My name is Kofi and I grew up navigating multiple worlds, traversing between the hallowed halls of New York’s elitist private schools and the survival-oriented streets of the Bronx. My parents were as deeply committed to excellence as they were to the social justice movements they participated in, so, between independent assignments, planning meetings and demonstrations, my school week never ended. From an early age, I learned how to synthesize my experiences at the welfare office with class ski trips, and to maintain my friendships with trust fund kids, veteran organizers and the corner store crowd that never seemed to have anywhere else to be. Translating people and cultures became a joyful experience, so I soon expanded my neighborhood to include Harlem, El Barrio, and the Village, but Brooklyn and Queens remained exotic locations across the international border known as the East River. I am eternally grateful to my parents because they let me explore and instilled in me a lasting desire to both serve my community and always pursue knowledge. Eventually, I even moved to Brooklyn.
Soon after college I had the privilege of traveling through the entertainment industry from Senegal to Ghana, India to South Africa, Brazil to the Dominican Republic, and I was deeply impacted by the shared experience of so many young children in these vastly different cultures and landscapes: bright faces and sharp minds missing hours of schooling to work in fields or trash heaps, fetching water or collecting firewood for hours, and when school work was finally undertaken, the lucky ones working beneath naked, flickering light bulbs if not by candlelight or kerosene. Why? The birth lottery, or, as Xavier de Souza Briggs describes it, the geography of opportunity. These experiences caused me to reorient my goals and compelled me to return to graduate school to pursue skill sets that would allow me to contribute to finding “solutions” in the context of global poverty. I wanted to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, to understand rapid urbanization, as well as the barriers to rural development.
This brought me to MIT to study Urban Planning and eventually to D-Lab where I began to work closely with Amy Smith on a curriculum that challenges traditional approaches to “development” where people living in poverty are relegated to being passive recipients of technological solutions and, instead, to encourage and enable people living in poverty to become creators of technology solutions. A theme of amplifying the voices of people who are generally excluded from the processes that affect them the most emerged, and I threw myself into developing a curriculum that introduces design thinking to people without any formal education, then invites them to contribute their knowledge and skills to defining a problem and, in about three days, making a prototype. This curriculum, called Creative Capacity Building, was the basis of my thesis and was developed in post-conflict Uganda; folks around the world have been trying it and refining it over the last 8 years in settings ranging from refugee camps to classrooms to community-based maker spaces. Most recently, I have begun translating elements of this curriculum for use in local afterschool programs in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and Roxbury, Massachusetts. But this curriculum is no panacea—pursuing it has opened serious questions for me about the limits of this work in terms of generating sustainable social and economic change.
These projects have marked me with a burning passion for the transformative possibilities of hands-on, experiential learning that invites young people to explore their own creativity, insights, and knowledge as valid sources for creating solutions to real-world problems. Watching students in small rural villages in Uganda find the same joy and excitement as students in rural Mississippi when they turn their own concepts into functional three-dimensional representations revealed what appears to be the universal power and potential of making. Far beyond the practical skills learned of using computers, machines or tools, which are also important, the most powerful aspect of this work to me is the visible self-confidence and expressions of pride, optimism, and possibility among participants—some kind of magic can happen when a person begins to view themselves as a change agent, as someone who can solve problems, offer solutions, rally support and move their community forward.
In addition to continuing at D-Lab, I’m now a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Education exploring the intersection of learning through creative problem-solving and the pedagogies and policies that can address the inequities in access that correspond with the geography of educational opportunity. In other words, I’ve come to think of technology creation by everyday people, not just specialized engineers, as a powerful lever that I would like to see democratized through educational practices that emphasize the critical thinking, collaboration, and cross-cultural communication skills that are essential for learners, workers and social change agents in the 21st century. Simultaneously, I see through my work with young adults in Mississippi that access to these types of strategies and resources is constrained by the complex impacts of racial segregation, suburban sprawl and rural underinvestment on education policy and practice. What brings me to this class are my wonderings about whether technology can be effectively and equitably used as a lever for ensuring that every learner experiences the magic of making, regardless of whether their school is in a rural or an urban area, in a moneyed or unmoneyed school, in the U.S. or around the world.