educators face when working to infuse the values and methodology into their schools. The group cite examples of multi-disciplinary project work, and dig into the spaces where they happen.

Episode 26: Other Technologies, Part 1

“I needed to find a way to save them,” Cook told The Washington Post. “It really affected me having my kids killed.”

This is Part 1 of a 2-Part Episode. Akbar Cooke is the principal at West Side High School in Newark NJ, he’s one in nearly 1mm K12 administrators in the country, but at West Side he’s a giant. Kids call him “coach” or “Cooke” and straighten up when they see him. Not out of fear, but respect — the kind that if you’ve ever worked with teens, you know only comes when things are reciprocal, mutual — it’s clear that his heart is as intimidating, in a way, as his physical presence. Everyone should walk the halls with Akbar, if you don’t ask yourself “do I have the courage to love this much — to work this hard for the people around me?” then you’re not human.

Episode 18: Computer Science Education — The Time Is…Now?

I sit with Dr. Stephanie Rodriguez, Director of STEM Policy at the Afterschool Alliance, and Michael Preston, Executive Director of Computer Science, NYC (CSNYC), and Co-founder of the National CSForAll Consortium, to dig in on the momentum to build support for Computer Science Education. What is ‘the movement’? Is there new relevance, or more urgency now than ever? What outcomes do we hope to influence in the years to come? Who do we think will benefit?

Join the conversation, like us: facebook.com/nosuchthingpodcast and find all show notes at nosuchthingpodcast.org.

The makeup of the room was a big part of the week’s success. Two thirds of those who were attending were from higher ed — academic researchers, faculty, admissions, and other administrators at schools represented below. Mouse and Chicago City of Learning presented case studies of youth-serving organizations experimenting with digital credentials toward goals of equity and access to high-quality learning.

You can read about why Mouse was one of few (from many worthy) youth-serving organizations represented at the meeting in previous posts like Your university can make an impact on college access without spending $$$. The meeting was two-days long, and while I could easily make this post book-length if including all that was compelling about the conversation, I won’t. I just want to note here why the meeting was so important to us at Mouse.

For starters, we learned so much about higher-ed admissions.

By mid-morning on Day 1, my mouth was agape. As admissions representatives from University of Michigan (U of M), Kalamazoo College, and U of M’s Stamps School of Art and Design presented the lay of the land for college admissions, I felt the surf receding under my feet and the boats on the horizon consumed by a tidal wave of challenges that haven’t fully hit shore yet, but draw from a hundred+ years of institutional history.

Fun fact: Harvard University reviews over 40,000 applications for 1,100 undergraduate acceptances a year. A school like University of Michigan now gets roughly 70K applications per undergraduate class for about 6,500 enrollments. Students who apply have roughly 90% odds of being rejected, and an army of application reviewers are likely spending less than 10 minutes with an application in a round (but there may be several rounds if you’re a contender).

Meanwhile, small private colleges, which fight the behemoth state institutions for enrollment, admit more students overall than the schools at the top, but they are also expensive. And while the trendline nationally for applications heads steeply upwards, the competition at the top is widely understood as a delicate and very expensive art of hoop-jumping. This has been documented in detail, one of my favorite sources so far is William Deresiewicz, who you can read about in The Atlantic, or his book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

It’s all very daunting, but my greatest takeaway from this meeting is that there is a field of professionals nationally who are working hard to work through these challenges, have extremely difficult jobs, and ARE open to innovation.

And there are innovations:

One representative in the group cited that ¼ of colleges in the US have eliminated ACT and SAT as requirements for application. Is this good? Maybe(?)…it certainly represents a shifting paradigm around how colleges analyze the “whole student,” another term I learned at this meeting. That same admissions expert (I’ll protect his/her inbox) cited that in their extensive experience (and they have data(!)) — there is no correlation between pre-admittance test scores and students’ successful completion of a four-year degree. (Whoah, I say. That even surprised me.)

Believe it or not, SAT and ACT scores were originally intended as an innovation, in the spirit of the ones we were there to discuss, to open access and build equity in the process of college application. We know how that’s working out, but if you ever wonder whether admissions knows it, too…they do, and things are happening to attempt change.

Check out the 90+ schools who have joined the Coalition for Change and the work that they’re doing to change the application process. And the Making Caring Common Project, who describe themselves as “a broad coalition of college admissions offices have joined forces to collectively encourage high school students to focus on meaningful ethical and intellectual engagement.” It focuses on avoiding the kind of hoop-jumping mentioned above (among other youth-centered challenges that threaten the well-being of students).

