Compose Our World

Recognizing a need to engage students in deep learning, reflection, empathy, and fun, this project aimed to design and study a Project-based learning ecosystem to support ninth grade English language arts (ELA). Researchers tested the prototype projects that were developed through a design-based research process from 2015 to 2019. The study was led by Drs. Joseph Polman, Alison Boardman, and Bridget Dalton at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Antero Garcia at Stanford University.

Compose Our World

This course consists of four core projects that are organized around the following questions: “How is our world composed for us, and how can we compose our world?” Throughout each project, students cultivate habits and routines around authentic making; collaboration; feedback/revision; reflection; and the social and emotional learning components of caring, advocacy, perspective taking, and empathy. Researchers developed the projects with Universal Design for Learning principles so they are engaging and accessible to all learners.

In the first project, Project Media, students learn about media literacy and become remix artists who speak back to texts that compose their world. Next, students act as investigative journalists in What Happened Here to understand how perspective taking, time, and place shape the stories we tell. The project culminates in a narrative retelling of a personally meaningful local event. In Unearthing Humanity, students explore what it means to be human by reading stories and dilemmas of humanity and unearthing artifacts that make us human. They create an interactive museum of humanity to display their themes and to engage the public in a dialogue. Finally, students participate in Changing the Conversation, in which they become researchers producing information about issues that impact them. After conducting research and administering their own surveys, students design and disseminate multimodal messages to influence their audience.