Building Smart, Resilient Communities and Schools: Using a Technology Platform to Transform the Social Determinants of Education with our Nation’s Most Vulnerable Populations

Young people spend more time in school than anywhere else outside of home (National Research Council, 2007). By the time a young person graduates from high school, they have spent almost 16,000 hours inside of school buildings (Schools for Health, 2015). More than a decade after the release of the groundbreaking Green Schools: Attributes for Health and Learning report, the research community has made it clear that environmental exposures inside of school buildings impact student health, well-being, thinking, and learning (Schools for Health, 2015). More recently, studies are beginning to demonstrate the ways that environmental factors found in and outside of schools interact with powerful structural forces such as race, place, space, and waste in overlapping and complex ways (Size, 2007; Akom, 2011b; Bullard et al., 2011; Powell, 2015; Shiva, 2015). As a result, the school building itself, as well as the neighborhoods where children grow up, represents a critical opportunity to intervene and increase the resilience, health, and well-being of our nations’ most vulnerable population—our children.

We start here because even though research provides strong evidence of the benefits of healthy buildings and communities, the cumulative impacts of poor school buildings and impoverished neighborhoods often do not get the same type of attention as test scores and curriculum. This is because the links between neighborhood environments, school facilities, health, and access to opportunity are subtler and less overt. For example, in the United States many schools were constructed well over 50 years ago. As a result, researchers have found lead in the paint, arsenic in the water, PCBs in the windows, and asbestos in the ceilings and floors (Akom, 2009; Liu & Lewis, 2014; Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016; Herrick et al., 2016). We are at a point where the rural, urban, and sub-urban American educational infrastructure is so dilapidated and dysfunctional that it is creating “Toxic Toddlers,” while the very school lunches that we feed our children are increasing the childhood obesity epidemic. The impacts on health, well-being, and the ability of people and places to be resilient are profound. One in three children exceeds a healthy, normal body weight and childhood asthma is a leading cause of student absenteeism, accounting for 13.8 million missed school days each year (National Collaborative on Education and Health, 2015). With so many students missing school, test scores are becoming a reflection of the social determinants of education happening outside of the classroom, and less about learning.

As a nation, we have an obligation to provide nurturing, supportive, and healthy learning environments that increase resiliency in our neighborhoods and schools by helping young people transform the social determinants of education and turn adversity into opportunity.

In this article, we first discuss resilience to foster a better understanding of the concept at an individual and school/community level. As educators, we spend a lot of time thinking about green schools, sustainability, net-zero, and zero waste, but we do not spend enough time thinking about the role that resiliency plays in transforming educational outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable populations. When you look at things like test scores, high school graduation rates, and college attendance, youth of color in general, and Black, Latinx, and indigenous youth in particular, are being systematically held back by visible and invisible social forces (e.g., structural racialization and implicit bias) from reaching their full potential inside and outside of the classroom (Fergus, Noguera, & Martin, 2014). As a result, we need to better understand what role resiliency plays in how students succeed and the ways in which trauma and adversity inform students’ experiences, so we can create educational environments where all students feel safe, learn, grow, and thrive (Akom, 2011a; Tough, 2013; Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015).

Next, this article explores the role of community and culturally responsive technology in building more resilient schools and communities. Technology has the power to transform our democracy, making it more transparent, efficient, and inclusive. In big and small ways technology can help young people engage in community design decisions related to food access, land use, public space, and civic infrastructure – as well as ensure that vulnerable populations have a voice in transforming the social and material conditions that are impacting their everyday lives. Here, we explore the role of technology in building resilient communities and schools through a youth- and community-driven participatory technology platform called Streetwyze. Streetwyze is a mobile mapping SMS platform that collects real-time data about how people are experiencing neighborhoods and schools. Its state-of-the-art technology allows users to find goods and services and take action on important issues, serving as a connection hub for community transformation. Streetwyze’s people powered place-making approach (See Figure 1) enables students to share stories, integrate social media, and make data interoperable, accessible, and “mappable” by allowing youth and community members to act as “information catalysts” capturing and uploading community assets, place-based ratings, priority areas, and digital narratives on a single, easy to use, mobile platform. By demystifying planning processes and making invisible community assets visible, Streetwyze bridges the gap between “top down” professional knowledge and “bottom up” local knowledge to elevate youth and community voice and build healthy, resilient, and sustainable neighborhoods for all.