A group at Stanford d.school has worked on a number of designed experiments for Stanford2025, which is another refreshing acknowledgement by our country’s universities that things aren’t working as effectively as they might have at one time and certainly don’t yet accommodate the future we think is coming. Now, if only these experimentalists had the tools they need to conduct their experiments.

Bernard Bull, Assistant VP of Academics and Chief Innovation Officer at Concordia, whose blog you should read, turned me on to models like Wayfinding Academy in Portland, OR, and his ideas about “Outsider Higher Ed” orgs that he writes about, and seem worth watching.

And, which beg big questions for me:

What if lifelong learning portfolios were the next evolution of the Common App, such that application to college wouldn’t be a cramming process, but a matter of curating work and experiences you’ve been collecting your entire life? Similarly, admissions professionals would be “scouting” learners much earlier, using a more robust data set…the way their colleagues do in the athletic department.

What if admissions counselors were a part of the fabric of communities? Not dropping in each year to “pitch” their school, but working alongside youth development programs, schools, and other universities to fulfill the needs of communities, and our country. To reciprocate, every formal and informal program in the country can learn from university admissions professionals about makes for successful students in higher ed, and work as opportunity “brokers” (See Dixie Ching, Rafi Santo, Christopher Hoadley, Kylie Peppler) to support interest-driven transitions between programs, and from K12 institutions into higher education.

What if we re-narrate “gap years,” and turn “drop-out” into what I heard Karina Moore, Director of Admissions and Enrollment Management at U of M’s Stamps School of Art Design called “stop out.” She and I agreed that students who become overwhelmed in their first year by things as real a drastic change of context shouldn’t have the experience devalued, and certainly shouldn’t be taught by our system that it’s the end of the road. For many, that experience could be one of the most formative of their lives…one that helps them focus, and come back to their academics with renewed perspective. That’s IF we stopped perpetuating the myth that “some are equipped, and some just aren’t.” Karina herself is a first-gen-to-college woman of color, and the topic hit home, so another question: how do we foster the rise of more professionals like her into the career? I don’t pretend to know the full answer, but I bet it starts with better college access (wink emoji here).

What if more programs were a la carte, and stopped pretending that every field in our vast world requires four years? I need to do more research, but understand, also, that it’s very hard to garner student loans for non-4-year degree pursuits. So if, for example, I went to a school in a place that didn’t realize (or didn’t offer supports for) my inclination for engineering and I decided to put my toe in the water on my own, while working another job, I can’t get a loan without committing to a multi-year program? A growing percentage of college loans are being paid back by students who never finished their degree… huh? (he offered with irony).

These and so many other terrific questions came up during the convening. I’m crossing my fingers that a re-convening is on its way. It was one of the most productive conversations on alternative credentials that I’ve attended since Mouse started designing badges in 2009. Many were converts to the potential of micro-credentials as a doorway to portfolios of rich data. All were sold that such an innovation has the potential to change how we address equity in higher ed admissions. Many left the meeting already working on par-baked ideas with new thought partners. There was intellectual momentum.

Huge thanks to Barry Fishman and Stephanie Teasley at University of Michigan for all of the hard work to assemble the group, and for the many colleagues who inspired at the meeting that didn’t get a mention here. There were so many.

A Maize & Blue Convening on Digital Credentials for Admissions was originally published in mouse_org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s one ideal scenario for fans of alternative credentialing: learners of all ages can earn evidence-based badges in a variety contexts beyond the walls of a formal learning institution (say, at an amazing afterschool program) and present them for placement or credit, the way that AP students sometimes do in the transition from high school to college.

Except, credit for those colleges = $$$, and even for well-established programs like AP or International Baccalaureate, this is less straightforward than some think. Unless your school has a giant endowment, that might be hard armor to pierce in selling the idea to administrators.

Another ideal: the same learner can use alternative credentials in the course of the typical college application process as a mark of equivalency for required courses that their school might not have offered (or they might not have known they’d need to take), which is often the case for learners coming from under-resourced public schools.

Except equivalency requires time, and multi-departmental process, and an infrastructure for making that process fair. All of this may not be a luxury that every university has while the world experiments with new ways of assessing and demonstrating skills and understanding, digital badges being one such experiment.

So here’s a third possibility: what if universities, many of which have explicit goals to increase diversity in the fields they support while also working to better match candidates for their programs, partnered with portfolio-driven learning programs in ways that benefit all stakeholders and costs very little money?

