As a boy attending Longfellow Elementary in Minneapolis, Mondo Davison’s class had “silent reading time.” While the other kids read, Davison would pretend to read or doze off. He was a good student and wasn’t daydreaming to spite his teacher. He just didn’t know why he couldn’t keep his eyes on the page.
Years later, Davison found work as a teacher’s assistant and then a project coordinator at Obama Elementary in St. Paul. One of his duties was to figure out how to connect with disengaged students. But upon investigating why some students couldn’t seem to focus in class, he found that the issue wasn’t a behavioral one, that it was with the curriculum.
Finally, Davison realized why he couldn’t bring himself to read as a kid: None of the reading material was relevant to his life as a young, Black boy. And that was probably true for many kids of color in the Twin Cities and across the nation.
Schoolz, an educational platform Davison and his team released in January, aims to solve that problem.
“The student, whose school didn’t work for them, clearly knows the type of stuff that would have engaged them,” Davison said. “And so it makes sense to go back into the community and engage them on what we should have created.”
The platform is slated to be a digital library of interactive short fictional stories, educational cartoons and documentaries created by artists and educators of color. It is designed to supplement more traditional K-12 pedagogy with content focused on people of color, Davison said. Down the line, it’ll also feature material for most subjects.
Free content will begin rolling out weekly starting in mid-October. The hope is Schoolz’s novel take on education will make enough of a splash that philanthropic organizations will invest in the company— it’s already secured a $160,000 contract partnering with ArtsUs to develop digital content.
Once the library is more replete with content and its name is better known, Davison plans to create licensing agreements for teachers who want to purchase material for their classroom. He estimates that’ll happen during the 2020-21 school year. With luck, he said, entire school boards and districts will start purchasing Schoolz content in bulk a couple of years after that. The platform will probably target markets in the Twin Cities first, though it’s possible the product will catch on elsewhere sooner, Davison said.
The material Schoolz has already made publicly available is strikingly different from what’s going on in most classrooms. In an illustrated video explaining what Schoolz is all about, the viewer is greeted by Destani, a Black, turquoise-haired, levitating-via-jet propulsion, “fly, funky, fresh smartbot” who serves as the platform’s brand icon and student guide. She’s voiced by Destiny Robers, a St. Paul-based artist and assistant teacher who Davison has known since childhood.
“The bot creates a very relevant touch for our youth who seem to all enjoy technology and thoughts of the future,” Roberts said.
Other available content includes a history lesson on the neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat from Sheppy, another animated character; a short story about the pangs of going to school on a Monday; and a portion of a documentary about the uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd.
“When you’re a person of color going through the education system in America, you don’t really see much of yourself reflected in a classroom,” said Myc Daz, Schoolz Creative Director and Davison’s former high school classmate said. “It’s very important to see positive images of people of color.”
Schoolz is the latest in Davison’s slew of tech products, including MyBarJar, a now defunct web-based platform designed for gifting drinks, and SafeSpace, an app designed to gather crowdsource safety from pedestrians when people of color are pulled over by the police. He calls himself the Black Tech Guy and hasn’t worn a shirt without “The Black Tech Guy” written on it for the past six years — Daz vouches for this.
Feedback from teachers about Schoolz has been positive thus far, but the challenge will be creating enough content to satisfy the market, Daz said.
Schoolz is set to rollout in the midst of an American racial reckoning and a fierce debate over what education ought to look like in America that has seen high school students across the country demand a more diverse curriculum and President Trump rebuke “left-wing indoctrination” in schools. Should it gain traction, it could be embraced by some and anathema to others.
The platform doesn’t shy away from this dichotomy. In its introductory video, Destani promotes Schoolz as being able to shape future Americans “So we don’t end up with leadership like —” her voice trails off. In addition, a cartoon image of Trump is shown with the words “Epic Fail.”
“I would argue that the neutral, on the fence, perspective that schools try to educate through is the exact reason why so many students of color are not engaged, because the content seems tone-deaf,” Davison said. “How are we talking about what’s going on in the world without actually talking about what’s going on in the world?”
So Schoolz differs from mainstream curriculum not only in the diversity of its subject matter, but in its taking a political stand. Davison thinks that’s necessary.
“Yes we’re playing on the fringe for education right now, it looks that way, but so many people thought Kapernick was on the fringe, too, and now you got whole leagues saying Black Lives Matter and kneeling at the beginning of games,” he said.
