here in Jinja Uganda at the source of the Nile River, we need learning with a purpose of caring for the natural environment so as to protect Lake Victoria that feeds into the Nile River just a few metres from our home.  Girls4Climate, SKILLS and BusainoFruits.com are collaborating to bring experience of agro-ecological methods of farming with over 1,000 smallholder farmers to the wider community.  To encourage youth engagement we need to use modern technology such as social media, youth video making, radio etc

Thank you Janet for telling us about this work.  In many communities, uniting around caring for the natural environment seems to be an important purpose for learning for many people!  

I wonder if other folks involved in school or out-of-school projects focused on caring for the natural environment might tell us about the importance of learning with this purpose in your work?

Also, given the movement of children's learning to the home environment during the covid time -- Do those of you who are parents have some observations about the role of contributing to something bigger, for your children's motivation to learn?

One may argue that learning communities are specific types of communities. We often include questions about learning communities in our evaluation efforts.  Do you feel like you are a member of a learning community? Which learning communities do you belong to?  How important is being a member of a learning community?  How important is being a member of a learning community to x goal?  Not surprising, if these questions are asked in a focus group setting, the answers of the first several individuals will drive the remaining answers.   For example if the first respondent answers that  they are part of the mathematics learning community, folks will be more likely to answer with a subject based community but if the first respondent answers that they are part of the Black learning community, folks will be more likely to answer with an demographically based identity community. 

Qué crees que se necesita para tener una mentalidad comunitaria? ¿Cómo podemos ayudar a los niños a que aprendan el valor de la participación en las actividades de la familia y la comunidad?

¿Tienes observaciones relacionadas con la importancia de tener un propósito de aprendizaje, especialmente entre personas de comunidades mexicanas, latinx, indígenas y afroamericanas?

 ¿Qué habilidades crees que están involucradas en el aprendizaje con propósito y la contribución a la comunidad? ¿Cómo alinearse con un grupo y colaborar con fluidez? ¿Algunas otras observaciones?
Maestros, ¿Tienen sugerencias sobre cómo diseñar situaciones de aprendizaje para incluir un propósito de aprendizaje, especialmente un propósito que beneficie a una comunidad?

Gracias por incluir unas preguntas de nuestro equipo en español, Itzel!

Thanks, Itzel for expanding the questions in Spanish!  

We will be trying to bridge between Spanish and English so that people who are more comfortable in one language or another can follow the gist.

Invitamos a toda la comunidad de investigadores, profesores, amigos y familiares de habla hispana a incorporar sus preguntas en español para que podamos ampliar la conversación. Muchos de nosotros nos sentimos mas cómodos expresando las experiencias de nuestras familias y comunidades en nuestro propio idioma. Te invitamos a que nos compartas tus reflexiones y vivencias. Muchas gracias por colaborar en este tema y ayudarnos a ampliar esta importante forma de conocimiento comunitario.

Hola Itzel!, me parece un excelente video para hacer ver al público general y a los estudiantes una de las facetas del LOPI. Me interesa mucho porque justamente quisiera saber qué ha sucedido en esta época después de la llegada del COVID qué o cómo se adaptan estos aprendizajes con propósito en el contexto de espera de refugio -en albergues- y en familias cuyos procesos migratorios forman parte de sus vidas. Las restricciones de las autoridades y la saturación de algunos sitios de albergue han hecho que la crianza sea comunitaria, que el propósito del aprendizaje se difumine incluso y que se centre en solo disminuir la angustia de la espera.  En recientes observaciones que he empezado a hacer en un albergue noté en algunos niños y adolescentes que suelen participar de conversaciones de manera espontánea contando sus historias para contribuir en "tener un caso fuerte para el asilo de su familia" , asi me pregunté al observar esto si la participaciòn responda a intereses personales o comunitarios y qué otras actividades harán la diferencia. Estoy ansiosa por poner a prueba en estas poblaciones y con estas condiciones de movilidad los hallazgos de ustedes. 

Erika, 

Muchas gracias por compartir tus observaciones en los albergues fronterizos. Es maravilloso escuchar que los niños aprendan como su aporte puede marcar la diferencia en su situación migratoria. Aunque en una situación complicada, aprenden sobre leyes sumamente complejas que yo como adulta aun no logro entender. Estamos al pendiente de los resultados de tu investigación.

To bridge this conversation to English -- Erika commented that at the shelters near the US border, crowding has contributed to the interactions of families encompassing the broader refuge community, and children often take part in the conversations.  They recount their experience to contribute to 'having a strong case for asylum for their family.'  Erika added that she is eager to apply our findings to this population.  Itzel added that the children and youth learn complex laws that are not easy even for adults.