In earlier posts I talk more about Why We Badge at Mouse, and about our credential endorsement project with partners at Parsons The New School for Design. Recently I’ve posted also about an exciting new dimension to this project, funded by the National Science Foundation, where together with partners at the EDC’s Center for Children and Technology, we’ll be doing some research to find out whether youth of color from under-resourced schools benefit from badged portfolios as a course-setting factor for futures in STE(A)M. We care a lot about this work, as we’re focused heavily on how our learning experiences and content can support youth identity as we work to address the opportunity gap especially in technology, engineering, and design. We think there’s a shot that evidence-based digital credentials (badges of a certain type) can help.

Where to start:

Get people on board. We worked on building interest, and checking our assumptions with folks at the university who would be most involved. We had a concise pitch deck that talked about the program we looked to endorse, the challenge faced by our learners, and the impacts we saw possible from the university getting their brand and a few faculty involved.

It helped to have the Dean of Art, Media & Technology as our ally, and the faculty lead for the university’s pre-college programs. We pitched the project also to the Committee for Undergraduate Education (CUE), who determine 1st-year curriculum for undergraduates, the Director of the Design & Technology program, and the Director of Undergraduate Admissions.

What did we find? Overwhelming support. At each of these levels there were questions, of course. But with those questions in mind, the university saw benefits for everyone involved.

What’s next?

We worked with CUE to compare the intended outcomes of our Design League program, a yearlong afterschool experience focusing on the process of human-centered design and building tech solutions for real users, with the intended outcomes of Parsons’s 1st year undergrads. It turned out the two were a striking complement to one another. Below, Mouse badges like “Empathy” and “Iteration” are shown with 1st-year outcomes.

After realizing the material connection between our curricular outcomes, we began drafting a set of common institutional goals around which we would build a formal agreement. Here they are:

1. to increase interest among K–12 learners in the advanced study of design and technology and subsequent professional identities in related fields

2. to recognize relevant competencies and skills among pre-college learners as a way to better scaffold their trajectory between pre-college learning and higher education

3. to improve the representation of non-dominant demographics (including race, class, and gender) in the fields of design and technology

4. to improve the ways that learning artifacts (beyond transcripts and test scores) in both formal and informal K12 learning contexts can be applied to future academic and career pursuits

5. to establish a better (more scalable) “standard” by which K12 learning organizations can align efforts with higher education programs and vice versa as a means of improving “college-readiness” especially among non-dominant demographic groups

Our agreement included language about the standard that Mouse agreed to uphold, and the extent to which the university’s mark could be used by learners to support their applications — not just to Parsons, but to any school where they applied. We developed a mark that we could use on badge criteria pages, and an Endorsement Page that linked from the mark to detail the meaning of the endorsement. Ours includes things like:

• formal alignment of desired curricular outcomes
• in-person review of partner organization’s programming and pedagogy through multiple touchpoints by University stakeholders, and
• in-person evaluation and critique of project-based work product by University stakeholders

What’s in it for my institution?

In addition to what’s obvious — that every post-secondary organization should be committed to improving access for all learners — there are benefits to these partnerships. For starters, badge endorsement is an extension of a college or university’s brand. In the growing virtual landscape for post-secondary institutions, there’s new territory to blaze where brand ambassadors exist beyond a school’s alumni. If 200 badge earners share a badge publicly for an impressive well-evidenced skill like human-centered research and receive even 20 unique views, that’s a lot of positive impressions, other students, educators, and other influencers connecting a school or program with the cutting edge of their field. (And without spending a dime on advertising.)

It’s also a low-stakes way to fulfill sometimes overlooked aspects of your school’s mission and vision. You may not have aspects of your charter around equity specifically, but here’s a line from Parsons’s vision statement:

We will fulfill our mission by extending The New School’s legacy as a nontraditional academic community, nimble and responsive to change, that…Prioritizes humanity and culture in designing systems and environments to improve the human condition, an approach that draws on design thinking and the liberal, creative, and performing arts

another school…

aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world.

one more…

…seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.

And here are some other considerations:

• Endorsement processes can involve university faculty in the admissions process in exciting ways. Faculty who spot programs that present promising candidates and practices can establish more formal partnerships that attract students when considering their next steps.
• A growing number of universities use portfolios as standard or supplemental material for admissions. Badge endorsement, in most cases, will center around the portfolio practices of the program. Post-secondary institutions can help disseminate best practices, and improve the quality of applications.
• Colleges and universities depend on being situated as crucial fabric that connects communities with their economy through employers. The discourse about the relevance of traditional post-secondary credentials to employers grows more complex. Some question the role of traditional post-secondary institutions in the future of connecting skills and jobs. And while there’s no question to me about whether there’s a role, it will only become more crucial that schools can pronounce their value in the chain between all citizens and the qualifications they seek.

