Student Centered Learning Conference

For the Student Centered Learning conference I attended Session A for the first round, which was “Exploring Mastery collaborative, a Competency/Mastery-Based Education Program, Using a Culturally Responsive Research Design”. This session explained a research project being done by NYU in school’s throughout the city which uses a mastery based program and culturally responsive curriculum to work with students in their schools. While the session was very informative of the program, I felt as though the majority of it was them explaining what they did, but did not provide any information really on how the practices could be implemented in other spaces. This session was however where I saw the most support for purposeful play in the conference. They had us do a photovoice activity at the end of experiences we felt capture mastery based education. While the activity was rushed, it still held a lot of value and is a very unique activity.While photovoice is typically a research method, it was utilized as a creative activity similarly to a purposeful play activity.


My second session was, “Student-Centered Learning is Political! The Role of Youth Activism, Voice, and civic Readiness in Learner-Centered Education”. This session was set up more as an open conversation for everyone in the space to speak about their experience and opinions of Youth Activism and Youth Voice. Two of the student researchers had been in this session, and it was the point during the conference when I felt the ideas of leading with were most prominently held. The facilitators of the session took a seat in the circle and allowed the conversation to flow, and the researchers were able to share both their experiences in  their schools, and aspects of their research project. This varied from the end of the conference where there were many issues with the way they introduced the student researchers, spoke over them, and re-said exactly what they had previously said. While that had been their attempt at promoting students at the center, it failed to represent leading with and failed to promote a space where the student researchers were equal to their other researchers.