Figure 1.

People Powered-Placemaking Framework. Adapted from Right 2 Root Campaign of the Community RE/Constructions 3.0 Initiative: Conceptual designs for equitable development in N/NE Portland, by RADIX Consulting Group LLC, Center for Public Interest Design and Salazar Architect. 2016. Copyright 2016 by RADIX.

Toward an Integrated Understanding of Resilience

Grit vs. Resilience

Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellowship winner, and a gifted public speaker, discusses in her TED talk on grit (over 14 million views) the ways in which grit – defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” – is an essential characteristic in helping young people overcome adversity.

Duckworth’s research is important to the green schools movement because she begins to address the critical question of why some students – given similar talent, intelligence, and resources – accomplish more than other students in similar educational environments. In attempting to answer this question, she determines that grit is related to how much you can inspire yourself, access your passion, and sustain your motivation over time (Duckworth, 2016; Lechner, n.d).

How Does Grit Differ from Resilience?

According to Duckworth, grit and resilience are related but not the same thing. The subtle distinction between grit and resilience is that resilience is the optimism to continue during moments that may seem futile, impossible, or difficult to overcome in the moment. Grit is the perseverance over time toward longer-term, more sustainable goals (Tough, 2013; Duckworth, 2016). Put more simply, resilience involves the ability to bounce back from adversity.

Research shows that exposure to traumatic events can have a significant impact on emotional well-being and academic performance in the classroom (NCTSNSC, 2008); especially for Black students and students of color (Lewis, 2003). Children who have experienced traumatic experiences may demonstrate “fight or flight” responses (NCTSNSC, 2008). Without proper training and skills, teachers, administrators, caring adults, and other professionals may negatively interact with young people who have experienced trauma and not help them build grit, resilience, and master the art of overcoming adversity (Goldman et al., 2016).

What is a Resilient School?

Resilient schools are not created by accident. Instead, they are the result of community-engaged resiliency planning by committed individuals and institutions. From our work with schools and community-based organizations around the world, we have collected the following best practices for increasing resiliency in schools and neighborhoods. This is not an exhaustive list and, because this is a relatively new field of practice, we expect this list to expand overtime.

Resilient schools are places where all students regardless of race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other areas of intersectionality thrive in a regenerative ecosystem of caring, supportive, and rigorous curricula. Resilient schools thrive because they understand that resiliency is not experienced by individuals alone. Rather, resiliency is a collective experience as well as an individual experience, and addressing resiliency in all forms is necessary to build sustainable classrooms and communities. Resilient schools leverage human-centered design and state-of-the-art technology (when available and accessible) in ways that help vulnerable populations improve health, wealth, and increase access to opportunities. Resilient schools utilize community and culturally responsive technology and pedagogy that promote youth-driven resiliency by ensuring that youth, parent, and community voices are placed at the heart of school planning and decision-making processes.

Resilient schools create living learning landscapes that integrate rigorous racial and social justice curricula with models of sustainability that produce efficient, renewable energy; hydrological water management; school gardens; organic meals made from locally sourced food; zero waste; cradle-to-career pathways; and low carbon emission transportation for all students. Resilient schools strive to incubate next generation climate scientists and energy innovators from low-income communities and communities of color. They are places where young people are the lead designers, engineers, artists, innovators, and the “CEOs” and “COOs” of classroom and community operations through a co-production model with adult allies. Resilient schools are community hubs for eco-literacy, digital literacy, sustainable development, community engagement, cross-sectoral collaboration, innovation, and youth-driven design thinking (Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, 2015).

Addressing Resiliency in the School Environment

Now that we have defined what resilient schools are, the question remains, How do we build resiliency inside classrooms and communities? To address the questions of scaling resiliency across schools, the Institute for Sustainable Economic, Educational, and Environmental Design incubated and launched Streetwyze in 2015. As described earlier, Streetwyze is a national participatory technology pedagogy, platform, and process that has been recognized by the Obama Administration, PolicyLink, and Atlantic Magazine’s Citylab as one of the top 10 digital technology platforms and processes that can help schools and communities build smarter, more resilient, more sustainable, and healthier neighborhoods and schools from the ground up (Ross, 2017; Misra, 2016). Streetwyze was piloted and implemented in three high school programs in urban, mostly low-income areas from 2011 – 2014 (Van Wart et. al, 2010). Today, Streetwyze can be found in urban, suburban, and rural locations in California, Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Minnesota, Colorado, and Tennessee. Most recently, Streetwyze was launched with First Nation Maori populations in New Zealand. A full description of the model, as initially implemented with cities, is available here (Akom, Shah, & Cruz, 2017).