How can I learn more?

There are a lot of solid ways to connect with a community who are thinking about this topic. If you are a college or university, start with the Badge Alliance’s higher ed working group on google.

Read more about University of Michigan, Purdue, Penn State, and Concordia’s experiments with digital badging. Check out new work by our partners at Credly who, with Learning Machine are working on Competency-Based College Admissions through badged portfolio systems. And take a peek at how Aurora Public Schools in CO are engaging employers to endorse 21st Century and social-emotional competencies.

And if it helps to start with the basics, here’s a great TedX from Providence’s Damian Ewans, who provides perspective about the potential of new forms of credentialing.

Last but not least, we’re actively seeking new endorsement partners. Message me on Twitter @malesser, or my other contact info.

Your university can make an impact on college access without spending $$$. was originally published in mouse_org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I cringe when I hear people say things like, “I’m not a math person.” I hear it a lot as a parent. Usually, this involves other parents being cute when their child asks a question that even vaguely involves numbers. “Ask your mom, I’m not a math person.” I hate it, because I could easily be one of those people. My first and only letter grade of “D” was in seventh-grade math, and while I found a way to jump the necessary hoops after that, I never really recovered.

That “D” became a badge that mattered. In high school, having yet to encounter the right math teacher for me, or a system that would help me to see math for all of its wonder and creative potential, I opted out of of the subject entirely after fulfilling what was required.

Not a math person is a deficit identity. It’s a self-deprecating way to opt out of a whole category of competencies that, in too many ways, is not the fault of the learner at all but the fault of an entire system. My kids are still building skills like counting by 10, so I have a while before they realize how quickly they’ll surpass my own competence, but I think a lot about how I’ll respond when they ask math questions that I can’t answer. “I’m still looking for the right way to learn that myself” is my favorite so far. I won’t treat it like it’s a disorder or a genetic trait, when I know that it’s not, and I fear that it’s the attitude that we pass down when we apply bad archetypes to ourselves, not any inherent inability to comprehend the subject.

By the time that I get there with my own kids, I’m hopeful that learning systems will have undergone enough full-scale change toward embracing personalized and competency-based approaches that the educational “it” factor of yore — the got-it-or-you-don’t understanding about the human capacity to learn — is well on its way out. In the meantime, the shifting paradigm of the information age is our opportunity to realize new systems for supporting learner identity that move us a step toward that ideal.

As Senior Director of Learning Design at Mouse, I lead a team that’s committed to helping schools, informal learning spaces, and educators to empower their students to use technology as a force for good. We’re a STEM-support organization, focused closely on narrowing the opportunity gap that currently determines too much about who gets to participate in shaping the country’s creative, scientific, and technical future. Through one aspect of my work, I’ve been deeply involved in the national discussion, and early efforts to implement digital badges, through the field’s ebb-and-flowing interest in the topic over the last six years or so. To me, digital badges aren’t nearly the whole entree in realizing competency-based changes in K-12, but if that solution is some kind of gumbo, I think that badges can be one-half of the roux that holds it together.

A “badge,” in this context, is a graphic representation of a skill or competency that is displayed and accessed online, earned through a specific criteria, and links to “evidence” or portfolio data that can be reviewed by stakeholders. Badges are not — at least to the community of researchers, practitioners, and policy people who believe in their potential — merely gold stars for the web. And if the language “badge” is a barrier that keeps you from realizing them for anything but, try “digital” or “alternative credential,” and imagine them as graphical doorways to rich demonstrations of learning.

Before connecting digital badges to the types of systemic change that I think can help to solve the not a math person identity problem, it’s important to first acknowledge what’s already changing about our ideals. I love this comparison by Dr. William Watson at Purdue, who studies systemic change in education. It describes the paradigm shift from Industrial to Information Age principles in specific terms.

If we can agree on at least a majority of these shifts, then we can also agree that an Information Age infrastructure is needed to realize systems of practice that match the zeitgeist.

If digital badges are a doorway linking outside stakeholders to data about the person who displays them, let’s consider their practical potential as a tool that affords us progress toward the ideals above. We’ll add a column to Dr. Watson’s comparison to detail some of what my seventh-grade self might have gained had I grown up in what I hope is my children’s future.

Another aspect of what we have yet to discover about digital credentials is how effectively they can support the habits that we develop as young people to be thoughtful about our own learning. For example, what if we can help young people to know more about who, in their future, might value experiences that they’ve drawn from classes, clubs, camps, afterschool programs, or one-on-one work with a mentor? What if we can make those value relationships more explicit through badges?

