Teacher Information
How can our city / community be a home to thriving people in a thriving place, while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet?
This question, posed to changemakers by Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, is the essential challenge to leaders everywhere and the focus of the Youth Mayors Field Guide. It is clear from the challenges facing people all over the world -- from the COVID-19 pandemic, to climate change, to poverty and inequality -- that local leaders have a major role to play in making their communities, and by extension the global community, thrive.
Why mayors?
The publication of the book If Mayors Ruled the World, by Benjamin Barber in 2013, sparked a global movement to harness the power of cities and local action to make change in the world. Since then, city leaders have established a Global Parliament of Mayors, which provides a platform and network for mayors to work on global problems at their local level. Other city-oriented organisations, like C40 focused specifically on climate change, have also emerged as we have realised the importance and power of mayors and their cities to affect global change.
The Youth Mayors looks to these leadership models to establish a programme to teach the skills and dispositions that young leaders need to take on global challenges in their local communities. To solve these challenges, we need leaders now and in the future who can think critically and creatively, who take initiative and can collaborate with others. The Youth Mayors Field Guide provides instruction and tools to help young people develop these skills through project-based learning.
The Youth Mayors Field Guide uses systems thinking and design thinking strategies to support students’ learning through their projects. Systems thinking encourages students to consider a holistic approach to investigating and taking action on the problems facing their communities. Understanding the complex systems with their reinforcing and balancing feedback loops that govern our daily lives is essential to devising solutions that build resilience and improve wellbeing. Design thinking, with its focus on human-centered solutions, requires that students consider the needs and mental models of those for whom they are acting, building collaboration with stakeholders into their investigations, proposals, and execution. Together these approaches demand that students use and develop empathy. Systems and design perspectives are invaluable approaches to leadership that promote solutions that really work for people.
How to use the Youth Mayors Field Guide
The audience for the Youth Mayors Field Guide is students. This approach supports the varied contexts in which this Guide may be used. The aim was to provide as flexible a tool as possible so that it could be useful for young people, regardless of whether they had a teacher, mentor, or school environment in which to carry out their projects.
Projects are at the center of this Field Guide. Students and teachers / mentors using this guide should use it to investigate local problems and develop solutions. Ideally, students are progressing towards developing projects that extend beyond their immediate familial or school surroundings to scale up good ideas to affect more people. Students may engage in increasingly challenging and higher-impact projects over time with your and the Field Guide’s support, becoming a true Youth Mayor. The Guide can be used with a range of school-mandated or independent projects, from the IB Middle Years Programme Community and Personal Projects, the IB Diploma Programme CAS Project, as well as projects outlined in other national or local school systems.
The Field Guide has been written with an expanded focus on Stage 1 Investigating, to respond to the common problem with service learning and action, that students often dive into actions without considering the systems at play in the problem and/or the people they are working with. It has 4 Stages and 15 Modules that guide students through a logical progression of project investigation and management:
Stage 1 - Investigating - 5 modules
Stage 2 - Planning / Designing a solution - 5 modules
Stage 3 - Taking action - 1 module
Stage 4 - Sharing and scaling - 4 modules
Each Stage has Modules that explain a project’s progression. Embedded in each Module are Tools that can provide more concrete structure and guidance on carrying out the advice in the Modules. These include graphic organisers, templates, instructions or other tools. There are also Practice Activities embedded in the Modules that students can carry out with you in a classroom, or on their own outside a classroom and Project Activities that help students move their projects forward.
Below is a table that can help you determine what strategy to take with the Youth Mayors Field Guide:
Table 1. Guidance on using the Youth Mayors Field Guide
Regardless of your context, it is important to keep a few things in mind.
Projects take a lot of time to investigate, plan and execute. Encouraging students to take this time, or helping them to find ways to allocate it in or outside of school, is critical to the success of this project-based learning.
Remember that students are novice changemakers; their execution of the Modules and Tools will be flawed and this is fine! It’s part of the learning process. The important thing is to get the students to try out strategies and take some risks.
Ambiguity is inherent to changemaking. There is no roadmap to a finished project. The Modules and Tools in the Youth Mayors Field Guide help support projects, but they do not eliminate uncertainty, missteps, or confusion. As a teacher, it is very important that you help students understand, become more comfortable with and even embrace ambiguity. This change in mindset can be an important part of getting students to take more risks and to improve their confidence to take initiative.
In the short video below, two teachers from the Stanford d.school explain the role of ambiguity in the learning process and the importance of helping students navigate it.
On a final note, if you have students who are especially interested in learning more about systems and design thinking and social entrepreneurship, please direct them to the Learning More page. We are building a set of links to online courses and organisations that can help them go even further with their ideas.
Where is Youth Mayors going?
The Youth Mayors Field Guide is a project developed jointly by the United World College Maastricht, Strothoff International School, United World College Robert Bosch, International School of Brussels and United World College Red Cross Nordic with funding from the European Union's Erasmus+ programme.
In the 2020-2021 school year, the Youth Mayors Field Guide is in the piloting phase. We need your help to improve this Field Guide. Please use the feedback form to provide your suggestions for improvement, let us know about mistakes, or offer other sources of information that might be useful.
In the 2021-2022 school year, the Youth Mayors Field Guide will be scaled to schools in the United World Colleges network and to others who are interested in using it. If you have a suggestion for schools who may be open to scaling with us, please let us know.
As students complete projects, they will be able to apply to have those projects showcased on a Youth Mayors website, explaining how they investigated, designed and planned, took action and shared and scaled their ideas. The aim is to provide a network, like that of the Global Parliament of Mayors, for ambitious students to connect with one another, build on each other’s ideas and seek inspiration.
THANK YOU!
for piloting this new Field Guide - we look forward to hearing your feedback!
Works cited
Barber, Benjamin R. If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. Yale University Press, 2014.
Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist. Random House Business Books, 2017.
Wentworth, Amanda. “Thinking About Creative Commons.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 11 Jan. 2019, www.flickr.com/photos/146278242@N03/31762655127.
