Pig Sickness and Hummingbird Hopes in Mexico City
The first thing a member of the UNETE mentorship corps is asked to do upon arriving at HQ in Mexico City is take a picture to send back to their parents. If you were to arrange these selfies into a mural, it would provide a good approximation of what the UNETE family feels like across Mexico: a string of professional, nervously exhilarated young people, all smiles, against a patchwork of schools all driven off the connectivity map by the rainforest and the desert.
Learning Equality’s pilot partner and fellow Google.org grantee UNETE, at two decades old, is one of Mexico’s most respected teacher training programs, with a presence in over 8,000 schools and the honor of the prestigious Premio Nacional de Calidad. It’s also one of the most challenging implementation models of ICT training possible. UNETE makes use solely of one-to-one counseling between public school teachers and full-time UNETE mentors, having previously attempted and rejected the methods of group counseling and online training. The imaginary selfie mural would tell a true story: despite some similarity in positioning, every UNETE mentorship looks different.
While a UNETE mentor is intended to serve as guide to the digital tools on UNETE’s hardware, they often become an entire community of practice for isolated teachers once at their school sites: impromptu encyclopedia, extra hand in administrative work, counselor with difficult parents, and friend when troubles befall students. What exactly will be required of them is often unknown until the last moment. For instance, one mentor for four schools at an indigenous site in the Yucatán casually told us visitors how he’d arrived at his site and produced his contract only to find that none of his new colleagues read Spanish (“Not a problem,” his friend said later, when I stopped them at a coffee break to ask for the slower-did-I-hear-you-right repeat, “of course he learned Maya”). For two days in midsummer, they broke from these responsibilities to gather for their annual postmortem convening, and in July, Learning Equality implementation manager Carine Diaz and I flew to Mexico City to participate, and to help visualize what Kolibri looks like within an already complex picture.
Grassroots Content Curation On the Non-Internet
On the first day, we attended a roundtable discussion where mentors, guided by evaluation questions from a mentor coordinator, chatted congenially amongst themselves about their daily work. I was so intent on keeping up in Spanish that it was easily twenty minutes in before I looked down at my notes. I was immediately overwhelmed by the nuances involved in describing an ostensibly straightforward task: how mentors utilized information to supplement their teachers’ work.
The mentors cut content out of newspapers, xeroxed annotated copies of syllabi, and dog-eared institutionally mandated textbooks. They knew the locations of libraries, bookstores, shelves of papers left in the middle of hallways, and spots in courtyards that yielded a bar or two of service. Some of them hoarded links for weeks at a time, trading snapshots of URLs via WhatsApp during courtyard connectivity moments, and some of them wrote the links out, letter by letter. Some never went into classrooms with recommendations, some never without them. Some never used UNETE’s own beautifully designed offline Open Educational Resource (OER) repository, UNETE-CA, unless a teacher initiated it, and some were so familiar with it they could describe navigation to their sources as though they were walking to a neighbor’s house.
For many offline users like these, an orderly flow of content from repository to platform to lesson plan to student screen isn’t only impossible, it simply won’t work. It can’t replicate the kind of ubiquity and informality at work around that discussion table, but as we talked, it was clear that it’s that element which truly ensures that information is able to get everywhere.
El Mal de Puerco and Too Much of a Good Thing
In an offline community of educators, the architecture of what is used as educational content doesn’t involve the internet, but it’s no less vibrant. It has an idiosyncratic intimacy that too much content at once can easily overwhelm. As many OER repositories have found before us, we worry about too many content options without support creating feeling of overwhelm, a too-muchness. Even the most lightweight intervention runs the risk of producing a glut.
That, interestingly, had been one of the first terms we had learned in Mexico. The mal de puerco, our hosts had informed us on our first UNETE site visit months earlier n Tijuana, is the universally known sensation of having too much rich food and entering the phase of overwhelm — at best a blissed-out, soporific state of unproductiveness and at worst a full-body sulk. “Pig sickness” isn’t the most appealing term, but at the end of the day — disoriented, preoccupied and losing our Spanish by the second — we were ready to live up to it. We ate ourselves into exactly the kind of stupor promised by the term, and back at home, we stared in confusion at our page after page of notes. No question about it: our exposure to just a little bit of what mentors did every day had resulted in our own information glut.
Feature Design for Adaptability in Implementation
Over the next few days, we worked together with UNETE to understand how Kolibri could be adapted to the conditions of a one-on-one training model in which content curation and so many other elements are determined at the discretion of individual mentors. About six sessions of intense whiteboarding and even more intense mal de puerco later, we came to a plan of action to incorporate Kolibri into UNETE’s mentorship program, undergirded by several realizations.
First, we realized that tools for content curation must make it to the hands of end-users as quickly as possible in order to keep pace with the self-directed planning ethos every mentor takes to their site. Although we have always envisioned only one or two content curators in our deployments, we made plans to give the mentors full control over the specific content curation for their sites, and went forward with internationalizing Kolibri’s internal tool to curate content for use in Spanish. Thanks to the efforts of our team members Jordan and Aron, it is now ready for UNETE’s use when deployment begins.
Second, we explored how Kolibri’s analytics could alleviate the arduous task of evaluation in a situation where mentors are not bound to operate at the same pace or with the same tools. We identified additional information to help mentors and coordinators analyze and process data regarding what content mentors choose to incorporate into their curated sets, and how it can support lesson planning. This will also open up new ways for UNETE and its mentors to engage with its existing content repository. Third, we explored which elements of program planning UNETE allows its mentors to determine, and how allowing them autonomy over the details of implementation at their schools (rather than mandating specific practices) empowers them to form stronger professional communities, take ownership of content and lessons, and immerse themselves in the particularity of every teacher’s circumstances. To support this unique and effective model, we gathered information to further explore software features we hadn’t previously prioritized for Kolibri prior to the first version of the product, including analog document management capabilities, granular content assignment, and elementary content creation.
Getting Lightweight in an Information-Heavy Context
It’s a funny thing about mal de puerco: being overwhelmed by too much of a good thing doesn’t sound like a particularly terrible problem to have, whether it pertains to food or information. Yet the presence of so many things that work can be disorienting when it comes to surveying implementation in a new context. Introducing a new tool into the mentors’ milieu — their close feeling of intimacy with their work, their ownership over their tools, and the reality of immense variations in their circumstances — is a task comprised of delicate decisions.
What I’d like to remember from our visit to the mentors is that these aren’t our decisions alone to make: we want to ensure autonomy in mentors’ control over the entire flow of information, all the way down to teachers. So much of what we do is about a sense of agency and responsibility. Like all the good things we had in Mexico City — the tacos de pastor, the thin glasses of mezcal, the beautiful and stupefying commutes, the very first view of red clay roofs turning silky in the rain — it’s at its best when it is shared with others.
Kolibri is intended to make the internet accessible, but by adapting it to their needs, our deployment partners are the ones who imbue it with the necessary sense of intimacy. That intimacy comes from saturation, presence, familiarity, and comfort — informational architecture that works within and not against the architectures already in place — and there is no one universal model. But there are dozens of non-universal models — one for every inception selfie a UNETE mentor takes with such optimism at the beginning of their placement — and we hope to keep adapting to support them alongside partners like UNETE. With their help, I have no doubt that, despite the effects of mal de puerco, we’ll be able to take flight.
