Empowering Problem Identifiers

The more schools and educators work to tear down the false boundaries that have constrained student thinking for years, the more empowered students will be to start thinking about the world as a place that they can truly change.  Currently many middle school students engage with social issues through the lens of reading literature.  Every year, many 8th grade students learn about prejudice and racism through the eyes of Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.  While those discussions in English class might help them see the prejudice at their doorstep, many more possibilities exist.  Future classrooms could have a class focussed on social justice and students woudl explore this concept through multiple lenses, not just using Scout Finch's view, but many.  Students would explore this topic in story, in numbers, in science, and throughout history.  Then, taking these ideas and sending them around the world, students would explore this topic through the views of students their age and the idea of social justice is not just a static idea on the page, but it is a problem in their world to be addressed.  

 

Many of today's educators focus on how students need to be creative problem solvers, but often times that asks that we want students to be reactionary and not proactively engaed with their world.  The more that students approach topics and tasks in a variety of formats, with a variety of voices, the more connections they make.  However, once they start seeing how learning and the world connect, the more they see disconnections - problems to be solved.   This is the goal of education - to have students feel so connected to the world and knowledge around them that they see how they can use that knowledge to have an impact on the world.  The examples below are just the tip of the iceberg and they don't quite represent the fullest potential of students as problem identifiers, but they aim to show how even small steps towards these skills empower students to change the world around them.