Accepting the Challenge: Helping Schools Get Smarter about Supporting Students’ Creative Collaboration and Communication in a Changing World

Although the purpose of schools can be (and has been) debated, one common goal that most people agree upon is that schools can and should play a role in preparing young people for the complexities of the future. This goal is somewhat paradoxical in that the future is unknown. So how might schools prepare young people for the unknowable? The prototypical response has been to design learning experiences based on what is already known in the hope that the knowledge, skills, and experiences in school will be durable enough to equip students for navigating the complexities of the problems they will encounter in the future. Consequently, most of what students learn in schools is predetermined. Although we recognize that some of these experiences can be beneficial for helping students in the future, we assert in this concept paper that schools can (and need to) get smarter about the kinds of educational experiences that students engage with if we are to prepare them for addressing the uncertainty of complex problems that they face now and into the future. More specifically, we open this concept paper by briefly discussing the prototypical curricular experience that schools provide young people and how these experiences sometimes fall short in providing students with the opportunities, experience, and confidence necessary to creatively engage with, resolve, and communicate about their experiences addressing complex problems. We then introduce a collaborative creative curricular experience called Journalistic Legacy Challenges (JLC). JLCs can support students in learning how to identify, address, document and communicate about complex problems that can make a difference in their communities and in their own and others’ lives. The experiences offered by JLCs differ from prototypical learning experiences because they require young people to identify problems that matter to them, collaborate with skilled others to address those problems, develop their creative confidence, and learn how to use journalistic learning to document and communicate about their work to broader audiences.