Anacostia International Launching in February in D.C.
In February, Learning Life will launch Anacostia International (AI) — a monthly series intended to bring international affairs “east of the [Anacostia] River” to Wards 7 and 8 of Washington D.C.
Background
The United States has an enormous cultural, environmental, economic and political impact on the world. At the same time, the world is becoming more globally interdependent as transportation and communication technologies improve, and more people, goods and services move across national borders. Many of today’s pressing issues — trade, development, terrorism, climate change, disease, piracy, slavery, etc. — are often international in scope. For all these reasons it is important for more Americans to become informed and caring citizens of the world.
As the capital of the United States, Washington D.C. has many people involved in international affairs, yet these tend to be disproportionately white, educated, higher-income people clustered in the wealthier neighborhoods of the city. International affairs, however, should not be the province of a privileged few because international affairs affects everyone. Furthermore, experiencing the cultures of foreign countries can help open minds and hearts, and turn more American families on to a life of engagement with the world.
Anacostia International
Learning Life is organizing Anacostia International to help meaningfully connect more families in Washington D.C., particularly in Wards 7 and 8, to the world. AI will be composed of two kinds of events:
A country presentation seriesfeaturing two or more diverse presenters — artists, musicians, dancers, journalists, teachers, students, business and nonprofit leaders, travelers, diplomats, etc. — who will present or perform about a chosen country’s culture, history and current affairs.
An international meal seriesinviting lower-income D.C. Ward 7 & 8 families participating in Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative to taste and learn about the food and culture of different countries via metro D.C. restaurants.
The country presentations will occur every other month on a Saturday afternoon at the Anacostia Arts Center (1231 Good Hope Road SE, Washington, DC) starting in March, and will be open to the public. The meal series will occur in intervening months likewise on a Saturday afternoon at a different metro D.C. restaurant each month starting in February.
We invite individuals and organizations to sponsor AI in this launch year at the levels described below. To discuss sponsorship, please email Learning Life’s Director, Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info to set up a time to meet or talk.
Sponsorship Levels
Anacostia International Ambassador: $800
Ambassadors make possible an AI country presentation for 25 guests ($500 value), and an AI meal at a related restaurant for up to five Ward 7 & 8 families ($300 value).
Benefits of being an Ambassador:
Opportunity to take part in selection of the country and metro D.C. restaurant
Invitation for 1-2 people to be guests and speaker(s) at both events
Recognition as an Ambassador at Learning Life’s website
Special thanks via Learning Life’s email list reaching 900+ people in metro D.C.
Special thanks via Learning Life’s email list and social media pages that reach 10,000+ people worldwide
Anacostia International Country Sponsor: $500
Country Sponsors make possible an AI country presentation to 25 guests.
Benefits of being a Country Sponsor:
Opportunity to take part in selection of the country to be presented
Invitation for 1-2 people to be guests and speaker(s) at the presentation
Recognition as an Ambassador at Learning Life’s website
Special thanks via Learning Life’s email list reaching 900+ people in metro D.C.
Anacostia International Meal Sponsor: $300
Meal Sponsors make possible an AI meal for up to five Ward 7 & 8 families.
Benefits of being a Meal Sponsor:
Opportunity to take part in selection of the metro D.C. restaurant
Invitation for 1-2 people to be guests and speaker(s) at the meal
Recognition as an Ambassador at Learning Life’s website
Learning Life’s 2016 Work, and Plans for 2017
In 2016, Learning Life focused its efforts on developing and testing our new Citizen Diplomacy Initiative, which engages lower-income American families, starting in Washington D.C.’s Wards 7 and 8, in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with families in other nations of the world. More specifically, and among other things, we:
Mobilized over 30 volunteers locally and internationally to assist with dialogue organizing, research, outreach, media, document translation, dialogue interpreting, educational content development, and more.
Recruited over 20 advisors and consultants to help guide our research, planning, and project collaborations.
Developed a database of 100+ relevant funders, 120+ relevant metro D.C. organizations, 170+ embassies in D.C., 200 potential partners, nearly 250 individuals and organizations abroad, and close to 500 scholars in education, social science and international affairs.
