Students from Around the World Slow Down to Connect, Share Stories Online

Over the past 11 years, researchers at Project Zero (PZ) have connected more than 70,000 young people from classrooms in more than 70 countries in a vast online and intercultural learning community. The Open Canopy initiative originally started out as a small experimental educational space, inspired by a journalist and explorer named Paul Salopek and his multiyear walk around the world retracing the migratory footsteps of our ancient ancestors. 

The origin story and the much broader project that the initiative, previously called Out of Eden Learn, has become are explained in a new manual for educators: The Open Canopy Handbook, co-authored by PZ researchers Liz Dawes Duraisingh and Shari Tishman, with Carrie James and Sarah Sheya, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Through The Open Canopy initiative, any teacher worldwide can sign up for free curricula known as “learning journeys,” and have their students, ages 3–19, paired with groups of learners of a similar age from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, around the world. All the students who participate enjoy shared learning experiences, asynchronously, that emphasize critical thinking, creativity, and deep understanding. 

The work is influenced by five basic principles: 

1. Slowing down to observe the world closely
2. Sharing stories and perspectives
3. Making connections
4. Learner-generated content
5. Thoughtful peer-to-peer exchange 

A project turns into a mission

In the spirit of Salopek’s journey, which continues to this day and embraces slow journalism, The Open Canopy project encourages young learners to take slow walks through their own neighborhoods. In one curriculum called The Present and the Local, for example, students carefully observe their everyday surroundings and consider what might interest their counterparts in other communities and countries. Then, they document their discoveries to share with other participants online. 

“We've [received] phenomenal photographs, hand-drawn maps, sketches,” explains Dawes Duraisingh, co-director of PZ, and “gathered incredibly rich data from around the world,” which has proved especially helpful for the team’s design-based research approach.  

But what Dawes Duraisingh says started off as “a nice project,” has, over the years, “increasingly felt like a really important mission,” particularly in polarized times where “public discourse has become more xenophobic or anti-immigrant,” she says.

A toolkit to help students get beyond the “wow, that’s cool” factor 

The online platform has developed into “a model for thoughtful intercultural exchange,” according to Dawes Duraisingh, but it wasn’t always that way. Conversing with a learner you don’t know from a different culture, even anonymously, can be intimidating, the researchers say, and in the early days students would frequently respond to each other’s work online with very simple comments like, “wow, that’s cool,” says PZ colleague and co-author, Tishman. 

One answer to the problem: A dialogue toolkit with strategies designed to “help students just go a little bit deeper,” in their responses and feedback to one other, explains Tishman. The toolkit was initially piloted by former team member and current PZ co-director Carrie James and participating teacher Chris Sloan. And the result? “A tremendously usable tool that teachers tell us they use all over their curriculum,” online and in-person, says Tishman.

Educators can help learners get the most out of the dialogue toolkit by deploying these tips shared by other teachers.