The Challenge

Building smarter, more resilient neighborhoods and schools requires significant shifts to address the root causes of structural racism and other areas of intersectionality that have led to opportunity gaps, as well as comprehensive place-based innovations that increase social cohesion, localize food and energy systems, and advance democratic participation practices. This is important because one of the main challenges facing the green schools movement are the ways in which low-income communities and communities of color are often locked out of conversations about how to improve their schools and communities and revitalize their neighborhoods. First-generation models of community engagement have struggled with getting diverse, equitable, and inclusive community input, which is an essential ingredient for building smarter, more resilient schools and communities. Furthermore, traditional models of education reform, food justice, and community revitalization rarely provide vulnerable populations with the tools they need to achieve equitable community development, and often fail to address the role that technology and community-driven data can play in aligning infrastructure investment with addressing real community needs. As a result, a significant opportunity is missed to demonstrate how the power of local knowledge, community-driven planning, smart tech, and creative place-making can improve the social, cultural, and economic health and resiliency of our schools and communities.

The Streetwyze Solution: The Model in Practice

What makes Streetwyze unique is its ability to combine people powered place-making with cutting-edge technology, social equity, and social media so that young people can engage in health promotion, community development, civic engagement, and social activism (Flicker et al., 2008). At the core of Streetwyze’s use in schools is the belief that youth have the capacity to make transformative change in themselves and in their communities, and that encouraging youth to become critical thinkers through participatory technology can support scientific inquiry and lead to transformative social change (Flicker et al., 2008).

Streetwyze is designed to be used with a youth facilitator, teachers, or adult facilitators working with youth-serving organizations or directly with schools and is premised on the notion that youth are active agents in their own transformation. The model is most effective when youth are initially grounded in the local history of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other systems of interlocking oppression (Akom, 2009, 2011a, Akom et al., 2016). Second, it is important to focus on young people’s emerging ‘assets,’ ‘agency,’ and ‘aspirations.’ In this regard, Streetwyze works best when embedded in an asset-based and collective impact framework that organizes young people around common agendas, shared progress measures, mutually reinforcing activities, and a culture of collaboration. Third, young people should be given the freedom to use culturally and community responsive participatory technologies that enable them to share their own stories of grit, resilience, and self-determination (Ridgley et al., 2004; Strack, Magill, & McDonagh, 2004). As such, Streetwyze introduces a more expansive notion of youth cultural production, one that posits young people, and the technology that they use, as central subjects to knowledge production and underscores their ability to actualize their agency for personal, social, and community transformation and the building of formal and informal social capital and community cultural wealth (Akom et al., 2008; Yosso, 2005).

Streetwyze’s human-centered design and community engagement platform and process provide three essential capacities for schools and community-based organizations looking to build more resilient schools and neighborhoods. These include:

• School and neighborhood capacity to put forward a vision of resiliency and assert a set of community priorities that flow from that vision;

• School and neighborhood capacity to assess and visualize what’s working and not working and develop (or select) appropriate solutions based on a community and student’s unique racial, cultural, gendered, and other intersectional experiences in neighborhoods and schools; and

• The capacity to build community voice and power to get resiliency efforts resourced and implemented.

The capacity to build power is important. When school and neighborhood resilience planning processes are conducted without building capacity within the community for visioning and mobilizing, these efforts risk becoming empty investments that sit on a shelf with little chance of being implemented.

All three of the capacities listed above are required to enable school and community revitalization and equitable community development to reach their full potential. Streetwyze’s ambitious goal is to ensure that every person has a voice in the structures that impact their daily lives so that each person has the opportunity to transform the social determinants of education and improve the places where they live, learn, work, play, and thrive (Akom et al., 2016; Misra, 2016; Ellison, 2016).

The following two case studies show how Streetwyze helped youth in East Oakland, California and Auckland, New Zealand map access to local, fresh, healthy, and culturally appropriate food, and transform food deserts into food oases.

