Grants talk:Project/Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum
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Thank you,
Eligibility provisionally confirmed, Round 2 2021 - Research and Software proposal
editWe've provisionally confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 2 2021 for Research and Software projects, contingent upon:
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Schedule delay
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We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!
Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia · org.--Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:28, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum
editScoring rubric | Score | |
(A) Impact potential
|
5.4 | |
(B) Community engagement
|
6.4 | |
(C) Ability to execute
|
7.0 | |
(D) Measures of success
|
7.0 | |
Additional comments from the Committee:
|
This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.
The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.
Next steps:
- Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
- Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Thursday, May 27, 2021.
Scheduling interview
editDear Jetaynz,
Your project has been selected by the Project Grants Committee to advance to the next stage of review. Consequently, I would like to meet with you for up to one hour to discuss your Project Grant proposal. I am reaching out to you here to kindly ask you to check your email and get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding your availability to meet.
Warm regards,
Mercedes Caso (platícame) 18:30, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Response to feedback
editKia ora, hello. Thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for considering our grant application, and a big thanks to the members of the committee for their feedback and to Mercedes Caso for the time she gave us working through the committee's feedback.
Before addressing the feedback from the committee we think it's worth emphasising what a seachange the introduction of the compulsory Aotearoa New Zealand history curriculum is, and the potential we think it opens up both for Auckland Museum, the wider GLAM sector and the Wikipedia movement.[1] Until now the teaching of New Zealand's national history has been an optional subject in schools and kura kaupapa schools. From next year it becomes compulsory across all levels of the pre-tertiary education system. In Auckland, the city we are based in, this covers over 278,000 students, more than one third of New Zealand's 816,000 high school/secondary school age population.
What makes this a particularly exciting opportunity is the nature of the New Zealand secondary education system. While there is guidance around the themes and topics that should be covered, the New Zealand curriculum is not prescriptive in lesson planning or day to day teaching— it allows flexibility in the particular areas that can be taught by teachers and the teaching methods they can use. This opens up the potential for the use of innovative teaching methods, such as using Wikipedia in the classroom.
However the new curriculum is also focused on providing localised history for students. We are conscious of feedback from teachers in workshops that we have participated in around the new curriculum that they lack resources to teach at this micro level, and we see the initial impact of Wikipedia in providing local resources, in particular enhanced suburb articles as a starting point. Ideally a local teacher could go to their local suburb article and be presented with a list of resources that would make their lesson planning easier.
In terms of applied learning we are particularly excited with the excellent new resource Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom which we became aware of after we had submitted after our grant proposal. We plan to connect with the Wikimedia education team as well as the staff that put this resource together. This will enable us to hit the ground running when it comes to working with local teachers, rather then needing to start from scratch and put suitable training material together.
Another important part of this project is the literature review examining the use of Wikipedia in the secondary school classroom. An initial scan of the literature suggests that most studies of Wikimedia Projects and education focuses on the tertiary/university sector. We aim to synthesise research that has been undertaken on non-tertiary education and our project hopes to build on these learnings. The results that come out of this project will be put written up as a case study and we anticipate it will be both scalable and also applicable to other areas of the education curriculum, in particular natural science and social science teaching, and potentially in other countries which have a similar flexibility in their high school/secondary school curriculum.
To address some of the specific feedback:
Why a survey of public opinion?
editWe had originally intended to apply for this project as a Community Organizing project to work directly with teachers and schools. However after some discussion within the project team we realised we needed to first establish relationships with teachers and schools. Part of our rationale was that we should assess teachers needs around the new curriculum and in the process find willing participants to take part in a pilot project. By laying the groundwork undertaking this market research and establishing relationships with interested teachers and schools we feel that later pilot projects have a much better chance of success.
The number (30) of participants we originally intended to survey is small but New Zealand is a relatively small country with a population of only 4.5 million people— our target group of secondary school teachers is only a few hundred individuals, within 378 secondary schools across New Zealand. We're also conscious that teachers are busy and won't necessarily take time out to take part in our survey. For the purposes of complying with the grant (if successful) we aimed for a low number. Keeping this concern in mind we will make the survey available to teachers across the country and the target sample group has been adjusted up to 40, which will cover 10% of schools nationally. Our Visitor & Market Research team has informed us that valid conclusions can be drawn from this sample size.
We have also made time in our project plan for smaller workshops/focus groups with interested teachers. These will be Auckland based, as that is where the Museum is located as we are not nationally funded (our funding is from the Auckland Council). We believe we will glean the highest value information in these workshops and establish relationships for on-going partnerships in which we can test the utility of WMF resources and begin planning for pilot projects next year when the curriculum rolls out. This will by necessity involve only a handful of interested teachers, but can scale up depending on demand over time. If there is interest from other parts of the country we will happily share our methodology, advice and time with other organisations or GLAM institutions to undertake similar work.
Institutional Strategic Goals
editThis project is indeed being undertaken as part of Auckland Museum's strategic goals— as a publicly funded institutions this is a requirement of our day to day work. However we believe we are uniquely placed to undertake and deliver this project. Auckland Museum is one of the country's leading museums, has a long history of working with Wikimedia Foundation projects and this work is supported at a high level by our executive leadership team. We have recently commissioned a Wikimedia project strategy document written by local Wikimedians, and we are in the process of implementing these recommendations as part of our long term Wiki Workplan. Already this year this has involved employing a Wikimedian in Residence (funded by Wikicite), holding an edit-a-thon for the local community and we have an upcoming workshops with the local GLAM community, encouraging their involvement in Wikimedia projects. We are also hosting the 2nd Aotearoa New Zealand Wikicon in mid July, organised by the Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Auckland Museum's education programme aims to engage 100,000 students onsite and deliver a range of online education programmes, products and services. The new history curriculum is a major focus of the Museum's work, and both our Wikipedia work and education programme intersect as can be seen from the project team which involves staff from across the Museum.