Wrote 25+ CDI surveys, fact sheets, news and opinion posts, website pages, program and dialogue guides, and other documents, and translated key guides into Spanish, French, Arabic and/or Tagalog.
Conducted seven introductory dialogues with eight families in Washington D.C., four families in Puerto de la Libertad, El Salvador, and two families in Dakar, Senegal.
In 2017, we plan to start the family project collaborations with a photovoice project, followed by interview, research and writing projects that will pursue the families’ community interests and concerns. We will also be expanding our base of volunteers (interns, mentors, project consultants), organizational partners, and participating families in the U.S., El Salvador and Senegal. We are also working to find CDI partners in one to two new countries for 2017, likely Jordan, Palestine, and/or the Philippines.
As we move into 2017, here are four ways you can help:
1)Donate to support our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative. Sometimes small internet or transportation can prevent families from participating in our live, international dialogues, as we learned this year. Your donations help pay for those small internet and transportation costs as well as printing, snacks for our valuable volunteers, and other items that allow us to sustain and grow CDI. When you donate, please consider becoming a CDI sustainer by giving $5, $10, $25, or $50 per week, month, or quarterly through your credit card.
2) Volunteer with Learning Life: Volunteers do the bulk of Learning Life’s work. You can help with planning, fundraising, research, writing, design, video, social media, recruiting CDI families and partners in D.C. and abroad, language interpreting, document translation, dialogue moderating, and other tasks. To learn more, contact us at email@learninglife.info.
3) Shop through iGive.com, and help fund Learning Life free. Shop more than 1,400 stores through iGive, and if you make Learning Life your preferred charity, a percentage of your purchase will be donated to Learning Life at no cost to you.
4) Buying or selling real estate? Use a Referral Project realtor. Through the Referral Project, realtors agree to donate 50% of their commission to the Project, and the Project then donates half of their proceeds to Learning Life at no cost to you. From our latest Referral Project donation this year, Learning Life received $1,500.
About Learning Life & Its Citizen Diplomacy Initiative
Based in Washington D.C., Learning Life is an educational nonprofit that seeks to spread learning in everyday life beyond school walls. Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI) is a new, free program that engages lower-income American families, starting in Wards 7 & 8 of Washington D.C., in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with similar families in other nations across the world. CDI aims to nurture informed, skilled, connected, and caring global citizens through international dialogue and collaboration.
About the Research
Following on several test live international dialogues in 2016, Learning Life aims in 2017 to engage a small number of CDI youth and families in Washington D.C., Dakar, Senegal, San Salvador, El Salvador, and Amman, Jordan in up to four project collaborations, through which participants will practice certain civic skills including photography, interviewing, research, writing and public presentation. Each project will yield a skill-practicing, resume-building product like an international photo album, recorded expert interviews, research report and presentation, and opinion article. These projects are the first in what we expect will be a years-long stream of projects, each one 3-4 months long, building on the last, and intended to nurture the knowledge, skills, social connections, and attitudes of developing global citizens.
Initially, in 2017, we plan to measure changes in participants’ above-mentioned civic skills, interest in international affairs, tolerance for difference, and knowledge of the people and countries with whom/which they dialogue and collaborate. Eventually, we plan to measure other variables, including social capital. We are preparing to measure changes in these variables through a survey, a brief video interview, and a project assessment tool. The survey and video interview will be administered individually before participants start their first CDI project, and after each CDI project. The assessment tool will be used to evaluate participants’ project contributions individually and/or collectively following each project.
To better measure the impact of CDI’s international dialogues and project collaborations, we plan to administer the survey and video interview to a comparable group of “control” families who do not receive the CDI “treatment.” In 2017, this experimental research will likely be restricted to American families living in Washington D.C.’s Wards 7 and 8.
The Research Collaborators We Seek
Learning Life seeks metro D.C.-based research faculty and/or Master’s and Ph.D. students in sociology, political science, psychology, education, international affairs, or other academic fields to form a research team that will include Learning Life’s founder, Dr. Paul Lachelier and one or more undergraduate research assistants. The team will further design and carry out the above-described program evaluation research.
