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Closing the Democracy Gap: a Connected, Effective and Agentic Project

The research that I undertook as a major part of my Innovative Learning journey sought to answer the following driving question: “How can authentic PBL products requiring student innovation be leveraged to help students develop agency skills?” As such, the project curriculum that was developed and implemented is central to understanding the learning that I undertook.

My intention was to build a project that contained the three necessary components that my research suggested would lead my students to Intrinsic Motivation and Authentic Agency Development. To recap, that meant 1.) student work had to be visible to communities that they cared about, 2.) that students had to perceive that they could solve the problem effectively and creatively, and 3.) that students would have freedom to design their project and show their learning in ways they wanted.

To attempt to solve this problem, the project that was designed had students developing resources to educate uninformed voters in order to help them avoid voting against their own interest. The project was done in collaboration with our local Registrar of Voters, who would include student work in this year's voter guides. The rest of this section, of course, is designed to shed more light on this project and the learning that happened (for both student and teacher) as a result.

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