Can you teach someone to teach? Better yet, can you teach someone to teach a community to take control of their own learning?
In 2015, the inimitable Diana Nucera, then director of the Detroit Community Technology Project, brought me on to help her develop a handbook on the history of popular education and tactics for developing community-rooted technology. The goal of sharing these teaching practices is to diversify and shape technology fields to be community-oriented and build the digital capacity of neighborhoods. The more people know about the technology around them, the more they will be able to participate in shaping their environment. The handbook trains folks with more of a technical background and aren’t super familiar with teaching to go into communities to develop community-based technology projects.
Diana had an incredible wealth of materials on popular education and community technology that were developed and used for community organizing at Allied Media Projects and Detroit Community Technology Project from 2008 to 2015. We knew the guide had to be thorough without being overwhelming. Over the course of a year we organized, whittled, edited, and re-organized the curriculum. I developed a visual design for the curriculum to help people easily navigate the handbook and understand the more complex concepts.
The resulting guide, “Teaching Community Technology Handbook” introduces Community Technology as a series of educational practices, combining theories and methods by Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, Grace Lee Boggs, Bernice McCarthy, Susan Morris, Grant P Wiggins, and Jay McTighe. In New York City, the handbook is being used in the Digital Stewards training programs for coalitions of community partners to implement wireless mesh networks in Sandy-impacted neighborhoods like the Rockaways, Sheepshead Bay, Midland Beach, and Staten Island. The handbook has also been training trainers in Detroit and London.
Training photo credits: Muna Danish