Expeditionaries Day 1 of 8: Journey into the Unknown
We live in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
This means that our students, in their professional and personal lives, will have to identify and solve problems they have never seen before.
How do we prepare them for such a journey into the unknown?
That exact question anchored Day 1 for Expeditionaries, a social entrepreneurship learning experience. The current cohort of Expeditionaries consists of students and teachers from Regis High School, Fordham Prep, and Bishop Kearney.
According to the Expeditionaries thesis, the best way to prepare for a journey into the unknown is to:
Regis High School teammates do empathy interviews to get to know one another better. This exercise also prepares them to do empathy research as they imagine the user whom they want to serve.
- Know yourself
- Know your team
- Know the world
Since we can't formulate final and complete answers to these things, Expeditionaries learn to ask the right questions:
- What are my natural strengths?
- What are my teammates' natural strengths? How might we harmonize those diverse strengths?
- How might we experience radical kinship with someone in need? How might we prototype solutions that meet her need? How might we test our ideas through her feedback and the feedback of others?
Students and teachers from Bishop Kearney's team do some "questionstorming" around gun violence.
"School" is, by and large, a journey through the known: problems are pre-packaged, and the teacher already knows the answers. So a student's "compass" for navigating school typically means "the right answers."
But Expeditionaries understand that when they journey into the unknown, their questions about themselves, their team, and the world constitute a more effective compass.
The Fordham Prep team helps out the Regis team by generating additional questions around gentrification.
On Day 2, our Expeditionaries will go deeper into the unknown by focusing on two critical questions: "Who is our user? What is her need?"
In our VUCA world, don’t we need Expeditionaries committed to the common good now more than ever?
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