Hi George, Good to see you here!  Your question is important.  I think that the upshot of our research is that for museums to be more welcoming and interesting to people from some underserved backgrounds, it will be important for them to recognize the attractiveness for many people of working/playing together with others.  

In my view, the best guidance on this comes from Sally Duensing's articles about her work helping museums around the world to adapt Exploratorium exhibits to serve groups in countries where people are often interested in sociable exploration of exhibits rather than just solo exploration.

Also, in terms of our writings that might provide some guidance regarding social aspects of learning and exploration for the informal sector, here is a paper that may be of interest --

Rogoff, B., Callanan, M., Gutiérrez, K.D., & Erickson, F. (2016). The organization of informal learning. Review of Research in Education, 40, 356-401. 

Hi Aline, 

thank you for your comment.

I wanted to clarify that we are interested in changing the culture of teaching and learning, but not necessarily towards making it fit individual purposes. Our argument is that underrepresented students' purpose is often tied to their community and that it is important that the culture of education recognize this and find ways to incorporate this strength to better serve these students. It does sound like we are advocating for an education model that fits individuals, but at the core of our argument is allowing these students to bring and incorporate their communities into their learning experience. 

Thank you for the comments, Todd!

Yes, so many of us (like yourself!) have been working and thinking hard about how to tackle issues of making learning more equitable and inclusive. We feel bringing a focus to the purposes learners and their communities orient towards as a strength for learning is a powerful frame with a lot of utility. For example, this framework we've developed together is something that I'm using as an analytical lens to understand and explain students' experiences within a large-scale citizen science project (presenting on this at the ISLS conference). I also think "learning with purpose" has great potential as a design principle for developing STEM learning opportunities as we all go about doing design work with communities, schools, organizations, etc. -- it's a rich perspective to design around/towards.

I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts about how you (or others readings this) see this frame as supporting science learning, where you see overlaps with your own work!

Thanks for sharing Sam! Love the notion of focusing on purposes of pursuits (thinking of activity theory and the subject-object dialectic driving activity) and centering communities, especially in ways that help us recognize and desettle western only community perspectives. 

Yes! Absolutely great insight for how activity theory can serve as a useful lens for thinking about purpose in relation to a shared collective object (for those not steeped in the language of activity theory or CHAT, an "object" is essentially the objective/goal of activity). In fact, we've discussed in our group how Leontiev's notion of activity theory in particular is useful for our framework. From the ISLS paper:

"To conceptualize how students can collectively engage in learning with purpose over time and at various levels (see Smith, 2020), this framework draws on Leontiev’s (1978) notion of the structure of activity: learning with purpose requires students always move towards the motive of their activity (e.g., protect our ecosystem) through smaller actions and goals (e.g., find patterns with species) and yet smaller operations (e.g., writing notes)."

Also here's a flash talk by Josh on the subject: https://youtu.be/V3s4QEasB5k?t=132

Hi Amy,  Thanks for your comments on the video!  I appreciate your first point, that in the context of community, children are mentored by children and parents and others that they know and trust.

However, I don't think this is 'natural' -- there are important cultural differences in how communities include children in everyday activities.   In last year's NSF video, our team showed important cultural differences in whether children are seen as contributors from the start (in many Indigenous-heritage communities of Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere) or whether young children are regarded as getting in the way and excluded from contributing to many family/community endeavors (in many communities with extensive Western schooling).  You can see that 3-minute video at https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentations/1676

Barbara

Your question about how community-mindedness is connected with fluid collaboration seems to be based in the ways that families and communities include and engage with small children -- seeing them as contributors to shared endeavors or getting in the way of efficiently completing tasks.  This can also be seen in our 2020 video at https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentations/1676.  

Some of the cultural differences in sophisticated fluid collaboration are shown in our earlier 3-minute videos in prior NSF Video Showcases.  They help fill out the cultural picture of children's collaboration, initiative, helpfulness, alertness to what is going on around them.  Here are links:

2019: Impressive ways that Mexican-heritage children collaborated in a planning task and programming a computer game.

2018: The spontaneous helpfulness and initiative shown by Mexican-heritage children, especially from families with Indigenous background.

2017: The sophisticated collaboration of many Mexican-heritage and Indigenous children of the Americas.

2016: Attentional strengths for learning among Indigenous and Mexican-heritage children - being alert to surrounding events.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this all fits together, for children to become community-minded and skilled in aligning with a group in fluid collaboration!

Other folks too?  What observations have you made of these processes?  Whether they fit with our conclusions or not....

