A Lot to Learn

I keep eyes open for places where I can use what I know to help youth build a sense of agency in changing systems around them. And I mainly know places. I know how designers want places to work, how economics motor places, and how places affect people who use them. As AllBeforeUs evolves, I want to spread this literacy about place- which means a challenge. 

Teaching young people to read places may well entail teaching them the psychology and coding that make each place act as it does. This broaches marketing, design thinking, engineering, sociology, labor market theory, ecology, and plain old math. It's all teachable, especially through experience and journal-keeping. But it's also all chock-full of terms of art, references and specialized skills. The danger of leaving ideas packed in sentences humbles me. 

So the way educators use my structure of place, systems and role-play will vary with group and age. Younger students need more scaffolding and unpacking- this is a law, this is a negotiation, this is a frame- and accordingly more hands-on work to act as splash when their eyes might glue shut. Older students can delve into theories of psychology, as they relate to climate and justice and the whole messy enterprise of sharing limited space. 

I'm eager to learn how educators tailor the ideas here -- and how young people alter them. As "turkey day" approaches, then, I'm grateful for the chance to share the premise that kids can learn to make their public lives less oppressive- and eager to let many lessons fly. 

Early notes toward a lesson plan for systems reform

When I ride over cratered streets south along Manhattan's edge, I must see 20 people each day with visible health problems. I don't know how they feel overall, or what they do when they get where they're going, but they seem like they could use some help. I don't mean pity, I mean coaching to get access to the services and habits that would boost their health.

I need coaching too, on different points of self-care.  So, I expect, do you.

Rolling through the city on a bike, perhaps, leads to a sense of everything being more surreal than it seems in the pod-theater of a subway car. But there, too, we see lots of evidence of people not feeling in control of their lives. And we probably detect this in ourselves. 

Who have I pledged to write for in that context? What is my duty of elucidation, or investigation, or relief?

Public health is the problem, and public health ties to public education, and public education ties to public funding, and all this ties to public debate...which suffers under poor public health and public education, and around we go.

You can find a place along the broken wheel to stop, catch someone. help someone walk, change someone’s mind.

And maybe you can define this place's coordinates more fully if you work them out in a group. 

Helping Teens Resolve Three Systems to Live Healthily with Climate Change

IT can be paralyzing to hear that adults have been pouring carbon into the atmosphere for more than a century, leaving today’s young people to deal with the consequences of a massive uncontrolled chemistry experiment. If you ask a teenager:

“So all the adults in power decided to roll the dice on the ecosystem, and so, um, what should we do to stop the consequences?”

then you are supporting her worst fears about adult fecklessness. Or sociopathy.

The accurate message is this:

“People have always tended to confirm what they already believe and resist confusing data, yet people can overcome these limits with enough proper cues in their day-to-day lives. And with enough leadership.”

So I start by laying out the limits in human psychology- we tend to confirm what we already think, we fear losing what we already have, we obey authority, and we tend to bounce back more readily than we might expect. Once teens hear this depiction, it becomes familiar. Once they hear that adults just didn’t know to query what industrialism would cause, they feel a little bolder about what to do next.

Then we discuss climate science. We establish that climate change departs from other ecological problems in its scale and feedback loops. We cannot stop it and we cannot know unless we keep and keep gaining data how it will grow. This is liberating.

It’s liberating because it establishes climate change as a constraint. It will affect you whether or not you care about ecological issues, it will change the physical world you know, but it will not cancel the other forces that drive society. We can’t stop climate change; climate change is extremely unlikely to stop humanity more or less as we know it, but it will make social stability more challenging.

And so you will still be here. You have the chance to know more about how your life and public places will change. But you, with your cognitive limits, have to figure out how to get along with everyone else and their cognitive limits. Now here’s the good news. People can behave more sociably, charitably and patiently with certain cues from leaders…and from the physical space around us. 

Now students assume roles, which I articulate on index cards, in a real or hypothetical urban problem at a specific place. They have to figure out how to improve flood-readiness and withstand heat waves amid competing claims for affordable housing, manageable taxes, free markets, transportation, and the whole urban mess. They write each other memos (which I edit to help them build writing skill) and make a presentation to an expert jury.

Of the dozens of students I’ve taught in this module, all began with the idea that climate change amounted to a curse beyond their control and that the only way to make life better as it descended was to rely on outside deliverance. (“Call Obama!” was the shorthand in one Queens high school.) And all ended with collaborative plans for doable changes to real places, such as a campaign to compost cafeteria waste and grow food on a school roof. All these plans foster green space, local food production and social connection – just what we know will enhance resilience, adaptation and general public health in any climate.