Empowering Leaders of All Ages
RevX and the reimagined future of learning
Co-authored with Juliette Heinze
In Developing a Liberatory Consciousness, author Barbara Love states, “The socialization process of society works to ensure that each person learns what they need to know to behave in ways that contribute to the maintenance and perpetuation of existing systems [of dis-equality].” Love further asserts that rather than preparing people of color to become leaders, innovators, and decision makers, these systems of dis-equality instead actively hold people of color subordinate.
Jenn, Alexa, Saskia — the three founders of Revolutionary Experiences (RevX) and all women of color — experienced these systems playing out in their own schooling. When faced with a choice of high schools, Saskia was at a crossroads. She had the opportunity to attend a school that offered rigorous, real-world, project-based learning but lacked diversity, or attend her zoned community high school where sixty percent of the student body looked like her, but where expectations were low and instruction was absent of creativity and critical thinking. Fear of imposter syndrome led her to choose a feeling of belonging over a high-quality educational experience. Alexa, when reflecting on her experience in district schools, shared, “I didn’t learn anything. In fact, school felt so irrelevant that sometimes I barely went.” And Jenn’s education felt more like a journey in assimilation than one that helped her to cultivate her true self.
These early personal experiences of the rampant inequity in education fostered a deep sense of urgency and a commitment to equity in these women. As leaders in education, all three felt an urgency to dismantle the systems of dis-equality so that more people of color feel prepared to become leaders, activists, and/or entrepreneurs. They wanted to enable young learners to claim the power to make meaningful changes in their lives and the world around them. With this ultimate goal, the three founded RevX, a model that offers equitable access to learning experiences that honor young people’s identities, are relevant to them and their communities, and provide rigorous real-world learning.
Building Revolutionary Ways of Thinking and Doing
RevX prepares learners to advocate, defend, promote, and question the world around them through building their confidence and deconstructing any mindsets of inferiority. RevX educators empower young learners by asking them what they want to study and identifying which issues are affecting them and impacting their communities. This is a sharp contrast to traditional learning environments in which students engage in simulations about topics that are often disconnected from their lives instead of real-world issues that are impacting them and their communities, such as climate change, body shaming, and discrimination.
In RevX, students have ample opportunity to make choices and decisions about their own learning, and offer feedback and input throughout the experience. This kind of student-centered learning came to life powerfully in 2020 when RevX educators started their pilot round. It was the same week George Floyd was murdered. Protests had started. A student in one of the RevX modules said, “I’m really scared that I’m going to die or my brother’s going to die just by walking down the street.” The teacher took time to really listen, and gave all students the option to redirect their learning. Learners eagerly said yes and that they wanted to design the next module around discrimination, so that’s what the RevX team did.
Having recently completed the a RevX module on discrimination, a fourth grade participant created her own Twitter account to share information with her peers about the harmful effects of abelism, racism, and sexism and how to address them. Another fourth grader said, “What I can do now is I can actually stand up for something…let’s say racism, I can actually do something about it because before I was talking about it…but I didn’t know anything to do about it.”
The RevX Approach to Teaching & Learning
It’s not only the young learners who experience transformational learning experiences through participating in RevX. Part of the vision is that the facilitators who participate are transformed through the process as well. In RevX, teachers assume the role of facilitator and coach as they present information and guide learners to discover and make choices. The teachers are coached to be agile with the curriculum in order to respond to students’ needs and interests. They engage in a robust R&D process in which they gather data that assesses student learning and evaluates program effectiveness. Assessments that take into account all of the different aspects that shape a learner’s experience are embedded throughout RevX modules.
Jenn, Alexa, and Saskia are committed to continuous improvement as they pilot RevX modules with diverse groups of students, dispersed geographically and across different school settings, to ensure a strong instructional model. This month (November 2020), they will embark on their third pilot with kindergarten and first grade students. As they have progressed in the understanding of what is and isn’t working and continued to refine and shift, they are witnessing the impact on students.
RevX is navigating this time of uncertainty with steadiness and vision. They adapted all learning to be flexible so that it can be delivered online, hybrid, or in-person, and are continuing to pilot their discrimination module and develop additional modules on other real-world issues that students want to explore. In the new year, they plan to codify these modules to create exemplars that clearly illustrate the design principles so teachers and schools can easily adopt and adapt them to meet their learners’ needs and develop educators’ capacity. Through these actions, they ultimately aspire to dramatically shift the quality of learning opportunities that children, especially those in marginalized communities, receive from rote and compliance-driven to rigorous, student-driven, and project-based. The founders are personally and professionally committed to giving young learners the knowledge, skills, confidence, and passion they need to feel prepared to lead and activate revolutionary change in their own lives, in their communities, and beyond.