Amy, your point that in the context of community, children are mentored by older children, by parents, by other folks whom they know and trust, and have a desire to be able to do the things these role models in their life are able to do -- This observation is central to the example that is given below by Elisa García about tiny children helping to fetch water during water scarcity in Guadalajara.  

She asked a mother about this, and the mother said that her little one knows that there is a problem situation, by being around family conversation, and knows that everyone 'normally' helps with everything. So 'of course' the child helps out, feels responsibility, and wants to do the same as his siblings and other little children.  How to describe this?  You referred to this helping and learning as 'natural' and I responded that it isn't nature, it's culture.  But there isn't another easy way to refer to it.  The child has picked up on the expectation that everyone helps, based on what everyone else is doing.

I think it shows the power of expectations and example, which in the case of parts of Mexico is also carried in a cultural value of being acomedido, being alert to what is going on and helping out without being asked.

Thank you for watching and supporting our video!

Hi Graciela!  Thank you!

How interesting, Ari! The challenge is to transform academic spaces into places with purpose. That way, students from underserved backgrounds would not need to choose between participating in the practices that come when incorporating on self into higher education and what they do at home. Students could be building bridges between academia and people in their own cultural communities.

One way that people in Indigenous communities of the Americas have been successful at promoting these learning environments is by including young children in daily community life. Segregation of children into mature activities limits opportunities for learning and contributing to real-world situations. In many highly schooled communities, there is too much emphasis on “preparation for life” during childhood because children are “the future of the world” rather than seeing children as skillful contributors in the present.

I totally agree. Thanks for your comment, Itzel. It reminds me of some of the major themes in The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Adapting schools and education systems to become more family- and community-oriented is important, often challenging work.

Thanks for your comments, Ari!

Building on what Itzel said, this framework really brings into relief the need to rethink how we go about our design work to create opportunities (particularly from an equity standpoint) for learners in places like schools. Developing actual, tangible learning materials and opportunities that can work within a classroom, for example, will require making specific commitments simply due to constraints like limited resources and time. It would be disheartening to invest significant effort in what designers thought was an effective community context, only for it to not resonate with learners as much as it could have (I've been in this situation -- paper forthcoming!).

To navigate this challenge and better orient designs towards the purposes our learners orient towards, we can look to collaborative design processes that move away from a traditional researcher-as-the-expert model and instead where researchers actively seek to work with people in the community and privilege their expertise: what contexts would prove compelling, how to structure the opportunity so that learners actually have agency to contribute meaningfully?

I've only begun to incorporate Learning with Purpose into my design work in science education. We're all still figuring out how to do this work more effectively, but someone who has been doing great design work along these lines that would be worth looking at is Megan Bang and company from Northwestern. Here is a great piece: http://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2015.1087572

Hi again Amy, 

Your observation of your parents-in-law is really interesting! I would agree with you and say that not all communities foster community-mindedness. What is particularly unique to the deaf and lgbtq communities, is the need to come together to overcome barriers and adversity. Deaf and LGBTQ individuals rely on their communities for social support, validation, and to learn how to overcome challenges. So I think that sharing a struggle and having a common goal is what promotes "community-mindedness" for individuals in these communities.

Such an important point, Gloriana!  I don't know of research related to your speculation here.  Do you know of any?  Or other folks reading this -- any thoughts? This is really worth pursuing.

Literature on LGBTQ activism has shown that LGBTQ people are more likely to be activists than straight individuals, and that the activism they engage is to promote better the treatment of the LGBTQ community. That's the closest literature I can think of. 

The way I see LOPI playing a role in my research is to study the vast amount of informal learning minoritized individuals have to engage in to reach a positive identity. For example, the psychological work to reach a positive identity for queer men and women is directly tied to having access to an LGBTQ community they can learn from.

Interesting, Gloriana!  Also it may make a difference that minoritized people's reputation is tied up with how others from their group act; it reflects on them.  Which is seldom the case for the dominant group, who may think of themselves as individuals rather than member of their ethnic/racial/etc identity group -- but who don't have this impetus to learn community-minded attitudes and skills.

Hola @Itzel Aceves y @Barbara Rogof:

Desde mi experiencia en la coordinación académica en Guadalajara, Jalisco México con alumnos desde jardín de niños hasta preparatoria, me he percatado que cuando los alumnos identifican que lo que aprenden tiene sentido los alumnos se involucran hasta conseguir soluciones reales y la colaboración fluye. Se enfocan en lo que saben, en lo que les falta saber, generar ideas para resolver problemas, reúnen información, presentan soluciones y de repente se encuentran ante otras dificultades que van arreglando entre ellos mismos en el camino. Hay una transferencia del aprendizaje recibido a situaciones reales; lo mas importante para ellos es la actitud y el respeto que permite que colaboren de manera orgánica, desarrollan habilidades y adquieren conocimientos. Los alumnos lo encuentran motivante.

