THE EIFFEL PROJECT

The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge

Version 1.2
September 1996

Contents

2b) The School and Society
2b1) The School and the Home
2b2) Engage in the Civic Concerns of Public Life
2b3) Achieve Productive Potential in the Workplace
2b4) Create Cultural Relevance within Community Experience

2b) The School and Society

Conditions of social, economic, and cultural life deeply affect educational work, and the Eiffel Project must not ignore these realities. Educational initiatives alone cannot solve social, economic, and cultural problems, even though these problems often lead educational initiatives to fail. A powerful pedagogy must go beyond the school, beyond the educational process in the narrow sense, to work in concert with broader civic, economic, and cultural initiatives. Education cannot solve social problems, but a community that acts in concert to overcome its difficulties presents children with a deeply educative context and a resonance can build between enlightened educative effort and visionary social action.

In search of such resonance, the Eiffel Project will work closely with the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), and in our scaling up efforts additionally with the Kingston-Newburgh Enterprise Zone (see Section 5). Technologies that can empower school reform can also enable more integral, effective social action. Networking technologies will enable people who live under difficult circumstances and face complex, many-sided problems to link in their everyday perception challenges and resources that they now encounter as seemingly separate sectors of activity -- schooling, employment, health, housing, safety, and the environment. A powerful pedagogy should empower people to see action in one sector as an action contributing to the whole ensemble, which in its complexity determines the quality of life.

2b1) The School and the Home

We have four basic strategies for extending new pedagogical resources to children in inner-city homes and communities: educating parents to help them understand the new pedagogical resources; making technology resources in school available to parents and community members after school, weekends, and during summers; providing access to those resources through community-based organizations; and helping economically disadvantaged families acquire advanced technologies in their homes. Here are examples of ways in which consortium members have initiated distinct efforts to implement these strategies. We will expand and add to these beginnings as the project develops.

• Innovating schools need to make special efforts to help the parents of their students understand their pedagogical efforts. This is particularly true in inner-city settings where parents often have difficulty getting access to educational information. The CCE Schools have pioneered regular, pro-active efforts to educate parents about the schools' educational principles. Such cultivation of parental understanding and involvement is becoming standard in NYC's small schools movement. It will be the foundation for work extending the Eiffel Project's benefits to homes and communities.

• An important mission of the Media Centers in Eiffel Project schools is to afford parents and community members a fuller understanding of the educational principles of the effort. These centers will host regular meetings with parents, showing them how their children are using technology to augment their educational opportunities. In addition, the Media Centers will provide parents opportunities to use these resources in work preparedness programs, for many parents need to upgrade their skills to succeed in an employment market that is increasingly knowledge-based.

• In Columbia's Harlem Environmental Access Project (HEAP), a building block of the Eiffel Project, the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library has been equipped, along with participating schools, to afford children, parents, and the community access to HEAP outside school facilities and hours. Likewise, CCE is collaborating with branch libraries in the South Bronx and East Harlem to develop programs for parents of children in its schools and will deal with technology-based pedagogies along with other educational matters in these.

• In mid-August, a community-based partner in Eiffel, the Harlem Tutorial and Referral Project, submitted a proposal to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for "Project P.A.R.E.N.T. - Parents Accessing Resources by Engaging New Technologies." This project, developed with ILT, seeks $81,000 from CPB and will roughly match it in kind. As the project proposal states, "In an area with some of the lowest educational performance levels anywhere in the country, this project will offer new technological resources to parents as a means of redressing their inability to gain vital information, and hence become constructively involved in the education of their children."

• The Lander Street Project in Newburgh is a direct effort to extend new pedagogical resources and communications technologies into the homes of children in low-income families. Housing units in the Lander Street Project will be wired (ethernet), equipped with networked computers, and connected to the servers of the Newburgh Enlarged City School District nearby, which will in turn have Internet access through the Columbia system via a T1 connection. The Eiffel Project will provide Lander Street tenants training and support in using the home-based technologies and it will evaluate whether these resources help children in these families benefit from expanded educational opportunities. This effort seeks to build a case for making advanced technologies integral components of 21st century low-income housing projects. We are working to arrange for a similar New York City trial, currently at a Harlem site on 116th Street.

• High on the Eiffel Project agenda for implementation in collaboration with the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone is a program permitting families to acquire home computers at very low-cost through used-equipment donations. Already, the Ralph Bunche School is maintaining a small dial-in modem pool, connecting home-based users to its servers and the Internet. Preliminary experience here has uncovered hidden costs in such plans: the combination of old equipment and unskilled, novice users leads to substantial support problems. Before embarking on a large donation program, we want to make sure that they are not less cost effective than they appear to be on the surface.

In addition to such ground-up efforts to provide families and communities access to advanced media in education, it is important to address key structural issues that affect how well people can benefit from improving educational resources. The discussion below, under 2b3) Achieve Productive Potential in the Workplace, is integral to extending new pedagogical resources to children's homes, as it is essential in motivating effort for everyone, including students and their families, to address the long-term secular shift in the New York Metropolitan Region from an economy offering good industrial jobs to one in which manual labor is shrinking steadily while high-skilled, knowledge-based employment is growing.