Streetwyze in East Oakland (2011 – 2014)

In East Oakland, California leaders at ISEEED, Youth Uprising, Castlemont High School, and PUEBLO worked with youth leaders to “ground-truth” public health data to identify a food desert in their local community. Leaders organized youth into teams of three – with each team trained and responsible for conducting street-by-street assessments of their portion of the study area, identifying, and locating grocery stores, liquor stores, and/or any other type of food/retail outlets.

Teams were tasked with the following:

• Verify the location and correct information of all retail outlets or grocery stores documented in regulatory agency databases (e.g., Alameda County Public Health Department).

• Verify the type of retail outlet as defined by the local community (liquor store, corner store, grocery store, ethnic food store, smoke shop, gas station, etc.).

• Locate and map any additional food retail outlets and healthy food locations not included in regulatory agency databases.

• Collect written data for the above three tasks on paper maps and in field notes, as well as documentation through pictures and audio field-notes of observations (Akom, Shah, & Cruz, 2017).

Ground-truthing revealed the majority of retail food outlet locations were liquor stores and corner stores, rather than grocery stores. East Oakland youth researchers further found that the top three non-tobacco or alcohol related products available at these stores were chips, soda, and candy/confection-items (i.e., Snickers, Skittles, Honeybuns), many of which had high sugar, fat, and salt content. Table 1 shows an itemized list of the most sold items (as reported by store owners) at seven food retail outlets on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland.

Table 1.

Itemized list of the most sold items at seven food retail outlets on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, California (Akom et al., 2016)

Most Sold Items	Frequency (# of store owners reporting)
Alcohol	7
Cigarettes	7
Chips (i.e. Doritos, Cheetos, Takis)	7
Soda (i.e. Coke, Pepsi, Mtn. Dew)	6
Candy (i.e. Snickers, Starburst, Skittles)*	5
Other confection (i.e. Honeybuns, Mrs. Fields’ Cookies)	5

^*Some candy-bars contain levels of protein high enough to be recognized on FDA nutritional standards, however most calories from candy-bars come from sugar

Public data showed there were 50 grocery stores within the bounded area between 35th and 90th between International Boulevard and MacArthur Avenue. This gave the appearance that this area was a food oasis. Once this public data was ground-truthed, validated, and verified, it came as no surprise that there were only three grocery stores; the rest were liquor stores or corner stores. Using the Streetwyze people powered place-making process; youth were empowered and gained confidence not only in the authenticity of their findings, but also as ‘people powered place-makers,’ linking their local knowledge to transformational local action.

Streetwyze in New Zealand with Maori, Pasifika, and Indigenous Youth (2018 – 2019)

In New Zealand, Dr. Ann Milne’s “Rehumanizing Education” project partnered with Streetwyze to ground-truth the University of Otaga’s Department of Health and Nutrition food survey of 2016. The youth-driven “Rehumanizing Education” project surveyed 48 people to uncover barriers in accessing culturally appropriate fresh and healthy food for Maori, Pasifika, and indigenous populations. Similar to the Streetwyze project in East Oakland, the Maori youth found that low-income students and students of color live in food insecure places. More specifically, the “Rehumanizing Education” project found that many Maori students and adults shop at weekly flea markets. In addition, 10% of those surveyed reported using emergency or food bank services, 20% used food vouchers and grants to help buy food, and 70% reported buying food from fast food restaurants where the food was of poor quality.

Youth uploaded data and visualized their findings on the Streetwyze human-centered design platform and concluded that their community was a food desert due to the prevalence of unhealthy outlets, fast food as barriers to accessing fresh and healthy food (Woodham, 2011). They concluded that it would be better to call their neighborhood a food swamp, which they defined as an area where there is plenty of food, but the available options are less healthy (Woodham, 2011; Tupe & Tupe, 2018).

The Streetwyze Solution: Lessons Learned

The Oakland and New Zealand case studies illustrate a few key lessons. First, using Streetwyze in an educational setting enables K-12 students and teachers to collect real-time data on what is working, what is not working, and what needs to be improved around the social determinants of education so that students and teachers can build resilient communities and classrooms. In the case of East Oakland, the following outcomes were achieved to start transforming the social determinants of education and building more resilient schools and communities:

• A farmers market was opened at the local high school.

• Liquor stores were restocked with healthier and more locally and culturally appropriate food.

• A public bond measure was passed to fund the development of a central food commissary and urban farm to serve the local community (Akom, Shah, & Cruz, 2017).

