Badges to help tell our stories...

flickr photo via PinkMoose

I didn't spend much time involved with scouting as a child, but I do remember those badges. I still have some of my handy work from a long time ago... a birdhouse I built for my construction badge; a sardine can first-aid kit I put together for my survival badge and a velvet-covered piece of plywood with my beautiful string art creation nailed and strung to it for my creative art badge. Why have I kept these items for all these years? I think it's because they remind me of a simpler time when people noticed the effort I put into these things, and took the time to engage and acknowledge me with a badge.

On the surface I feel kind of silly admitting that these badges I received mean something to me, but they do. My Twitter tribe and I have been taking a deeper dive into the badge concept as of late. The conversation has me re-thinking the process of badging. Typically badges are awarded to display some degree of competence or effort in a particular domain, but in an educational context I see a slightly different purpose for badging in schools.

I maintain that students need to be engaged in writing their own learning stories. What if badges were used to highlight interesting and engaging elements of each of our learning stories? Further to this, what if badges could be awarded by any member of the school family who notices something interesting and engaging about another's learning story? Administrators, teachers, para-professionals, parents, community members and the students themselves... all of these people could be badge givers- all they would have to do is notice something about another; a specific talent (realized or not by the person possessing it,) a exemplary act; a feat of kindness... anything that allows us to say "good on ya!" to members of the school family that we notice and want to engage by complementing them with a badge.

Consider the possibilities that may emerge within this culture of badging... talents would be noticed with intent by badge givers and realized by the badge recipient. Every member of the school family would become a "badge scout," constantly on the look-out for others in the school nemisphere worth noticing... we'd all be displaying our relative skills and aptitudes, sharing them with each other, and growing our self-esteem in the process, but most of all as we collect our badges we'd be chronicling our learning journeys in a unique and interesting way.

Think of those bumper stickers folks place on their vehicles displaying that they've been to new and exciting places. I am fascinated to notice the places people have gone on their vacation travels as I follow them down the road. The badges we receive in school would be like those bumper stickers... visual snapshots of the places we've been on the learning journey that nobody can take away from us. Our badges would tell the story of our learning purpose and experience. They would become acknowledgments of our learning efforts, not rewards for making them. Students could use them to help tell their learning stories when others see their collections and ask questions about why they received them. I'v decided to introduce a badge project in my class this week.

Here's what I'm thinking. I already have a well-established developmental model within my class that I call the Hope Wheel. Everyone in my class is on the Hope Wheel path. It centers around the concept of hope as an action word and includes four elemental domains: respect in the east; understanding in the south; relationships in the west, and responsibility in the north. I'm going to explain to my students how a badge can be earned for having explored these domains to the point where competency is visible and lessons have been learned. This will be my introduction.

After this introduction I'm going to suggest to my students that they can acknowledge each other too by creating a badge for anything they deem to be worth noticing along the learning paths they travel with their classmates. They will use art class to design their badges, and I'll scan and print them on sticker paper so they can be peeled off and applied to a badge plate, (just a piece of paper they will adorn in a personalized way,) that will be displayed on the wall in class. My guess is that displaying these plates will create many opportunities for my students to talk about where they've been on their learning journeys with anyone who shows interest.

I'm excited to see how this project will evolve, especially as a result of the students taking control of the process.