Some thoughts on campaigning for the right things
In the Keep Badges Weird community, we’re beginning to have a conversation about what the dynamic between badge issuers and badge earners is and what it should be. We need to circumvent bad habits of 20th century educational systems and help people understand how disenfranchising learners affects their own goals.
As badges have gone mainstream, we see increased need to counteract the top-down focus of institutions or corporations to ensure that the learner remains the beneficiary of the badge. Focusing on learner recognition, rather than just credentialing, will lead to better, more empowered learners and therefore a stronger civic society.
So how do we advocate for learner-centric badge systems? This is the piece that we’ve been thinking about the past couple of weeks.
The Advocates in KBW
Most of us know, instinctively, what the word advocacy means. I like this particular definition, although I’ll admit it’s a more controversial choice than some of the dictionary definitions:
Advocacy is an assertive form of communication or activity that promotes, protects and defends the rights of people who experience disadvantage, or are at risk of being disadvantaged.”
Learners are often disadvantaged. Often skills and competency programmes are designed with “business objectives” or “KPIs” in mind, as opposed to the learners and their motivations. We want to be active in advocating for something other than this status quo (i.e. recognition vs credentialing), and after many years of pleading and politicking, I right think it’s time for some assertive communication on the matter.
We have the authority to be assertive about badges. We are a community with people who have invented and pioneered badge systems, technologies, standards and everything else badges. People in this community are front line educators and learner advocates. We are the people who are motivated and influential in getting organisations to start thinking about upskilling in a non-traditional way.
What are we advocating for?
This is a question that we need to address! For example, we need to help people understand:
- It is more important to motivate learning then to simply recognise it. Yes, badges, but not as a top down approach!
- Disenfranchising learners is an old story and we are fighting for a new world. We are fiercely opposed to the commercialisation of badges.
- We should be badging mindsets and behaviours that don’t suck (e.g. #sustainability badge, SDG goals, climate literacy, etc)
The conversation is nuanced, but the point is that recognition is bigger than credentialing and encompasses a whole range of things. We are advocating for a world in which people aren’t seen as their CV or their qualifications and accomplishments, but rather holistically – who they are in all their humanness.
How do we advocate?
As I was thinking about what bottom-up advocacy even means in this community, I stumbled upon a policy advocacy framework. Originally published in a paper called Foundations and Public Policy Grantmaking*, the framework shows how “private foundations can consider their engagement in public policy grantmaking.” There’s documented and researched approaches to influence policy. Who knew!
I skimmed the paper and studied the framework. Then I remixed it with folks in the community in mind. I tried to think who are our audiences? Who are we collaborating with or trying to influence? More importantly though, what are the strategies and activities that our community is doing or likely to do? What approaches do we need to focus on?
The original framework used terms like “litigation” and “regulatory feedback”. These terms fit well with public policy initiatives, but our community is working in educational contexts. Thus, the remix replaces some of the terminology with terms more befitting to our context:
Campaigning for the right things
“Campaigning” is a faceted approach to advocacy. Again, it’s a word we understand instinctively.
Doug recently wrote a post in which he said:
“It’s taken a decade, as I predicted, for badges to be a no-brainer when it comes to recognising and credentialing knowledge, skills, and dispositions. We’re no longer in the stage of “imagine a world…” but rather “here’s what’s happening, let’s talk about how this could be useful to you”.”
It is certainly true that our job doing Awareness advocacy feels much different nowadays. It’s relatively easy to raise awareness, do outreach, convince folks to run pilot programmes — to run campaigns that help people understand what badges are and how they work. We have the research, we’ve analysed the polls.
We are running into other issues around advocating for Open Badges — namely, issues of will and action.
Using the framework, our community of Badge Champions are likely focused in the red zone. They need to advocate to people in the blue zone. Thus, our community might be supported with things like:
- tools to advocate to their superiors, deciders or purse string holders
- communication materials or stuff for media advocacy
- a manifesto for learners that they can remix and reuse
Let’s get concrete
The knowledge, skills and talent to advocate for learners in our organizations exist in this community. We can collaborate to build useful resources and structures for future badge champions. How can we build campaigns that go beyond awareness and into influencing the will and actions of the people who hold power in this arena? The question is What do people NEED?
Here’s some fully random ideas to get us started…
- Badge Budget tips 101 (stuff like “How to ask your boss” or an Expenditure spreadsheet template with a not sucky name…)
- 10 Slides to help your boss sell your idea
- A template for showcasing your pilot program
- Badge your boss day
- …
Your turn. Ideas? Requests? Come to the community call and join the discussion.