Learning should be enjoyable, even during a global crisis

Kaite Cisz, PRYDE Scholar

I received a phone call from my little sister this morning, asking when I was coming home. I have spent months away from my family this year due to COVID, and I see how much it pains my sister. Seventh grade is challenging enough, learning how to fit in with your peers, and adding the social anxiety of COVID doesn’t help. As she walks through the hallways, my sister constantly worries that she will get her friends or family sick, and as these concerns grow, school is becoming harder to attend.

Educators always want to engage their students in meaningful lessons and activities that spark educational growth, but how can we teach youth when they are continuously impeded by fears of an ongoing pandemic? Our goal this semester as PRYDE Scholars was to develop a new curriculum that children would enjoy. Although we did not set out to create a curriculum focused solely on virtual education, we’ve been guided by the belief that learning should be enjoyable, even during a global crisis, in creating a fun curriculum for youth.

Before the pandemic hit in early March, the PRYDE senior cohort was working on developing a program to engage adolescents in research. Affected by the pandemic, these dedicated students left the task of finishing “Youth Investigators” to the new junior and senior PRYDE cohorts. At first, tackling these modules was overwhelming. How could we make sure that the work done by the senior cohort the year prior was honored? However, the more I started to read the work laid out by the students in the spring, the more excited I became to help contribute to this meaningful project.

One of our initial concerns was ensuring that whatever curriculum we produced was a positive and engaging experience for students. This program would likely be their first exposure to formal scientific research. My group was tasked with creating a module that would teach students the importance of dissemination or communicating their scientific results with others. At first, our group was focused on the skills that the students would need to learn and loaded our first module draft with long research papers and supplemental activities. However, after consulting with youth educators in 4-H programs from various areas of New York State, our group quickly realized how overwhelming our curriculum was. Changing gears, we asked ourselves, how can we introduce young students to the power of dissemination in a fun and engaging way? Then it hit: social media! Children today are actively engaged with social media, so we decided to develop a module that focused on public speaking skills through social media platforms. I mean, what kid wouldn’t want to formulate a tweet about the research they just conducted? By engaging students in fun, social media-based activities we hope to have students walk away with the skills of condensing their research, while focusing on how to understand viewpoints from different cultural backgrounds when disseminating their research.

Children are “little scientists” even from a young age, always exploring the unknown and asking questions. However, one negative experience can ruin a child’s perception of a topic, so our cohort knew that we needed our modules to be engaging and fun. Although this curriculum was not formatted specifically to a Zoom setting, and we will hopefully have a better grasp on the COVID-19 pandemic when the modules are published, it is important especially now to recognize that school is oftentimes not a student’s first priority, and as educators we need to create fun and engaging learning atmospheres.