Hola @Elisa García!  Mil gracias por lo que aporta su descripción de cuanto motiva a los niños tener un propósito real que contribuye a la comunidad.  Me pregunto si ¿Ud u otras personas tienen observaciones semejantes en la casa?

I love what you wrote about the process, so I'm putting part of it in English too:

When students are involved to reach real goals, their collaboration flows.  They focus on what they know and what they need to find out, generating ideas to solve problems, gathering information, presenting solutions.  And when they run into new difficulties they set about addressing them themselves.  So they collaborate in an organic way, developing skills and knowledge.

Gracias por sus observaciones!

Hola @Barbara Rogof:

De manera particular en la familia es muy común la colaboración para preparar la comida. Después de un dia normal de trabajo los padres comienzan a preparar los alimentos y de manera automática los niños observan lo que hacen los padres y los imitan, pueden cortar vegetales, o picar carne, etc para que terminen rápido y coman todos pronto; asi descubren cosas prácticas del dia a dia en la casa. Actualmente en las zonas conurbadas de Gdl hay escaces de agua y las familias tienen que hacer grandes filas para recibir agua de camiones especializados; es muy común  ver no solo a las mamás sino a los niños muy pequeños, incluso que no hablan acompañando a sus padres con cubetas pequeñas para acarrear ; nadie los obliga, ellos ven que sus familias y vecinos  van por agua a formarse al mismo tiempo y para ellos lo normal es acompañar y cargar aunque sea un poco de agua, lo que puedan llevar. Los niños se sienten satisfechos de que pueden cargar y hasta presumen que puede llevar mas pues va a ser de utilidad en la casa para las necesidades diarias.

Hola @Elisa Azuara García,

Esta observación es muy interesante!  La satisfacción de poder contribuir tiene un poder enorme.  

It is so impressive that tiny children, toddlers, show such great satisfaction in being able to help their family bring water to their home from the distribution trucks, in this time of water shortage in Guadalajara.  They even want to carry more, in their little buckets, because they know that the water they carry is needed in their home.  No one makes them do this, they just see that their families and neighbors go to stand in line to get the household water, and so they want to join in even though they can't carry very much.

Bueno, tengo otra pregunta, para Ud o talvez hay otras personas que pueden contestar también -- Los padres de estos niños - ¿cómo explicarán lo que los niños aprenden con estas posibilidades de contribuir?  ¿Tiene importancia para el desarrollo del niño? En que forma?  Hemos hablado con varias madres que cuentan que es importante para el desarrollo de los niños que el motivo para contribuir "nazca del corazón."

I would like to understand more about the implicit theory of child development of the Mexican mothers who have told our research team that it is important for the desire to help to be 'born from the heart' of the child.  I think it must have something to do with their understanding the purpose of engaging.

¿Tiene algo que ver para el niño entender la meta de involucrarse? ¿Tienen ideas u observaciones con respecto a esta pregunta?

Hola @Barbara Rogoff:

Platicando con la mamá de este niño en particular, al cuestionarla sobre su pregunta ¿Cómo explica que los niños aprenden con estas posibilidades de contribuir? me dijo " pues él sabe que todo el que ocupe el agua en la casa, tiene que ayudar, así aprenden, de poquitos en poquitos" , pero en un tono entre serio que despierta cierta ternura y risitas en la mamá;  pero nunca se lo demuestra al niño; hace como que no pasa nada, pero en el fondo saben que así lo enseñan a ayudar. La mamá tiene claro que es así como aprenden, que así aprendió ella pero para ayudar en todo; no es algo excepcional, se asume como algo natural  y que tiene que salir del niño, eso es lo mas importante, no hay que decirle que lo haga, que el niño al ver a todos lo quiera hacer.  El niño sabe que no hay agua y que todos lo que conoce "andan a las vivas" para que tengan agua para bañarse y lavar, incluso si escucha cualquier camión grande estacionarse cerca de la casa se sube al sillón y  se asoma a la ventana; la gente de su alrededor habla de esta tema con preocupación, así que el niño sabe que pasa algo y todos tienen que ayudar, vea sus hermanitos y a otros niños pequeños que lo hacen.

Thank you so much, Elisa!  This is so interesting, I'll translate to English!

