[Best Practice] ] “Creating Teen Leadership Development Programs in Virtual Worlds”
Best Practice Submitted by Rafi Santo, Global Kids Inc.
Organization/Institution Name:
Global Kids
Project Name:
Power of Citizenry in Second Life
Name of Project Lead:
Rafi Santo
Funder for Project:
MacArthur Foundation
Project Description:
The Power of Citizenry in Second Life, colloquially known as the GK Internship Program, aims to transform GK’s approach and methodology of it’s offline afterschool Power of Citizenry Leadership Program to a 3D online environment. In the program, interns from across the world, meeting via Second Life, attend workshops on global issues, learn to evaluate educational events and projects, and develop, facilitate and document their own events or projects relating to social and global issues they care about. Program participants have held educational workshops on topics including the Role of Volunteerism in Society and Teenage life, Immigration in America, Child Soldiers and Media Piracy. The program coordinators and participants never meet face to face.
Settings in which project takes place:
Global Kids Island in Teen Second Life
Best Practice Explores the following:
Distance Learning
Distance Management
Leadership Development
Virtual World(s) or gaming environment used:
Second Life
Reason for choosing specific platform or community for your project:
The Teen Second Life community consists of many creative, dynamic and entrepreneurial youth that are at the perfect age to develop peer education skills, and the platform allows for effective live events and the creation of on the fly educational materials by teens without “expert” computer programming/development skills.
Learning objectives of project:
To support youth within the Teen Second Life community to become critically thinking global citizens, proficient in knowledge about a range global issues and developed with the leadership skills necessary to become peer educators on a range of social and global issues.
Best practice to share with the RezEd community:
When Global Kids first entered the Teen Second Life community, our first priority was to see whether the platform and its users supported the methodology around global issue education and leadership development that GK had been successfully implementing offline for almost 20 years. As part of the exploration of this question, we decided to figure out what it would mean to bring our core after school leadership development program, the Power of Citizenry, into Teen Second Life.
In one of our first projects in Second Life, Camp Global Kids, we established via a four week intensive workshop based program that the pedagogical approaches we employed our offline workshops (role play, group brainstorms, debate, media creation), ported very effectively into the virtual space. The question then for us was how to use that effective methodology to create a successful, ongoing after school program that would develop the kinds of leadership skills we were aiming to cultivate.
Our first instinct was to hold weekly workshops, as we did offline, and develop a cohort of teens within TSL that regularly attended. However, after spending almost a year familiarizing ourselves with the community, we found ourselves constantly approached by teens that off the bat wanted to run their own events, open stores, and generally create their own experiences on our islands.
This made us change the way we thinking about a leadership program dramatically. In the offline setting, the idea of public displays, whether they be peer education, public speaking or media creation for public consumption, were things that teens often had to be “leveled up to” to feel ready for after months of participation in our programs. In TSL, the challenge was not getting teens to a place where they were willing to do these things, but rather to a place where they were able to do so effectively.
The program that we’ve ended up developing addresses this desire while still infusing global issue awareness, and, importantly, developing the necessary leadership skills to effectively run projects for their virtual community.
We inform the Teen Second Life community about the program via group notices sent to our network of groups which number over 700 members, as well as through word of mouth and passing of notecards, which are short text documents that can be passed freely from avatar to avatar.
Interested participants fill out an application to apply to the program and a limited number, 6-10, are accepted as interns for four month terms, over the course of which they are required to both develop, promote, facilitate and document projects of their own as well as attend “Fireside Workshops”, interactive workshops on global issues facilitated by GK staff members and open to the TSL public.
In attending the Fireside Workshops we’re not only developing their awareness concerning global issues, but also modeling for them what effective educational workshops look like. At each Fireside, interns are encouraged to pay attention to the design of the workshop, to the techniques employed by the facilitators, and especially to parts of the workshops that didn’t work particularly well.
After the workshop ends, interns meet with GK staff for post-workshop feedback. We go through a process of identifying the elements of the workshop they felt worked well and that they’d recommend be emulated in future events, as well as things they think should be done differently. As a result, the interns are not only recognized for their own expertise in knowing what was engaging and what wasn’t, but also develop voices around how to think critically about pedagogy, global issues education, and event planning, promotion and facilitation. In paying attention to and giving feedback to professional educators, they see clearly that mistakes are made even by professionals, and that program assessment and improvement is an iterative process. Finally, insights generated in the feedback process can be applied to the interns’ own work.
For their own events and projects, interns work intensively with the staff to brainstorm topics, look to past relevant workshops from GK Power of Citizenry curriculum implemented in our offline school settings, and are supported as much as possible in the implementation of their project. After the event or project is complete, interns go through a similar feedback process with staff as the one they participate in after fireside workshops, and finally blog about their project in both a descriptive and reflective form.
