Globalizing Local Learning

The way history has been taught is failing in democracies around the world.  Politicized textbooks and boring instruction has been causing students to check out of engaging with history, and is disconnecting young people from the skills, mindsets and dispositions needed to solve problems and contribute to democracy.  Learning science has shown that inquiry-, project- and place-based learning provides the kind of deep insights and growth that students need to succeed as citizens of the future. This kind of learning has only been accessible to elites, because there have been no clear norms on assessment, poor training for teachers and no infrastructure support to manage the process of this kind of learning and collaboration with community institutions at scale.  Got history, in partnership with Area9, the world's leading adaptive learning platform, aims make high quality local project-based learning the norm, both in online and in non-digitized environments.

We are solving the problem that around the world, young people are suffering from history teaching that makes them feel excluded, disempowered and stressed.  In the US, for example, 70% of students are bored and 80% are stressed out by school (Yale), while a survey conducted by got history found that 65% of students find that history classes have a negative impact on their readiness as global citizens. 

There are many factors contributing to this reality:

- Politicized school boards argue chiefly about what interpretation of history should be taught, not whether any of the teaching has any effect

- Publishing companies are vying for the profits from selling textbooks that have little positive impact

- Testing companies are vying for their share of the profit from standardized tests that either devalue history (through a focus on language arts and math) or value fact-regurgitation. 

- Digital platforms have not yet been used to enable place-based and project-based learning

- No concerted effort has been made to activate community institutions as partners in achieving civic learning outcomes:  they have been treated as sources of content and edutainment.

- There are no standards for measuring learning outcomes from place-based experiences

Our solution is quite simple. We create the tools and infrastructure that museums and schools need to act as inspirational and engaging project based learning  partners. This includes

1) A library of templates/project plans on high impact local learning projects (eg. youth led Public Fora, historical tours, exhibits etc. ) that help museums and teachers envision and execute engaging projects 

2) Professional development on implementation as adaptive learning modules (on Area9 platform) that allow us to upskill and reorient teachers and museum educators towards achieving learning outcomes 

3) A process for hosting co-creation labs between local schools and museums to create teams that reimagine learning and create concrete opportunities for learning and engagement

4) A community infrastructure that allows collaboration and learning/data collection across the network to refine and spread best practices and advance policy change on how curricula/history instruction is structured.

Our solution is directed primarily towards serving those young people who currently lack the sense of identity, belonging, connection, community and agency that they would need to succeed in the economy and global society of the present and the future.  Depending on the school and the community, the number of young people affected by this deficit and the reasons thereof will differ; it can be caused by anything that makes them feel different, weak or excluded. In many school systems this is the vast majority of young people. 

We have listened to their needs.  We have organized a youth network, conducted surveys and held workshops and heard the resounding call for opportunities to learn that are active, local and engaging.  We have also heard the voices of grown-ups who grew up feeling excluded and disempowered by history education:  it is with their voices in mind and in our hearts that we designed this solution. 

They are underserved by an education system that was built for a world that no longer exists, in which history was a tool for defining nation-states and creating specific loyalties and preparing people for defined roles within an industrial economy.  We live in a globalized world in which everyone has access to information and power, and in which everyone must be prepared to constantly learn, adapt and orient themselves towards the common good. 

With our solution, we want to ensure that every young person is able to experience learning in their community that allows them to feel rooted, seen, grounded and empowered to act for the good of all.  We need a radical re-imagination of history education, and creating local learning experiences that give young people power, voice, and connection is an important building block towards achieving that goal.  

Our solutions align with several of these challenges. The learning experiences we create increase the engagement of learners in their physical environments, supported with an online platform.  The platform includes strategies and tools for peer interaction, and guides the students' independent work.

The tool is useful, but we also have this model accessible offline, in low-connectivity settings.  The templates are for collaborative projects and hands-on learning that are also implementable with no more than a google-doc.

Through the PD modules we are building with Area9, we support teachers to adapt their pedagogy, integrating place-based, action-oriented learning and facilitate personalized instruction.

We have tested this model in Kansas City across 23 school districts with 14 museums. It is spreading like wildfire and we have demand from 25 regions around the world. The platform in question is already established in several countries in Europe, all of whom have expressed urgent desire to integrate the museum-based local learning units and projects that we design. We “just need water” to adapt the modules to the online system, adapt them with local partners, and create the high quality PD to support adaptation at scale. 

Having spent many years apprenticing with leading practitioners and researchers in innovation at Ashoka and Innosight, we designed it from the get-go based on a rigorous analysis of unmet stakeholder needs and jobs-to-be done.  With a NIC-based systems-change model for impact (see attached image), we aim to transform the entire system of history education world-wide. 

We believe that this solution can be catalytic and spread rapidly, because our market research through museums and schools across the world has confirmed the urgent and pressing need for this solution, and our pilot has proved the ease of implementation and impact on students.  

Now:  350,000

One year: 300,000

Five years: 10,000,000

Goal:  To strengthen democracy by increasing the number of students who feel belonging and are inspired, informed and empowered to engage as citizens for the wellbeing of all.

• Student participants in learning experiences will report and increased sense of identity, belonging, connection to the community and of personal agency.  Participants’ learning outcomes will be tracked by conducting a survey to determine the number of them that realized the outcomes intended. (Already developed in partnership with Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project)

• Participants will gain skills on leadership, problem-solving, critical thinking, research, political discourse and changemaking.  The outcomes will be measured by rubrics integrated into the learning experience templates and forms, or--where possible--into the adaptive learning platform on which they will be delivered.  