I had asked Elisa about the tiny children who show such great satisfaction in being able to help their family bring water to their home from the distribution trucks, in this time of water shortage in Guadalajara.  They even want to carry more, in their little buckets, because they know that the water they carry is needed in their home.  No one makes them do this, they just see that their families and neighbors go to stand in line to get the household water, and so they want to join in even though they can't carry very much.

Elisa responded that she asked the mother of one child, "How do you explain that children learn through contributing," and the mother responded, "Well, he knows that everyone who uses water in the house needs to help, and this is how they learn, little by little."  She said that it is not something exceptional for children to help; they take it as something natural to help with everything, and helping needs to come from the child.  This is the most important; one shouldn't tell the child to do something -- the child upon seeing everyone else will want to join in.  

The child knows that there is no water, and that everyone the child knows goes to the water trucks in order to have water to bathe and wash.  He even, if he hears a big truck park near the house, he gets up on a big chair at the window to check.  The people around him speak about the water shortage with concern, so the child knows what is going on and that everyone needs to help; he sees his young siblings and other little children helping too.

My comment:  Such an important theory of learning!

Hi Pendred,

The work of Dr Megan Bang, for example, offers models based on Indigenous ways for learning that promote environments for learning science in nature. They have a beautiful project that involves people learning STEM through claywork. This way of engaging seems to be a way to foster learning with purpose and collaboration.

Relatedly, the work of Dr Kris Gutierrez in afterschool programs such as El Pueblo Mágico offers ideas on how to structure opportunities for children and youth from underserved backgrounds to build scientific knowledge by creating community.

Here are some papers that may be of interest

Barajas-López, F., & Bang, M. (2018). Indigenous making and sharing: Claywork in an Indigenous STEAM program. Equity & Excellence in Education, 51(1), 7-20.

Schwartz, L. H., DiGiacomo, D., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2015). Designing “contexts for tinkerability” with undergraduates and children within the El Pueblo Magico social design experiment. IJREE–International Journal for Research on Extended Education, 3(1), 15-16.

Thank you for your comments, Pendred!

Since Itzel tackled the latter part of your comments, I wanted to respond to the first bit. It certainly is a challenge to incorporate collaboration and community-mindedness into school settings in the deep manner we're talking about here, where students see their learning as purposeful and in solidarity with their community. But we think a learning with purpose frame offers some ways to rethink how we go about this challenge.

Using a learning with purpose frame pushes on the notion of various dichotomies that need pushing on (e.g., formal/informal, in-school/out-of-school). One dichotomy that seems particularly promising to challenge with our frame is the notion of the school/community boundary. Great work (by many of the scholars Itzel lists -- see Bang et al.'s website here: http://learninginplaces.org/) has already been occurring that blurs the school/community boundary by designing programs alongside community members and having the community be at least a context for curriculum.

Learning with purpose in schools calls for designs that do more than acknowledge learners' communities but takes up the purposes they value in ways where students don't see what they're learning as only valid in school but as having relevance across both school and community. Not an easy task, as schools have numerous constraints that cannot be easily ignored (e.g., laws requiring teaching of certain standards, etc.), but a challenge we need to attend to if we're to take advantage of the reach of schools.

Hey Catherine, thanks for checking out our video! Those are great questions. Related to the first, I think that community-minded students will have done much better at navigating the pandemic by having the motivation necessary to push through pandemic-caused educational challenges. One thing that I’ve been working on is helping expose computer science students to the ways in which the (often very abstract) engineering concepts they’re learning about in class are actually used in the real world to help people. In particular, I’m thinking about a student that we spoke to who didn’t realize that computer science could be so personally relevant until participating in our program and reading about how it is applied to helping immigrants like himself. Zoom fatigue, miscommunication, and a lack of social interaction are examples of things that I’ve seen students forced to deal with, on top of their ordinarily intense coursework. So, I could totally see how students with a stronger sense of purpose, i.e. to use what they learn to help their community, would have the greater motivation necessary to overcome these challenges.

Those are my thoughts anyway… thanks for commenting!

(Here's a link to our work for more context: Exploratory Reading Groups: A Scalable Approach to Creative, Relational, and Student-Driven Exploration in CS Education)

Hey Catherine, 

I am a graduate student in Chemistry and Biochemistry, and I can add to Dustin's comment about Zoom fatigue. Many of the chemistry classes are large 200+ person lectures (now over Zoom) for the first 1-2 years after which the class sizes still remain ~50 students. It is imperative that each student have a foundation of support. For black STEM students that I interviewed during the pandemic, many stated that their cultural communities offered a foundation of support that motivated them to persist in classes. In normal times it would already be difficult to connect with other students to form an academic community. 