Much of the methodology employed in this program is similar to leadership programs found in offline settings, though there are some important differences. The biggest one, and the one that I’d recommend any educator aiming to produce a similar program in a distance learning setting pay most attention to, is the process of communication and trust building between the program coordinator and the participants. The importance of knowing when and with which participants to talk to over skype or some other voice medium and when instant messaging, emailing, or other forms of communication are appropriate is critical for both effective feedback and mentorship as well as for the process of building enough trust that the participants will understand that they’re fully supported when they embark on public projects that often do not have very low risks of failure.
What would need to be in place (in terms of skills, staffing, infrastructure, systems, etc.) for someone else to reproduce your best practice?
A public presence in Second Life and a community of supporters.
Private land in Second Life.
One quarter-time staff member with:
- Experience in youth leadership development
- Experience in interactive curriculum design and group facilitation
- Experience with the Second Life platform and Teen Second Life community
Faith in young people’s ability to do extraordinary things!
An intern event, held by Alex Harbinger, featuring a human barometer debate.
To learn more about the program and read posts from current and past participants, you can visit HolyMeatballs.org.
Organization/Institution Name:
Global Kids
Project Name:
Power of Citizenry in Second Life
Name of Project Lead:
Rafi Santo
Funder for Project:
MacArthur Foundation
Project Description:
The Power of Citizenry in Second Life, colloquially known as the GK Internship Program, aims to transform GK’s approach and methodology of it’s offline afterschool Power of Citizenry Leadership Program to a 3D online environment. In the program, interns from across the world, meeting via Second Life, attend workshops on global issues, learn to evaluate educational events and projects, and develop, facilitate and document their own events or projects relating to social and global issues they care about. Program participants have held educational workshops on topics including the Role of Volunteerism in Society and Teenage life, Immigration in America, Child Soldiers and Media Piracy. The program coordinators and participants never meet face to face.
Settings in which project takes place:
Global Kids Island in Teen Second Life
Best Practice Explores the following:
Distance Learning
Distance Management
Leadership Development
Virtual World(s) or gaming environment used:
Second Life
Reason for choosing specific platform or community for your project:
The Teen Second Life community consists of many creative, dynamic and entrepreneurial youth that are at the perfect age to develop peer education skills, and the platform allows for effective live events and the creation of on the fly educational materials by teens without “expert” computer programming/development skills.
Learning objectives of project:
To support youth within the Teen Second Life community to become critically thinking global citizens, proficient in knowledge about a range global issues and developed with the leadership skills necessary to become peer educators on a range of social and global issues.
Best practice to share with the RezEd community:
When Global Kids first entered the Teen Second Life community, our first priority was to see whether the platform and its users supported the methodology around global issue education and leadership development that GK had been successfully implementing offline for almost 20 years. As part of the exploration of this question, we decided to figure out what it would mean to bring our core after school leadership development program, the Power of Citizenry, into Teen Second Life.
In one of our first projects in Second Life, Camp Global Kids, we established via a four week intensive workshop based program that the pedagogical approaches we employed our offline workshops (role play, group brainstorms, debate, media creation), ported very effectively into the virtual space. The question then for us was how to use that effective methodology to create a successful, ongoing after school program that would develop the kinds of leadership skills we were aiming to cultivate.
Our first instinct was to hold weekly workshops, as we did offline, and develop a cohort of teens within TSL that regularly attended. However, after spending almost a year familiarizing ourselves with the community, we found ourselves constantly approached by teens that off the bat wanted to run their own events, open stores, and generally create their own experiences on our islands.
This made us change the way we thinking about a leadership program dramatically. In the offline setting, the idea of public displays, whether they be peer education, public speaking or media creation for public consumption, were things that teens often had to be “leveled up to” to feel ready for after months of participation in our programs. In TSL, the challenge was not getting teens to a place where they were willing to do these things, but rather to a place where they were able to do so effectively.
The program that we’ve ended up developing addresses this desire while still infusing global issue awareness, and, importantly, developing the necessary leadership skills to effectively run projects for their virtual community.
We inform the Teen Second Life community about the program via group notices sent to our network of groups which number over 700 members, as well as through word of mouth and passing of notecards, which are short text documents that can be passed freely from avatar to avatar.
Interested participants fill out an application to apply to the program and a limited number, 6-10, are accepted as interns for four month terms, over the course of which they are required to both develop, promote, facilitate and document projects of their own as well as attend “Fireside Workshops”, interactive workshops on global issues facilitated by GK staff members and open to the TSL public.
In attending the Fireside Workshops we’re not only developing their awareness concerning global issues, but also modeling for them what effective educational workshops look like. At each Fireside, interns are encouraged to pay attention to the design of the workshop, to the techniques employed by the facilitators, and especially to parts of the workshops that didn’t work particularly well.
