Pittsburgh schools closed their doors last Monday, but the city got a running start on summer opportunities the weekend before. At the Cities of Learning (COL) launch party, on the sunny lawn at the Carnegie Library, local kids and teens learned about their dizzying array of options for discovery and exploration.
Sound familiar? It isn't Pittsburgh's first conversion into a living campus, but it is the largest. After a trial run last summer, and armed with a new grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the Sprout Fund tweaked and expanded COL to ready the initiative for 2015.
Whether a budding filmmaker or an amateur bike mechanic, a Pittsburgh child or teen will find a slew of (mostly free) activities in the Cities of Learning roster that will help build on his or her passions. The more than 40 participating organizations help youth develop expertise in their interest areas, figure out links to academic and professional pathways, and document their accomplishments with digital badges.
Pittsburgh, which joins Chicago, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., in the national initiative, was an ideal candidate for COL.
"There are many things happening in summertime but they can seem kind of fragmented, disconnected," said Sprout Fund Executive Director Cathy Lewis Long. "It definitely takes a network approach to begin to gather and collect and lift up the incredible opportunities."
The organizers capitalized on Pittsburgh's existing network of formal and informal institutions and educators to present a cohesive "campus." This year, the community is further integrated, with Pittsburgh Public Schools serving as a major COL partner. The schools' Summer Dreamers Academy is participating, awarding badges to students.
"We're interested in creating a more connected environment between their formal school life and things they're doing outside of school," said Dustin Stiver, Sprout program officer. "So the Summer Dreamers opportunity was a great chance to sort of test the notion of badges in a school environment but also during the summer."
Over the past year, Sprout convened a diverse group of educators to determine the core competencies important to the community, and to create badges and curricula to reflect them.
"One of the things we learned from last year is it's important to provide educators with the proper support to implement this kind of initiative," Stiver said. "It was a starting point for educators to think about their badge design very critically."
Badges are meant to acknowledge that learning happens throughout the summer—at libraries and museums, in parks—but might go unrecognized, Long said. Whether they have learned to laser-etch a light switch cover, tend to a lawn, or plan and budget a trip, kids now have a standardized means of demonstrating their accomplishments—to future employers, for example.
The activities and partner organizations are all searchable on the new Pittsburgh COL website.
"To borrow an analogy from [Sprout program associate] Tim Cook, it's like taking all the brochures and pamphlets off the coffee shop shelf and putting them all online where parents and students and others can find the things they're interested in," Stiver said.
Head over to the site now, where participants can sign up, build a profile, and start navigating the City of Learning right away.
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