Second, these case studies show that when educational leaders approach this work using only public data (secondary data); they are relying on data sets that could potentially be insufficient and inaccurate at the street-level. The challenge when it comes to 21st century social determinants of education data is how do we integrate official knowledge (i.e., secondary data) with local knowledge (i.e., primary data) in ways that make data more valid, reliable, authentic, and meaningful from the perspective of vulnerable populations?

To answer this question, Streetwyze’s pedagogy and platform focuses on two areas of resiliency when working with neighborhoods and schools: 1) what teachers can do in classrooms to increase resiliency by using Streetwyze to improve youth-driven design with vulnerable populations; and 2) what schools, districts, universities, families, and communities can do by leveraging Streetwyze to build resilient schools and neighborhoods. Both areas are briefly outlined below.

Streetwyze supports teachers in classrooms by:

• Increasing young people’s positive self-identity and equipping them with the necessary mindset to become critical thinkers and better navigate STEAM and social justice identities without having to choose one over the other.

• Increasing science and technology skills and competencies by exploring issues that are relevant to their subjective experiences as Black youth, indigenous youth, students of color, and rural youth dealing with extreme poverty.

• Increasing STEAM aspirations, attitudes, and achievement by introducing young people to STEAM mentors, as well as contributions made by mathematicians, scientists, technologists, designers, architects, engineers, and planners who look just like them and share similar cultural and socioeconomic histories.

Streetwyze supports schools, districts, families, and communities by:

• Training school staff and parents about race, power, the environment, historical trauma, climate change, and the importance of youth-driven climate resiliency planning in the face of growing climate disruption.

• Training school staff and parents about eco-literacy, digital literacy, creative place-making, and creative place-keeping to improve access to opportunity and achieve equity goals.

• Co-facilitating youth participatory action research trainings on building trust and social capital and strengthening the social fabric of neighborhoods and schools.

• Increasing school capacity to put forward a youth-driven vision of resiliency and assert a set of youth/community-driven priorities that flows from that vision.

• Increasing school capacity to visualize strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and develop appropriate solutions based on a community’s unique experiences and priorities.

• Increasing school capacity to build community voice and power, and to get resiliency solutions resourced and implemented from a youth-driven perspective.

• Increasing parent engagement – training parents on the social determinants of education, mapping community assets, and building resiliency ensures that children experience consistency across home and school environments that extends into the broader community.

• Guiding educational organizations past trauma-informed care and toward healing-centered engagement, and building resilient cultures that inspire teachers, school staff, parents, and students to thrive (Ginwright, 2018).

Streetwyze focuses on these areas because real-time, youth-driven data creates stronger, more resilient communities when young people have relevant local knowledge and direct experiences that are not otherwise visible or accessible to public bureaucracies, governments, and educational institutions. To build smart, resilient schools and unlock the multiplying benefits of youth-driven resilience planning for neighborhoods, youth must be viewed as assets and key actors in restoring the short- and long-term economic, social, and environmental vitality of their communities (Movement Strategies Center, 2017).

The Opportunity

The Streetwyze strategy for building resiliency in neighborhoods and schools is based on a simple premise: The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution and the more residents who participate in their community’s solutions, the more effective those solutions will be. Young people, teachers, administrators, community groups, artists, activists, advocates, and everyday people working to improve their neighborhoods rarely have the opportunity to integrate their lived experience into planning processes, big data sets, and computer simulations through participatory technology to improve resiliency planning processes in their schools and communities. This is what makes the Streetwyze platform and process innovative and transformational.

A framework of principles was developed with schools and community-based organizations from around the world to strengthen the fields of youth- and community-driven resiliency planning and implementation through community and culturally responsive technology and democratizing practices that engage vulnerable populations in building more resilient schools and communities (see sidebar). Heat waves, droughts, sea level rise, PCBs, lead, arsenic, asthma, worsening air quality, and economic and environmental racism disproportionately impact low-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities (Movement Strategies Center, 2017). To adequately address these challenges the framework calls for new forms of partnership, cross-sectoral collaboration with youth, and placing community voice in the center of the movement for change.

Streetwyze’s platform and process can play a vital role in building resilient schools and communities so that young people can help drive the development decisions happening in their communities. Streetwyze enables hyperlocal, regional, and global cross-sectorial collaboration, and uses data visualization to measure resilience “hot spots” and “cool spots” from the ground up. This framework can be considered a “living framework” because real-time community-driven data, big data, and predictive analytics are relatively new fields of practice in resiliency planning and implementation; this framework will be refined and evolve as these fields expand over time.