After the workshop ends, interns meet with GK staff for post-workshop feedback. We go through a process of identifying the elements of the workshop they felt worked well and that they’d recommend be emulated in future events, as well as things they think should be done differently. As a result, the interns are not only recognized for their own expertise in knowing what was engaging and what wasn’t, but also develop voices around how to think critically about pedagogy, global issues education, and event planning, promotion and facilitation. In paying attention to and giving feedback to professional educators, they see clearly that mistakes are made even by professionals, and that program assessment and improvement is an iterative process. Finally, insights generated in the feedback process can be applied to the interns’ own work.
For their own events and projects, interns work intensively with the staff to brainstorm topics, look to past relevant workshops from GK Power of Citizenry curriculum implemented in our offline school settings, and are supported as much as possible in the implementation of their project. After the event or project is complete, interns go through a similar feedback process with staff as the one they participate in after fireside workshops, and finally blog about their project in both a descriptive and reflective form.
Much of the methodology employed in this program is similar to leadership programs found in offline settings, though there are some important differences. The biggest one, and the one that I’d recommend any educator aiming to produce a similar program in a distance learning setting pay most attention to, is the process of communication and trust building between the program coordinator and the participants. The importance of knowing when and with which participants to talk to over skype or some other voice medium and when instant messaging, emailing, or other forms of communication are appropriate is critical for both effective feedback and mentorship as well as for the process of building enough trust that the participants will understand that they’re fully supported when they embark on public projects that often do not have very low risks of failure.
What would need to be in place (in terms of skills, staffing, infrastructure, systems, etc.) for someone else to reproduce your best practice?
A public presence in Second Life and a community of supporters.
Private land in Second Life.
One quarter-time staff member with:
- Experience in youth leadership development
- Experience in interactive curriculum design and group facilitation
- Experience with the Second Life platform and Teen Second Life community
Faith in young people’s ability to do extraordinary things!
An intern event, held by Alex Harbinger, featuring a human barometer debate.
To learn more about the program and read posts from current and past participants, you can visit HolyMeatballs.org.
Tags: development, teen
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jan Herder on
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Hi Rafi, thanks for the program description. This will be very helpful as I develop my virtual facilitation platform in SL. I was tickled by how parallel the process and achievements are to the RL immersive learning environment I use. In some ways a 'private island sim' is a fanciful and playful version of a classroom or school. Developmentally the freedoms which are possible in SL should be as easily available in RL but rarely are. Your insights into communication and trust building with the facilitator are similar to my experience. What I found very helpful in this process is the use of reciprocal apprenticeships. This is really helpful when there is continuity between older, more experienced students and new comers. I find that once the trust and confidence is developed between the facilitator and my students, it is easier to transfer that to less confident 'newbies.' Something like a good starter dough in bread making. Leadership skills and dispositions emerge almost unconsciously in the spirit of showing the 'youngers' the way. In many cases this is almost instinctual. This type of community building naturally engenders leaders. And when some kids simply don't want to be leaders it develops their confidence level in a supportive atmosphere.
But this reminds me of why I feel SL is such a great platform--because you have the freedom to do, to create without huge obstacles. The public/private dynamic is especially important here. I notice your reference to the time it takes to ramp up a student to feel confident to present their project to the public in RL, vs. in SL. I feel exactly the same way when I create in SL. I'm much less abashed and don't worry so much, feeling protected on my private island until I'm ready to reveal the work publicly. This certainly goes for the students as well. This feeling of safety and trust is important for confidence building. I'm wondering if you noticed any distinct differences with regard to safety and creativity and leadership building in your off line and SL leadership programs?
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Permalink Reply by Rafi Santo on
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Jan, I definitely agree with your point about reciprocal relationships. It's actually something I pay a lot of attention to in the internship program, though didn't think of it as I put the best practice together. In any given cohort, I make sure to have selected participants with high levels of skill in terms of event facilitation and developed leadership, as well as those with other skills sets, like building, scripting, or graphic design and global issue awareness so that they can take on projects jointly and experience skill cross-pollination, as well as encouragement for each other.
In terms of the question about creativity, leadership and safety, I think that there's a balance here. The teens I've worked with in TSL are more ready on the whole to do an event or express their creativity than those I've worked with offline, though I think it's important to acknowledge that those are not only two different environments, but also two very different populations. Offline I've worked mostly with high school students from inner city schools, and those that are in TSL are the types of kids that like the opportunities that the platform provides for creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, artistic expression, etc. All the same, even those in SL need safe spaces to develop the skills that they need to flourish when displaying something publicly, whether it's a piece of art or an event.
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