The team’s work will include literature review; research grant applications; survey, interview and assessment tool design; administration locally and in abroad; aggregation and analysis of results; and research write-up for popular and academic publication. We expect the team to meet at least once monthly while team members carry out their respective program research responsibilities in between those meetings. Team members should be willing to commit for at least one year (undergraduates excepted), starting in January 2017.
Benefits include the chance to participate in evaluating a cutting-edge international initiative, to learn from a collegial team of researchers, gain resume-building research experience, get published, and help empower lower-income families locally and abroad. Collaborators will not initially be paid, but we hope for some research grant funding.
Interested faculty collaborators should ideally teach or have experience teaching research methods, and a solid record of publication in peer-reviewed academic journals. Interested graduate research collaborators should ideally have: completed at least one research methods course; some survey, experimental or program evaluation research experience; a demonstrated interest in a professional or academic career in international affairs, education, and/or social science; and a willingness to use their Master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertation to advance the team’s research. Owning a car (for meetings with DC families) is a plus, as is fluency in Spanish, French or Arabic.
Interested collaborators should email their resumes to Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info.
Inspirations for Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative (or, Character, Connected Learning and the Future of Power)
Citizen diplomacy is far from new, but Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative (FDI) takes a fresh approach to this old form that draws on particular works for inspiration.
Diplomacy can be simply defined as the management of international relations. Professional diplomats handle official diplomacy between nations, but citizens can also get involved in conspicuous or inconspicuous ways in what is known as “citizen diplomacy.” Conspicuously, famous athletes, musicians and actors, like the basketball player Dennis Rodman, U2’s Bono and actress Angelina Jolie sometimes intercede in international issues, like nuclear proliferation, poverty, or violence against women, via widely reported statements, visits, productions, or events. Often much less conspicuously, “ordinary” citizens get involved in international sport, travel, business, cultural or educational exchanges. However, much of this citizen diplomacy is and has long been undertaken by relatively privileged middle and upper class people who have the social and material means to learn about and travel the world.
Fortunately, the spread of the internet, personal computers and smart phones has the potential to democratize diplomacy, that is, to concretely engage more people in international relations, for better or worse. For worse, terrorists and computer hackers, for instance, can use these technologies to wreak international havoc for political purpose. For better, “virtual exchange” or live dialogue via the internet has the great, and at this early stage largely untapped potential to nurture mutual understanding, trust and cooperation between people who have little to no connections outside their country, or even their local community.
Virtual exchange does not guarantee positive results though. Much depends on its design. To inspire and plan Learning Life’s FDI since late January this year, I have drawn on a number of readings, the most foundational of which are briefly discussed below with reference to FDI.
The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye
Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye’s 2011 book, The Future of Power, lends Learning Life’s FDI an international context and significance. In the book, Nye seeks to help prepare political leaders for exercising power in the 21st century, particularly the soft power of persuasion — based on a foreign policy widely respected, a culture people aspire to, and political values we live up to — in contrast with the “hard” powers of military and economic coercion. Nye sees two power transitions occurring in international relations: a power shift among states increasing the power of countries like the “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India and China), and a power diffusion from national governments to non-state actors, whether this be Al-Qaeda, Avaaz, or Twitter. The power shift among states is not new in human history, but power diffusion is. The diffusion is to a great extent due to improvements in communication and transportation that increase the power of social networks.
Accordingly, “[t]o be credible in a century where power is diffusing from states to nonstate actors, government[s]…will have to accept that power is less hierarchical in an information age and that social networks have become more important. To succeed in a networked world requires leaders to think in terms of attraction and co-option rather than command. Leaders need to think of themselves as being in a circle rather than atop a mountain. That means that two-way communications are more effective than commands” (Nye 2011: 161) and “empowering others can help us to accomplish our own goals” (Nye 2011: 21).
Nye’s book thus recognizes that growing numbers of non-state actors large and small, like Learning Life, are stepping into international relations, often as, or through social networks. While despotic governments seek to control cross-border networks, Nye argues that open, democratic governments should “promote and participate in” these networks, so long as the latter seek to do good in the world (Nye 2010).
Connected Learning, by Mizuko Ito et al.