While the primary audiences for this framework are schools, universities, and grassroots and community-based organizations looking to leverage technology, the power of local knowledge, and real-time community-driven data to increase resiliency in schools and communities, it is anticipated that Streetwyze will also be useful to public sector officials who are responsible for protecting our schools and communities from increasing climate chaos. Using Streetwyze technology to build resilient schools provides young people with a critical opportunity to be at the center of building smarter, more sustainable, more connected classrooms that enable schools and communities to reallocate resources, foster meaningful relationships, and develop place-based interventions that support all students.

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for building resilient communities and schools because resiliency is highly dependent upon the population in question, the challenges they face, local infrastructure, and access to institutional resources and privileges, among other factors. However, digital technology and the power of local knowledge have the potential to facilitate increased resilience across a range of contexts (Woodard, 2017; Akom, 2015; Akom, 2017) As 21st century educators, it is our challenge to find strategies that level the playing field for all students and build resilience across contexts. To maximize opportunities that build resilience in children, this article, as well as recent research, suggest that there should be less focus on “changing children” and more focus on shaping the environments where they, live, learn, work, and play for positive youth development and healing-centered engagement (Smith, 2012; Ginwright, 2018). Given current demographic shifts, more and more children from diverse backgrounds are coming into public education, and some may not have easy access to technology. Yet, for the first time in history a majority of low-income Black and Latinx populations own their own smartphones (Table 2), which can play an important role in helping to bridge and decrease digital divides (Perrin, 2017).

Table 2.

Smartphone Use by Black and Hispanic Populations: Percentage of U.S. adults who have broadband home or a smartphone, by race/ethnicity and income (Perrin, 2017), (Pew Research Center, Sept. 29-Nov 6, 2016)

Home broadband
	White	Black	Hispanic
<$30K	58%	51%	47%
$30K	86%	80%	76%
Smartphone ownership
	White	Black	Hispanic
<$30K	61%	63%	69%
$30K	85%	85%	88%

Note: Whites and blacks include only non-Hispanics, Hispanics are of any race

Black and Latinx populations are more likely to rely on smartphones for a number of activities, including looking up health information or looking for work (Anderson, 2015). As a result, leveraging tech tools, community asset mapping, and engaging youth in resiliency planning are critical ways to start building the next generation of urban, suburban, and rural technologists, community planners, climate scientists, and energy innovators from low-income communities and communities of color. Providing K-12 educators, universities, and grassroots and community-based organizations with community and culturally responsive technologies and pedagogies like Streetwyze should be an essential component of building more resilient schools and communities with our nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Figure 2.

Spectrum of Community Engagement. Adapted from iAP2 Spectrum of Stakeholder Engagement, by iAP2, International Association for Public Participation. 2018. Copyright 2018 by iAP2.

Figure 3.

Streetwyze Community-Driven Resiliency Framework. Adapted from Movement Strategies Center, Community Resiliency Planning, 2017.

Social Determinants of Education.

Social, economic, and physical environments heavily influence whether students are successful in school. Social determinants of education suggest that in-school factors, while important, account for no more than a third of the differential performance of students on tests. Out of school factors, including family income, parental education, and a multitude of health issues appear to account for the rest (Huang et al., 2013; Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, 2015).

Out of school factors include such things as:

• Access to healthy food

• Housing

• Transportation

• Healthcare

• Adverse childhood experiences

How might focusing on the social determinants of education change how we approach green schools and education, particularly for the most vulnerable populations?

People powered place-making involves the full spectrum of community engagement (See Figure 2). It involves students, community members, teachers, and staff who lead, design, co-develop, co-produce, implement, and evaluate the development and engagement processes that are driving impacts and investments in their neighborhoods.

Culturally Responsive Technology.

Culturally responsive technology (CRTech) is a form of pedagogy that honors and intentionally bridges students’ cultural knowledge and lived experiences with new technology tools. In particular, CRTech helps students examine the relationship between technology, identities, cultures, and communities.

