During Subiendo, participants are tasked with solving real world challenges facing our state. These challenges will be explored further during the Academy in hopes of finding new solutions.
The 2018 Subiendo Academy projects are formulated to be addressed through challenged based learning. The projects focus on issues related to education, health, or the environment. While participants will be strategizing to address their problem in Austin, TX, and surrounding regions, the targeted issues are not region specific. It is the goal that participants’ ideas and dialogue generated at the academy will continue to develop once they return to their home cities. In the essence of time, students will pick from a set of preselected challenges identified in the above mentioned areas of policy.
Challenge Based Learning is an emerging educational method pioneered by Apple Inc. which engages students by progressive inquiry. The hands-on, interactive approach fosters peer collaboration, dialogue, and in-depth analysis to address real world issues. The objective is to create achievable and proactive solutions that can be implemented within local communities.
- Essential Question: The essential question follows a series of inquiry and discussion which brings the team toward a nuclear community based issue they are attempting to resolve.
- Challenge: After the essential question is developed, a concise challenge is articulated to prompt a concrete, achievable and measurable solution.
- Guiding Questions, Resources and Research: Once the challenge has been introduced, team members generate questions which represent the knowledge and research needed to facilitate discussion and generate a solution. Team members use the questions to guide their work toward resources, field experts, statistics and content in order to gain more insight on why the issue is an issue and the most insightful way to resolve it.
- Solutions: Through extensive research, the team proposes multiple solutions and later narrows down by additional inquiry and analysis. Once a team has reached a solution, it will present its findings to an audience of peers and community leaders in a 15 minute presentation using creative or technological means.
- Implementation: Once a solution has been selected, the team would take the necessary action to implement the solution it. Due to limited time, teams will not be engaging in the implementation phase during the Academy. Individual team members can either continue working on their group’s challenge and prepare for implementation of their solution, or the individual can consider joining additional challenges post-academy.