Inequality has always existed, yet hundreds of millions of people across the world have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades due substantially to economic growth and trade. Nonetheless, poverty is still widespread, and inequality is increasing as the fortunate few have grown much richer since at least the 1980s. In this context, a group of scholars recently teamed up to answer the question: how can education be made to work for more people in a very unequal world?
The result is a 2013 paper on “connected learning” that both validates and inspires our approach with FDI. “Connected learning addresses the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning, intergenerational disconnects, and new equity gaps arising from the privatization of learning. In doing so, connected learning taps the opportunities provided by digital media to more easily link home, school, community and peer contexts of learning; support peer and intergenerational connections based on shared interests; and create more connections with non-dominant youth, drawing from capacities of diverse communities” (Mizuko et al. 2013: 4-5).
Six principles define connected learning: it (1) is driven by students’ interests; (2) focuses on experimentation and producing things that nurture (3) lifelong academically-oriented skills and dispositions vital to success; taps into (4) peers as well as (5) parents, teachers and other caring adults (e.g., mentors and advisors) for feedback, contributions and/or guidance in learning; and (6) forges an “openly networked” learning environment by linking school, home and community, and taking advantage of the internet to access information, fellow learners, and other resources. Learning Life’s FDI follows this connected learning approach by:
(1) involving lower-income parents in their children’s learning through international family-to-family dialogues (2) tapping into the internet (email, Skype, browsers) to work with interested youth, families and organizations worldwide (3) focusing our international dialogues on accomplishing projects that yield skill-enhancing and resume-building products (4) mobilizing caring adults as volunteer mentors, project consultants and language interpreters
The result is a novel approach to learning that empowers lower-income families through dialogues and projects linking the local to the global.
The Importance of Non-Cognitive Factors
A now large number of studies (e.g., Farrington et al. 2012, Pellegrino & Hilton 2012) point to the importance of non-cognitive factors, whether these be skills, strategies, attitudes or behavioral dispositions — like conscientiousness, motivation, deferred gratification, perseverance, time management, sociability, teamwork, curiosity, help-seeking — to success in school, work and life. The non-cognitive factors contrast with cognitive content knowledge in particular fields, like math, engineering, computer science, political science, or literature. Cognitive knowledge is less associated with success, though as I have previously noted, it is associated with better memory, comprehension and problem-solving.
Among the scholars who have conducted research on non-cognitive factors, Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economist James Heckman looms large. Heckman, who specializes in the economics of human development, offers compelling evidence that non-cognitive factors like those mentioned above, or what he calls “character,” matter more than performance on academic tests (Heckman, Humphries & Kautz 2014). Further, he provides evidence that early investment in character-building as well as cognition not only in youth but parents and communities can improve graduation rates, health, employment, and reduce crime and incarceration in the long term (Heckman 2013).
Heckman’s work, and the larger literature on the importance of non-cognitive factors informs our focus on developing character — particularly kindness, openness, tolerance, perseverance, curiosity, personal growth, and helping others — through international dialogue, collaborative projects and explicit discussion of these character traits. Our ultimate goal is to nurture more informed, skilled, connected and caring global citizens, yet we do not expect such citizens to develop in weeks or months, but years. Learning Life thus envisions working long-term with particular families in a gradually growing number of communities worldwide.
These are the works that inform and inspire FDI’s approach. I encourage readers working to make our world a better place to look deeper into these works.
Heckman, James. 2013. Giving Kids a Fair Chance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heckman, James, John E. Humphries and Tim Kautz. 2014. The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ito, Mizuko, Kris Gutiérrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, S. Craig Watkins. 2013. “Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design.” Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.
The United States has an enormous cultural, environmental, economic and political impact on the world. At the same time, the world is becoming more globally interdependent as transportation and communication technologies improve, and more people, goods and services move across national borders. Many of today’s pressing issues — trade, development, terrorism, climate change, disease, piracy, slavery, etc. — are often international in scope. For all these reasons it is important for more Americans to become informed and caring citizens of the world. 
Road SE, Washington, DC) starting in March, and will be open to the public. The meal series will occur in intervening months likewise on a Saturday afternoon at a different metro D.C. restaurant each month starting in February. 