• Museum educators will progress in their understanding of the multiple ways in which they influence civic growth and learning of young people.  Progress will be assessed through the built-in tools on the adaptive learning modules we will develop in partnership with Area9

• Classroom educators will progress in their understanding of the multiple ways in which project-, inquiry-, play and action-based learning activates civic growth and engagement and will be more able to play the role of “guide on the ride” vs. “sage on the stage”.  The progress will be assessed, again, via the built-in tools on the adaptive learning modules we will develop in partnership with Area9.

Got history is the catalyst of this work, and is a non-profit, but we operate in partnership with Area9 (which is a for-profit) and other non-profit networks, such as the American Alliance of Museums, EuroClio and the Learning through Engagement Network in Germany.  

got history? has 2 full-time staff, 7 part-time staff, and over 50 people working part-time out of their roles at other partner institutions (see above).  In short, the solution team is an open team-of-teams that is growing every day.  We are currently building out (with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's NILS team) the infrastructure. 

Our team is uniquely set-up to deliver large-scale systemic impact.  Got History was founded in 2018 as a US-based, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Got History's Founder and CEO, Fernande Raine, is a visionary systems-change entrepreneur committed to strengthening democracy with the power of better history teaching. After spending much of her undergraduate years in Germany on student government and democracy building efforts in the former Soviet Union, she completed a PhD in History at Yale. She then joined McKinsey and after a few years was recruited to launch the social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka in Western Europe.  In addition to launching several projects at Ashoka (including an analysis of models of systems-change leadership with McKinsey), she has deep expertise in applied innovation and product design, which she acquired during a 1.5 year sabbatical from Ashoka at Clay Christensen's firm Innosight. She has a very unique combination of systems change, historical, academic and personal skills and dispositions that allow her to act as a catalyst of open fluid teams.  Area9 is led by Dr. Ulrik Juul Christensen, who has been called the "Elon Musk of EdTech", and is recognized worldwide as an expert in learning technology. He has pioneered adaptive learning, data-driven content development, simulation and debriefing technologies. He is responsible for the strategy of Area9 Group’s businesses, that span from purpose-built platforms for optimization of business processes for large corporations over digital product design to corporate training based on intelligent, adaptive learning.  Together, they bring vision, ambition and excellence in execution.

Our commitment to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team runs deep, and is reflected in the diverse nature of our board (60% BIPOC) and in the specific effort we make to empower and encourage teachers and educators to step into their full selves as changemakers.  One of our founding team members of the collaborative team in Kansas City, Ovie Oghenejobo, has said repeatedly that his work with the got history is his source of hope and inspiration that he himself can make a systems-change difference. The same sentiment has been repeated by museum educators who used to see themselves as content distributors and are now discovering their role as innovators and transformational changemakers.  That is exactly the effect we hope for.  

We are aiming to create the infrastructure that will allow everyone to lead, from the teachers, the students, the museum educators.  We believe we are living, in the words of Ashoka's founder Bill Drayton, in an "Everyone a Changemaker World".  Everyone must be prepared to lead and take action in the complex world in which we live.  We hope to break the hierarchical, top-down nature of education by creating space and celebration for the kind of project-based learning that inspires community, leadership and agency across existing barriers.  

I am applying to become a Solver because I learn in community, and the Solver Community is one full of resources, people and ideas that would help us achieve more rapid and effective scale.  The reason why I have structured my organization as an open fluid team is because I know (much of) what I don't know and I love finding people who can expand the horizon of my vision by adding pieces of the solution that I could not figure out.  The kind of people that we need at this stage are precisely the ones that you have in the Solve community and that I have little access to on my own. We need help with business model design and creative thinking around scaling and implementation through technology and media partnerships.  We need help thinking about the use of digital media.  I also learn from people who are struggling alongside me, because in doing joint problems-loving we help each other, hold each other and validate one another's intent.  Being a part of MIT Solve's global network would be an honor, for people in your network are inspiring, and I know that we could learn so very much from being in your community. 

We already have a solid footing with school systems and with the Museum networks of America, and have developed this product based on rigorous analysis of “jobs to be done”and demands expressed by teachers, educators and students.  However, we would very much like help in thinking about how to ensure that we 

A) use best in class technology to support the user network and community and practice 

B) are able to adapt the online tech enabled model to any low-tech environment

C) Design the right web interface for our learning collaborative so that it becomes a platform that inspires connection, behavior change and co-creation and does not seem like a static page of content being pushed to the outside world

D) Develop messages that resonate globally so that we can connect people across cultural, educational and historical frameworks

I and have not been able to fully review all of the Solve members, but in general, we are particularly interested in partners who can help us with network management, business model design, UX design, digital civic engagement, and messaging. 

Many of our projects are geared towards helping young people of color explore jobs in cultural institutions (which are traditionally extremely homogeneously white in their leadership!). In Kansas City, we have integrated our projects in the Real World Learning initiative, attaching "Market Value Assets" to each project, as they are set up to prepare students with concrete skills they need in the market.  We aspire to make learning about history a source of inspiration for young people to engage as active participants in shaping the narratives and cultural institutions that weave the fabric of our communities.  We would be honored to be considered for this prize.  

We would be honored to be considered for this prize, as we believe that our solution is specifically geared towards using machine learning to help young people connect with their communities and benefit humanity.

We would use this prize to focus our efforts on spreading the kinds of projects that engage young people in reflecting on the power of human beings to create a better future for humanity.  The humanities are about strengthening our human collective imagination:  we aspire to have every young person growing up with the sense of connection to their own humanity, to that of others, and to the beautiful potential we have to create a global society in which all can thrive.