2b2) Engage in the Civic Concerns of Public Life

Through the project, students in schools should be able to engage with representatives of their communities, to work on health, environmental, and social issues, to develop habits of service and involvement, and to form a sense that they face significant choices and that they command significant resources with which to put their choices into action. It is particularly important that children growing up under difficult circumstances learn to engage in the effort to take control of those circumstances, to experience life as a series of challenges to which people can respond purposefully. Through the Eiffel Project we intend to seek out diverse opportunities to use information technologies to engage children in thinking and acting on real civic concerns. In this project, we will work with the UMEZ and other groups seeking to effect long-term social change and human betterment in health, housing, employment, safety, and environment, to apprise children of serious issues and to engage their participation in deliberation and action. We have piloted these practices through ILT's Harlem Environmental Access Project by using wide-area communications to encourage students to recognize the breadth and diversity of concern for the environment. For instance, using data provided by the Environmental Defense Fund, students investigate the effects of different solid waste management systems. Just as the technology supports their research efforts, so it supports their reporting. Through web-mounted hypermedia presentations, students offer their findings to the world at large, staking out well-documented policy positions they can link to those of professionals. Thus, they use the technology to address the public about what is to be done, to model effective initiatives for it, and to engage in the give and take of trying to persuade people with power to act in different ways. These are invaluable lessons for anyone to learn about the relation of thought and action.

Also in Harlem, Eiffel is developing collaborations with a number of Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) in order to support their technology-based programs. For instance, a planned technology-based skills-development program sponsored by the New York City Chapter of 100 Black Men and the Church of the Master will link with the extensive technology facilities nearby in the Ralph Bunche School. Extending school technology facilities to CBO's after normal hours can effectively make sophisticated technologies available to people who cannot afford to acquire them for their homes. So too can developing project technology facilities directly in CBO's. ILT is collaborating with the Harlem Center for Digital Technology to help provide connectivity, curricular resources, and training opportunities for their Digital Apprenticeship Program, which "addresses the issue of technological equity by providing poor youth with a structured process to earn while acquiring digital competencies, character development and work preparedness" during summer and after school and on Saturdays.

2b3) Achieve Productive Potential in the Workplace

If the information economy exists anywhere, it is the economy of the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area. The Eiffel Project should deploy information technology in the schools with, for, and through the diverse employers in the region who constitute that information economy in communications, media, publishing, banks, universities, medicine, and government. The Eiffel Project will use high-speed digital telecommunications to build continuous, powerful connections between participating schools and the information economy of the City, region, and world, and its volunteers from Junior Achievement and elsewhere will work with students and employers to ensure that these connections provide learning opportunities and apprenticeships that will enable students to achieve their full potential within the information workplace.

This use of technology is crucial. Several generations of inner-city students have learned to distrust large, bureaucratic schools, experiencing them not as stepping stones to self-advancement, but as source and legitimization of their frustrations, limits, and stigmata. Small school reform is important in helping the disadvantaged regain some conviction that schools present them with significant opportunities because they encourage students to affirm and take responsibility for their own education, seeing it not as an external imposition but as an inward expression of their hopes and potentials. This shift in the subjective meaning of the school for the child is of immense importance, but by themselves reformed schools, however meaningful, can be too easily left distanced from real channels of economic opportunity when the child and the school are starved for both capital and skills. Here digital communications transform schooling and make it significant for disadvantaged students, as they gain direct exposure to the levers of power and innovation in the global information economy and experience their education as a matter of developing their potential for productive action in this much larger arena. Digital technologies will provide all with a means of entry and action in the larger world.

2b4) Create Cultural Relevance within Community Experience

Educators must be careful to avoid a deficit model of education, especially when a high percentage of their students are disadvantaged. New technologies can radically alter the traditional politics of the curriculum, which have been narrow and exclusionary for centuries. For instance,

• Through collaboration with Columbia's African Institute, the Eiffel Project will use digital information resources to draw a diverse group of interested students from participating schools, into an ever-deepening engagement with traditions, cultural achievements, historical and contemporary realities.

• The Sister Clara Muhammad School, a participant in the Harlem Environmental Access Project, is already using its broad-band access to the World Wide Web to greatly strengthen its basic aim, a tri-lingual curriculum in Arabic, French, and English.

• At the Brooklyn New School -- a CCE school participating in the Eiffel project -- students speak 36 different languages. A teacher has high school students study westward expansion by conducting detailed analysis of diverse American family histories using multimedia resources. This year investigations included a slave family, two Sioux Indian families, an abolitionist family and a plantation-owning family.

As the Eiffel Project proceeds, it will build more and more channels linking the advanced study to the world's cultures and traditions with interested groups in the schools. It is often incanted as cause for dismay that New York City's school children speak over a hundred different native languages. By building links to the full range of cultural scholarship in universities, museums, and institutes, the Eiffel Project will make this multiplicity of linguistic and cultural identification one of the great strengths of the emerging educational system.

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