I do wonder whether community at home would innoculate some students from isolation. 

And, to perhaps be a little stimulating -- I recently read a good article that used the concept of "hybridizing" to analyze the complexity of the mish-mash of frames that occur when kids try to find purpose in an activity that has colliding community and school frames. Like school "authority" can clobber community "volunteerism." It reminded me its hard thinking work for kids to "find a unifying purpose" when an activity evokes multiple frames -- or that trying to achieve cultural relevance in instruction by connecting community and school frames isn't always an easy win. Any reactions to that sort of thought?

Hi Jeremy! Thanks for the great comments.

I'd love to see the article you referenced regarding kids trying to find purpose with colliding community and school frames!

You're absolutely right that students have much to navigate in terms of purpose when engaged in an activity in school that also attempts to have a meaningful community connection. The purpose of the activity does not always resonate deeply with learners if the learning still seems "encapsulated" (to borrow from Engeström) in the purposes of schools or someone else's notion of community. (I've seen something akin to this phenomenon in my own citizen science work with schools that I'll present at ISLS).

A learning with purpose frame I think has something of value to offer in addressing this. A huge part of the challenge I think is trying to rise above (or at least better blur) the dichotomy of school/community. Schools have been hubs for some notion of community, and using a learning with purpose frame would ask for even deeper engagement and blending between school and community where the purposes found in learners' communities become a focal point for work within school (sounds sort of Dewey-ian actually). In this way, it ideally wouldn't be so much "volunteerism" but on a level of demonstrating authentic solidarity with your community.

So, there's a broad vision but actually designing, implementing, and sustaining such an opportunity is a significant challenge. Inclusive co-design where teachers, community members, and researchers work together to identify productive contexts and develop needed materials I would think would likely have a key role. Megan Bang and others have some promising work here to build on.

Key to any resulting design, from a learning with purpose perspective, is that it really emphasizes the actual developmentally appropriate contribution that students can make, the agency that they have. Being able to actually "do" something, goes back to challenging that school/community dichotomy in some ways ("You mean we actually get to DO something that matters outside of school?!").

Curious to hear more of your thoughts about all this, particularly any ideas you have regarding the design work and schools!

What an interesting conversation, Jeremy and Sam! I think that learning with purpose is different from volunteerism. It is not only about solidarity or prosocial development; it is about getting things done and moving things forward in the communities they are part of, including innovation. For example, Francisco Rosado-May and colleagues have a fantastic article that addresses the Mayan value of iknal:

“a space where activities (such as accompaniment and togetherness, following up on an activity, guiding with conversations and other means of com- munication, and collaborating) are carried out and allow for the emergence of results needed by a community, including new knowledge” (Rosado-May et al., 2020, p. 86).

Many of my family members are teachers, and they have shared with me how difficult it is to design learning with purpose situations in the classroom. The institutional structures that are part of schooling, such as fulfilling the requisites of a curriculum, designed many times in line with the contents of standardized tests, sometimes make it very challenging for teachers to promote learning with purpose.

Hi Jeremy!  So great to see you here!  Your second comment reminds me of the work of Kris Gutiérrez and colleagues on the importance of "third spaces" where people with different backgrounds can blend their knowledge and ideas on an even basis -- like Anglo teachers and Mexican-heritage children conversing in whatever language comes to mind, for the sake of doing things together.  I think this is probably enhanced when people have a shared purpose.  Like when my team and I presented a poster symposium at a conference in Brazil, where there were a dozen languages used -- people were so interested in the ideas and talking with each other that they all pitched in to further the conversation. Such as a Spanish scholar explaining in broken French to help a Russian colleague understand a poster in English.  The discussion (and the camaraderie) was amazing! 

Thank you for your comments, Leigh!

It sounds like you have a wonderful project going -- challenging and exciting indeed!

Regarding your excellent question, the reciprocal effect on the community that may occur from youth contributing to a purpose valued by the community has not been the primary focus of the school/community STEM work that I at least have done up to now.

But I'm part of a team here that just received funding that will allow us to better explore the dimension you raise! This future work will be looking at STEM learning and identity in a school-based community garden setting where community members, researchers, and teachers co-design and enact opportunities that support predominantly Latinx youth in pitching in to address collective needs. Given the collective nature (e.g., across generations) of purpose in a community, we predict learning and development to occur with adults in the garden community as they engage in needed garden activity alongside youth (e.g., shifts in adult Latinx gardeners' STEM identities).

I'd be curious to hear how you've been thinking about this reciprocal effect on community in your own work or more generally.