In Mouse’s Design League, cohorts of about 30 youth per year amass well over 100 hours of experience learning the process of human-centered design, and applying that learning. Most leave with a design portfolio documenting their work toward the development of novel technology prototypes that address the needs of an end-user, applying their skills to generate tangible social impact.

Over the years, too many of those youth left our programs without understanding the value of those portfolios. Admittedly, many didn’t know that it was a “portfolio” they were creating all along, and none of them had formal support from Mouse and our partners to parlay their work into applications for college-level programs that, in many cases, share our goals and intended outcomes.

So Mouse, along with university partners at Parsons School of Design, are working to change that through formal endorsement processes, new infrastructure made practical through badged credentials, that we hope will serve as one illustration of how competency-driven systems are not only better for learning but also strengthen the pathways for young people from one stage to the next.

Design League alum, Zainab, a college sophomore, emphasizes the role that badges can play for learners beyond high school:

“Receiving digital badges through Mouse is what helped me to create my digital footprint. Recognizing the skills and accomplishments that I have developed with digital badges has validated these skills, which was especially important when I started applying to college and summer internships.”

Digital credentials are not a panacea, but they deserve the patience, rigor, and persistence that innovation requires. My colleague and our Executive Director at Mouse, Daniel Rabuzzi, is a historian, and he often reminds me that our future is not so different from our past. I liked one of his recent analogies so much that I think it’s worth leaving as food for thought. Despite the rise of automobiles near the end of the 19th century, it took nearly 80 years before our country became a car culture. In addition to the car, we needed more sophisticated roadways, new policies, fuel stations, and more. Transportation is not learning, but if we agree that a competency-based culture is what’s right for education in the coming decades, we all need to be open to the potential of new tools for getting there. We need to destroy the poisonous parts of our system that leave many of us thinking that we’re one kind of smart and not another, and build the infrastructure that we need to help every learner achieve and express their fullest potential.

View a full webinar from Purdue University’s Dr. William Watson to learn more about his badges work in higher education, or the full set of slides from which inspiration was drawn for this article.

Marc Lesser is Senior Director of Learning Design at Mouse, a youth development nonprofit that empowers students to use technology as a force for good.

Improving the Way Education Supports Learner Identity was originally published in mouse_org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why do we care so much about the project?

First, it will help guide the practical ways that Mouse carries out its mission. We’re looking to close the gap between those with access to practical academic and career tracks in STEM and those who don’t yet. To do that, our field needs to create not only new interest, but also new pathways that lead from learners’ point of enthusiasm all the way to their next step as they form that identity. If we get them excited and then send them away, trusting that someone else will grab the baton, we might not fail them entirely but it’s not enough to shift the paradigm.

We’ll know more from this research about how institutions can work together to reroute systems in a way that makes access a priority. We’ll know more about whether treating learners like budding professionals (better supports for skills to build a portfolio, endorsing credentials earned afterschool, making them more aware of the value of their work) will influence their desire to be one. We’ll pilot and test better practices for capturing project learning, and we hope to make those into shareable blueprints that learning ecosystems beyond New York can replicate and remix. And we plan to share challenges and outright failures, as these may very well be as valuable as the rest of what we discover to those watching our progress.

Here are the formal questions that our proposal asks:

Does the Design League Badge Portfolio process support participant engagement by increasing their STEM and ICT self-efficacy and interest in STEM and ICT careers?

What revisions have to be made to the existing badge and Learning Portfolio systems to enhance participants’ capacity to create Badge Portfolios that are personally meaningful and present their ICT capabilities to higher education admissions officers?

What revisions have to be made to the existing systems to ensure the continuity of the process for recognizing and credentialing youth ICT ability across the partner organizations?

Those partner organizations are what makes this work so full of potential. CCT’s Dr. Jim Diamond and team will lead this research. The Learning Design team at Mouse will lead and expand our Design League program for the project, and lead technical development of the portfolio and credentialing platform. Colleagues at Parsons The New School for Design will serve to co-design credential and portfolio systems, and involve admissions professionals from the university to advise. The DreamYard Project will host a satellite program site for the Design League in the Bronx, and also support the portfolio technology design. The project will build from years of prior work between DreamYard and Parsons to distill best practices for educators seeking portfolio-driven environments for their classrooms. The vision of the collective is that by carefully stitching together these strands of work — portfolio learning and alt credentialing — into a shared context, we can illuminate more about the practicality of creating new pathways together, and how their implementation can improve the footing for the learners we serve.

You can read the project abstract on the NSF’s website, and stay connected to Mouse for updates.