My 2024 SXSW Edu (Part 1)

• AI Ethics Engineer
• Digital archaelogist
• AR Playground Engineer
• Time architect

Just a few future job titles students work towards on the “Creative Frontier” described at SXSW Edu 2024…the first live session I attended this year.

The Creative Frontier: AI & the Making of Immersive Reality

SXSW Edu offers me an annual opportunity to re-energize my creative juices. Though I am seriously retired, I will never grow tired of learning and thinking about learning. This year, I decided to be more engaged than I was last year, when I was still recovering from my back problem.

So, I paced myself, balancing rising exhaustion with wanting to get as much as I comfortably could from the conference this year. As the days wore on, I hit fewer sessions, 

Obviously, I can only comment about the sessions I attended. There were literally hundreds more that I did not attend. Knowing the keynotes would be available online, I skipped those. Several unifying themes emerged as well as some excellent “stand-alone” presentations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is not “coming” — AI is here and has been for a while. With all the scary headlines about AI (some call it a “plagiarism engine”), it felt good to hear from educators already working with AI about current & future beneficial uses. 

Two top-level take-aways from the various AI sessions I attended:

• Use AI as a tool — not for an output.
• You need a human in the loop.

Both of these cautionary notes reflect concerns about how AI can “hallucinate” answers, especially if the AI draws too heavily on everything available on a subject out on the internet. Instead, one teacher focused the knowledge base on the class curriculum and created a  first-line homework helper. With that in place, when a student emails her for help, she can refer them to the chatbot first, then check back with the student later. Increased student understanding and reduced required teacher response — win-win!

Seeing outstanding teachers show its value makes me curious to learn more.  That’s pretty much what drove Marc Cicchino to hold the “New Jersey AI Literacy Summit” — because his staff couldn’t find a conference nearby to attend to learn more about AI. He described how they pulled this conference together in short order but staged an effective learning experience for his audience of educators.

And that got me to thinking about a possible Southern Colorado AI Summit we could hold here… 

Storytelling

“Those who cannot speak the past cannot navigate the future.”
— Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw

Storytelling speaks to my soul, as it does for most people. We tell stories to make sense of the world. When educators use storytelling to engage learners, they tap a universal language. In recent years, we’ve diversified representation to include various types of learners in our more modern stories. That, too, helps connect the individual with a pathway to knowledge.

Perhaps the most powerful use of storytelling is to evoke the students’ stories. When student writing goes into the trash, no wonder they don’t care. But elicit authentic storytelling that comes from their lives and their world, tie the story to real world solutions, and students will engage. Teach them to see the stories in their lives and give them the tools to tell “self-designed stories” and their understanding thrives.

One group of students set out to tell the story of a dangerous local intersection. By assembling live video footage of stop sign violators, the students told a story that prompted police to increase patrols there, making the intersection significantly safer. When students see storytelling lead to real-world solutions, that encourages them to work to improve their world even more.

Mental Health

Several sessions sought to address our ongoing youth mental health crisis. Echoing last year’s session about the need for death education in our schools, one presenter wondered why we require health education classes but not mental health classes.

Students then tend to think of “mental health”  as “having problems,” rather than how you deal with challenges. This results in a lack of language to talk about what’s going on in their lives. Rather than learning how to discuss feelings, students learn disorder-oriented language. Rather than saying they are nervous, they think they have an anxiety disorder. Rather than feeling sadness, they think it’s clinical depression. 

The Intersection of Storytelling, Mental Health, and Education

Dr. Napoleon West spoke about how everyone starts with self-talk that becomes a personal narrative. For struggling students, though, all too often that narrative turns negative based on outside forces.

By having the student journal and investing time listening to the individual, we can boost their positive self-talk. “Superhero therapy” encourages students to see themselves as a superhero, complete with origin story, allowing them to see themselves in a different light.

Dr. West’s recommendation for our mental health crisis boils down to “classroom and system-wide affirmations in the voice of the affirmed” — stories that recognize the student and their struggles.

Nothing shows our mental health crisis more than repeated mass school shootings that traumatize entire communities. When 21 students & teachers died in the Uvalde school shooting of May 2022, a top-level crisis-response team offered help — that was totally tone-deaf to the community. Initial flyers showed white children & adults and offered psychotherapy referrals — all in English.

Wrong, wrong, wrong — a more sensitive team of therapists took over to implement a community art therapy project called “Uvalde Love”. Knowing people mostly needed to spend time together to start healing, they based their response on the simple guidance, “Collective trauma needs collective healing.”

Rather than therapy sessions, they announced “Tacos & Tiles” get-togethers with colorful bilingual flyers. These brought people together to eat tacos (always a draw!) and make small tiles that would later be assembled into a large mural. Talking and sharing and all the key elements of “therapy” just occurred naturally in this setting.

People came to realize although they were not at the end of their suffering, they were at the start of their healing.

To be continued…