The model that most inspires us is the one devised by colleagues at U Alaska Fairbanks called Arctic & Earth Signs that does a fantastic job of cross-generational citizen science that activates both Indigenous and western science perspectives. I don't actually know if they've measured shifts in "community science literacy" (or comparable) but it's definitely an opportunity. I will ask them! 

Hi Rick, What kind of work are you doing with the Mexican Communities in South Dallas?

Hi Rick, 

I would like to hear more about the work you are doing in Dallas with Mexican communities. Are these immigrant communities? or are these more established Mexican communities like 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation? 

Both Glorianna I believe.   For Puede Network, it seems to be generational.   I

Hi Molly, Thanks for your post!  We are hoping that using video will help parents and grandparents visualize how they could be involving children in their everyday activities, beyond what they may already be doing.

Especially with families having to do 'school' from home for the last year, we think that school people and parents (and grandparents!) could benefit from widening their ideas of the sorts of activities that foster learning.  Many everyday activities in families and provide children with important opportunities to learn both academic and nonacademic things -- and they might help provide a purpose for learning.

I wonder if you or other readers might have tried some ways of including children in your ongoing work or leisure activities?

Thanks for your comment Abbey!  I was interested in what you said about the challenges of being a 'working, busy mom looking for the most expedient way to keep things in order in my house'!  (me too...)

One thing we've noticed in our research is that many of the middle-class families put a high premium on efficiency, and so they exclude their children, thinking the kids get in the way of getting tasks done.  But many of the Mexican-heritage moms we have interviewed regard the children's involvement from a very early age to be a more important goal, since in their view it contributes in important ways to their children's development.  They say that it helps children understand that their contributions are valued, and that they learn to be part of the family (and the broader community) this way.

Hi Susan, Thanks for your comment!  And it is so great to have grandmothers (like me) in this conversation!

I wonder if singling children out for being most helpful makes it more likely that children help in order to get recognition, rather than for the reason that someone needs help?  Anyone have an observation on this?

Hi Helena,  I agree with your point about the importance of considering  the context of people being community minded. I think that you are suggesting that an important impetus for being community-minded is to protect the community from perceived and experienced threat.  Makes sense, though sometimes threat doesn't pull people together.

In our work, we are focusing on the positive value often given to learning and contributing, by observing what is happening and helping without being asked.  In parts of Mexico, this is referred to as being acomedido/a, being aware of what is needed and voluntarily pitching in.  I think that this positive value system is a separate source of impetus to community-minded ways of engaging, not dependent on threats to the community.

Relatedly, it is worth trying to understand the impetus for the cultural value system prioritizing acting for one's own self-interest; where does that come from?  Many possible answers there too...

Hi Ivana, Thanks for this!  I can see the relevance of learning with the purpose of contributing to a larger community to issues of sustainability, in several ways.  But I'm curious about what connection you make when you teach this?  

Thank you all for both the video and this wonderful conversation thread.Responding to both Andrew and Ivana and as many others have articulated, having our learning be in, with, and through community is a core challenge and gift of our lifetime. And our current Eurocentric schooling seems largely inadequate to foster these relations in everyday ways. So yes, you can have a group activity, and yes you can have teamwork - but what does it mean to actually overturn normative power paradigms of who teaches and learns and actually see these as fundamentally interrelated? I also really appreciate Andrew and Samuel's notion of how community-purpose can be a design principle for organizing our activities at school.

In my own life and work, I've taken up designing with community in three main ways: (1) organizing classrooms and participant structures that hold a common relational whole (like in a community of learners called Tutoría, drawing from Ann Brown's work), (2) including everyday families activities as contexts for learning so that there isn't really an intellectual separation or separation of communities between school and home, and (3) ultimately broadening who and what we count as "community". Is it just our family? Is it just our racial? Is it just human people who count as community? 

For me at the heart of community-mindedness is understanding that we deeply need each other -- at a familial level, at a community-level, as a unified living world, plants and animal relatives included. Community-mindedness is particularly critical at these times in human history, especially as we move through this global pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, we saw beautiful ways that mutual aid was distributed up all across the U.S.. We were organizing and being there for each other. At the same time, mask wearing at the early onset of the pandemic was contentious because I think it tested our notions of community and the choices individuals were willing to make to protect the rest of the public, to think not only for the good of oneself but for the good of the collective. And now, when thinking about vaccine distributions worldwide, the U.S. making sure that vaccines are sent to India for example is actually enacting principles of community in some ways, based on logics that protecting others, protecting the whole is actually part of protecting the self. Our interrelatedness or "we are all related" as Lakota folks say - is given new consequentiality. As we seem to be at the tail-end of pandemic in the West, it is going to be key to not forget these lesson and emergent logics of being. It is key, I think to actually keep cultivating these community-centered ethics and ways of living in our education systems as Megan Bang, and other Indigenous scholars like Greg Cajete, Leanne Simpson, Ananda Marin, Emma Elliott-Groves have written about. 