Given the increasing ubiquity of digital technology in our lives, the evolution of tools that increasingly allow for individualized creation with technology, and the proliferation of technologies that mediate social relationships and community action, CRTech that reflects these shifts are necessary. And, as we strive to build greener, smarter, and healthier schools and communities that embrace diversity, equity, and inclusivity, the need for techquity – the fusion of equity, technology, innovation, and design with culturally and community responsive pedagogies and practices – has never been more critical.

CRTech builds upon the Ladson-Billings term Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (1995). As Ladson-Billings (1995, 2008) explains, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy is committed to the collective empowerment of students and consists of three distinct and interrelated components: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. CRTech adds a fourth critical component: Technology – and frames these components toward addressing specific principles:

• It is participatory and student driven.

• It foregrounds race, racism, gender, and other axes of social difference in technology, design, purpose, and development.

• It challenges traditional paradigms of technology as a way to engage in discourse – on race, gender, ablism, etc. – that is informed by actual conditions and experiences of people of color and other vulnerable populations.

• It is used to develop students’ understanding of and engagement in larger social issues, maximize students’ critical analysis, and allow for the maintenance of racial/cultural identities.

• It provides a deeper understanding of heritage and vernacular culture, empowerment for social critique, and appreciation for cultural diversity.

• It is transdisciplinary, drawing on ethnic studies, gender studies, and computer science, to name a few.

• It empowers tools through which all participants can increase control of their lives.

• It diminishes separation between the worlds of culture and STEM Pathways.

• It encourages balance between critical thinking, reflection, analysis, and action.

• It emphasizes union of mind, body, and spirit, rather than a separation of these elements.

Key Characteristics of Community-Driven Resiliency Framework.

(Adapted from Movement Strategies Center Climate Resiliency Planning Report, 2017) Community-Driven Data

Community- and youth-driven solutions developed and driven by the people most impacted by the problem are more culturally and community responsive and have better success in achieving community connected goals and outcomes.

Place-Based

Building resilient schools means facilitating meaningful participation among its occupants, thus contributing to an increased sense of place and an increased sense of belonging for all.

Equitable

In content and process, youth-driven data actively address the inequities that contribute to vulnerability. All stakeholders work to ensure that plans include equity indicators and the necessary policy and system change efforts to achieve equity.

Democratict

The Streetwyze youth and community resiliency framework democratizes data and decision-making by enabling youth and community voice to be placed in the heart of equitable planning and implementation processes.

Collaborative

Collaborative structures and governance models that enable vulnerable populations to be included, and at the forefront, of resiliency process—including grassroots partnerships and alliances—are vital to building equitable community development because they increase human capacity to implement bottom up and community connected policies and solutions.

Asset-Based

Streetwyze’s Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) framework builds the capacity of people in local communities. Our ABCD approach helps youth and other vulnerable populations lead, design, co-develop, co-produce, implement, and evaluate the development and engagement processes that are driving impacts and investments in their schools and neighborhoods in ways that are transformational rather than transactional.

Healing-Centered

The Streetwyze process embraces a holistic healing-centered approach involving culture, spirituality, artistic, civic action, and collective healing. A healing-centered approach views trauma not simply as an individual isolated experience, but rather highlights the ways in which trauma and healing are experienced collectively and can be overcome and transformed through processes of Ubuntu—which means “I am because we are” (Ginwright, 2018).

Innovative

Real time data, location-based data, data visualization, and participatory technologies are critical technology tools that can help build more resilient communities and schools from the ground up. Real-time data coupled with people-powered place-making creates more authentic and meaningful connections between race, space, place, and waste and is one of the platforms and processes that enables low-income communities and communities of color to innovate their way out of poverty (See Antwi Akom’s TEDx Talk on Innovation Out of Poverty).

Biographies

Antwi Akom Ph.D. (akom@streetwyze.com) is a Professor of African American Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU) where he specializes in participatory technologies, social and spatial epidemiology, Big Data, GIS, data visualization, health-informatics, neighborhood social determinants of health, community-generated data, urban planning, climate justice, and population health research. Dr. Akom is also Founding Director of the Social Innovation and Urban Opportunity Lab, the first joint research lab between the University of California, San Francisco and SFSU. Dr. Akom is Co-Founder of Streetwyze.

Aekta Shah (aekta@streetwyze.com/aekta@stanford.edu) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University and Co-Founder of Streetwyze.

Tessa Cruz (tcruz@streetwyze.com) is Director of Outreach and Engagement for Streetwyze.