The Museum is committed to the open access of its collection, and our values align with the Wikimedia Foundation's goals to make open knowledge free and accessible. We also believe the longer term potential of this project aligns with the Wikimedia 2030 strategy aiming to be innovative in the dissemination of free knowledge and increasing the sustainability of movement by legitimising the use of Wikipedia in a secondary education setting and unlocking a new generation of Wikipedia editors.
Why not an edit-a-thon or community event?
editAs mentioned earlier, in our initial planning for this grant we quickly realised that it wasn't possible for us to go directly into schools, as we needed to establish relationships with schools and teachers first. Furthermore, working directly with high school/secondary school students (aged 13-18) raises a number of ethical issues, the most obvious of which is that working directly with minors is problematic. The advice that we received from our research advisor was that taking a market research approach would be the most straightforward in terms of ethical approval, and allows us to undertake this project in a timely fashion.
We intend on holding some edit-a-thons with local the local Wiki community in the future with the aim of enhancing local suburban articles, as part of the pilot of providing local history resources for teachers.
Pay rate for researcher
editThis was addressed in the comments in the endorsements. As mentioned there a rate of NZD$35 (USD$25) p/hour for 12 weeks work (at 37.5 hours per week) was put forward. After further research we are keeping this pay rate as initially proposed. Though it is on the higher end of the hourly rate for research analysis in New Zealand and the researcher will be working with experts from across the museum, they will be required to undertake a literature review, design, analyse and write up the survey and also undertake workshops/focus groups with teachers, so we believe this is fair remuneration for the skillset that is required. In terms of timeframe it is our preference for the research to be completed by the end of this calendar year/early 2022 as the history curriculum rolls out at the start of next year, so a full time rate at a shorter time period works better for us. For the period the researcher is employed by the Museum they will be treated as full time staff, and have office space, consumables and other benefits as available to staff which will be paid for by the Museum.
Community engagement
editA number of local Wikipedians have endorsed this project and if successful we will look at ways that we can engage with them on this project, as advisors and also contributors to the work that we will do, particularly around enhancing local articles as part of the pilot project working with teachers to provide resources. We have a Wikipedian in Residence on the project team who is a long time Wikipedia editor and is active within the local community. As mentioned earlier, the Museum also has a Wiki Workplan guiding our work with Wikimedia Foundation projects, and an important element of this is actively engaging with the local community. We are hosting the 2nd Aotearoa New Zealand Wikicon in mid July this year where we can closely discuss with local editors how to work on this project together. We also envision hosting regular monthly or bi-monthly meet-ups going forward, some of which will focus on how we can enhance Wikipedia articles to assist teachers.
There is also a longer term outcome that we would like to see occur. As mentioned in the proposal, if we can work with local teachers and schools to normalise the use of Wikipedia in the secondary school classroom we hope to grow a new, diverse generation of Wikipedia editors here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Risk assessment
editThere are a number of potential risks around this project, most of which relate to the participation of the intended survey group.
- Lack of buy in from local teachers/not enough survey participants - This is a medium level risk. We believe that circulating the initial survey through various professional networks (as listed on the proposal page), we should be able to cover off enough of the target group. If there are issues there are members of the project team which have personal contacts within the teaching profession that we can call upon.
- Over subscription from teachers - This is a low level risk. If we find that there are more teachers interested in this project than we are able to host for workshops and focus groups we could stagger participants over time, as the curriculum will take 2-3 years to bed-in within schools.
- Negative perception towards the use of Wikipedia - This is a high level risk. We have anecdotal evidence that teachers regard using Wikipedia as a resource in the classroom with some suspicion. If our survey findings indicate this is true then we can use their concerns as the basis for a positive education campaign, addressing their feedback with respect but also attempt to show them the ways that Wikipedia can be positively integrated into a classroom setting— particularly drawing on the excellent new Wikimedia Foundation resource Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom.
Changes to original proposal
edit- increased minimum participation rate to 40 - survey made available to teachers across New Zealand
- more detail on workshops/focus groups - Auckland based
- more detail on pay rate (USD/NZD and hours required to work)
Ngā mihi maioha, thank you
Jetaynz (talk) 13:17, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
Round 2 2021 decision
editCongratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.
The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $11,400
Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to fund this research project to learn more about the attitudes towards the use of Wikipedia of history teachers. We appreciate the integration of existing knowledge in the research area, the incorporation of support and guidance from the Education team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and plans to build upon learnings from the Wikipedia in the Classroom program.
NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:
- 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
- 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event
Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.
Next steps:
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Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants
Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.Marti (WMF) (talk) 04:47, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
Updated timeline for Project
editDear @Jetaynz, it was very lovely connecting with you on a call last week (14 Oct 2021). Thanks for sharing that you'll require more time for project implementation due to the changing COVID-19 situation in New Zealand. I've updated the timeline of your project accordingly, taking place Nov 2021-Mar 2022 (previously June - Oct 2021). Please feel free to adjust the dates when you have greater visibility on your end. Looking forward to connecting again in a few months. Stay safe and well. Keep in touch. JChen (WMF) (talk) 08:43, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you @JChen (WMF) was lovely to talk to you too. Our Research Assistant should be onboard with us in the next week or so and we will be able to finalise our timeframes shortly after that. Look forward to speaking again soon. Jetaynz (talk) 04:04, 21 October 2021 (UTC)