What are these edges of "community" for you? How have others tried to design with these in schools/communities? What politics emerge from it? It feels like we are at a critical opening to truly learn from this past year and reimagine the purposes of learning with communities - in a broad sense of the word. 

Meixi, the issue that you are bringing, what counts as a community? Is key. I think that actually, a challenge that the modern globalized world is facing is the fear of the "other". Anything that is different from our own ways is seen as the cause of the "problems" instead of part of a potential solution, an opportunity to shift paradigms. As a personal opinion, if we do not recognize that we are all part of a big community, if the relational aspect of existence is ignored, it would be unlikely that the big challenges get solved. I think that Indigenous Knowledge systems offer us a holistic understanding of the world and could help us move beyond. 

Yes totally. I think that's it, it's a relational aspect of existence that we need our places of learning to structure and uphold. 

Meixi thank you so much for your thoughtful post, deepening the discussion!

Barbara

Thank you for sharing that reference, Brian! Schooling has had a big role in shifting family practices. In many cultural communities, parents have been pushed away and opportunities to learn at home and in the community have decreased significantly. Then an issue arises when young adults, who did not find a job related to what they "prepared" to become, they are unfamiliar with many of the practices of the community since most of their efforts were directed towards the "academic" goal. More bridges between school and community life need to be built. 

Hi Brian,  Thanks so much for your post.  That is an amazing quote, and just as relevant today as 3 decades ago.  I'll look for that article.  Thanks again.

Thank you for watching our video Gloriana! 

I have to agree with you, I think this is only the second time I run into another person with the same name. It is such a unique and rare name.

Hi Janet, 

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. Like you mentioned, grandparents can play a bigger role than parents sometimes, since parents have been working from home throughout the pandemic. I wanted to share a little bit of my own experience with informal learning like cooking and gardening. Something I have observed with my own family is that most activities are not structured per say, I learned to cook by watching my mom cook. She did not engage in any instruction, she would simply ask me to hand her the salt, or maybe stir the soup, or sometimes asked me to get ingredients out of the fridge for her. She never specifically guided me to prepare a meal, but when I moved away from homeI realized I remembered the ingredients and even the steps to cook many of her dishes! 

What I'm trying to say here is that you do not need to create a structure to involve kids in everyday activities for them to learn. A lot of learning happens through observation and by just involving children in the process, like setting up things to garden outside. 

Charles, thank you so much for your observations!  Your work with your colleagues in the UC Links after-school program has made such a difference in the learning of UC undergrads, who have the opportunity to pitch in with purpose to the community.  (And hopefully, the kids learn too.)

I've been impressed over the years of watching this program with the transformation that many undergrads seem to make, from thinking it is their job to manage their young partners' learning to seeing it as a collaboration.  That will be so beneficial to them in their future work and parenting!  The fact that it takes effort and time to make this change of perspective shows how engrained the issues of control and transmission are in the schooling experience of many of us. (Including myself, as a recounted in my article on "Becoming a Cooperative Parent in a Parent Cooperative" in the book "Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community."

It is inspiring to know about the transformation in the perspectives of teachers as they see young students show competences that the teachers had not seen in the classroom and had not imagined!

Thank you for sharing your experience, Benjamin! I think that there is something very powerful that comes after contributing, and I agree empathy is one of those things. I have participated in programs similar to what you are describing. For example, during my undergraduate program, part of the curriculum was to connect what we were learning at the university in community programs designed to respond to the needs of communities that historically have underserved. The experience gave me a better understanding of what people really need from someone in my profession, instead of me imagining how I could use abstract university knowledge. The idea of service and transformation of injustice or unfair situations could be a powerful tool for learning and collaboration.

Hi Sue,  yes indeed.  It really helps when activities are voluntary!  I enjoyed your video too....

Hi Ron, Thanks!  I really enjoyed seeing the activity in your video focusing on the arcs that support a structure like a longhouse.

Thank you, Michele Sam, for your message.  I appreciate your point, if I understand correctly, about the importance of the specific place-based nature of each locale and its human and more-than-human participants. Or did I miss the point?

It is interesting that the distinction of child and youth came from Western assumed terminology.  Maybe together with the increase in age-batching that came with industrial bureaucracies?  Anyway, thanks for your message.

Wow, Daniel, thank you! This is inspiring!