As we sat in the darkened auditorium at Sidwell Friends School, a young woman looking younger than her 17 years approached us and simply said, “Hi, my name is Heather. I will be speaking today and I wanted to give you a copy of my work.” With that she returned to her seat and we were left to wonder who Heather was and what she would speak about. We had no idea that her speech would be so compelling and her story so heart wrenching and hopeful all at the same time. This was clearly the power of TED.
While I had seen TED Talks online, attending an actual event is an entirely different story: you can see the care the organizers take to make sure that all of the pieces fit together, the emcee is compelling and the speakers hold together to create a day-long narrative. But more specifically, I was fascinated by the TED Talk format. It seems to be such a useful exercise for all of us, especially students, to have to conceptualize what we want to say, communicate it, oftentimes with fairly abstract images, and weave a compelling tale in such a short period of time. As most of the presenters were under the age of 25 years old, I was truly impressed with the polish of their talks and it made me think of Christian Long's project with his 10th graders last year.
But I was even more struck by their courage to share their passion so publicly. Heather was an abused child who survived the foster care system and was adopted. She now spends her time writing stories for other children in her same situation in an effort to offer them hope in addition to providing gifts for them during the holidays and even more inspirational, creating scrapbooks with foster children to help them start building new memories. I had lunch with Rebecca Kantar and her family. Rebecca is a founding member of Minga, a group of teenagers working to fight sexual exploitation. This is just the beginning of her ideas; at lunch, the descriptions of the projects she is working on, while being a freshman at Harvard, are staggering.
So in addition to being in awe of Heather, Rebecca and the many others who spoke on Saturday, I can’t help but think that much of their ability to take action does have to do with technology and our relatively new ability to be interconnected globally. These social entrepreneurs have let nothing stand in the way of their passion to help others and they have all brilliantly harnessed the power of technology to further their work.
So I left with my head spinning, knowing that I needed to keep looking for ways to make what we do in the classroom real for my students; giving them real problems to solve and real responsibilities in their own learning process. I left with the metaphor that Rebecca began her talk with: “Leadership is like eating a cupcake: it gets messy but has so much to offer.” Not only do I need to be willing to take the risks of leadership, I need to help my students to do so as well.
