With Chaka Jaliwa
During this interview, we learned more about Chaka, his approach to designing learning activities, and advice he has for people trying to break into the education space. We asked him the following questions:
- What is your role at Space Center Houston?
- Can you tell me about your educational/professional background and how you ended up in your current position?
- How do you approach designing a learning experience? Do you have specific learning objectives in mind?
- Given the diversity of your audience, how do you cater your design process to different groups of people?
- Do you have any advice for people trying to change career paths from a non-ID role into an education/ID role?
Watch the Video
Transcript
Dana 00:22
Thank you for joining me, Chaka. I’m with elearningdesigners.org and we just would love to hear more about what you do and your role in the education field. So, to start, can you just introduce yourself briefly?
Chaka 00:36
Alright, hello everyone. My name is Chaka Jaliwa. I am an education specialist at Space Center Houston. I am 33 years old, and I’ve spent more than half my life in the education or the informal education field. I started working as an informal educator at the age of 14 at the California Science Center. And it’s been a very long and very cool journey to get here today and I’m excited to share some of my story with you all.
Dana 01:01
Perfect. So can you tell us a little bit more about your role at Space Center Houston?
Chaka 01:06
Yes, so being an education specialist sort of means you do whatever needs to be done. I was brought in specifically to project manage our space Robotics Challenge, which is a NASA Centennial Challenge that puts up about a million dollars in prizes, and adults from either college or the technology industries can submit potential solutions. And for this phase of the challenge, the solutions could potentially end up informing how NASA lands different rovers and machines on the surface of the moon and have them gather resources and bring them back so they can be utilized by astronauts to either create fuel or permanent structures on the moon, but that was what I was brought in for. But because of how that challenge sort of progressed, there were a series of times where I didn’t have a lot to do with that specific project. My boss found that I was really, really good at the technical side of lots of things.
Chaka 02:04
He then asked me if I wanted to sort of be the technology lead and so hardware and software for all of the Education Department now falls under my purview. I help us decide what software to purchase for programs. I helped design different robotic challenges that we put in our classrooms, challenges for students to compete in around the city and things like that. So I really wear a lot of hats. I am a video editor, also. I have been a big part of taking some of our– well we have a big annual conference called the Space Exploration Educators Conference, and I was a big part of transitioning us from an in-person event to a hybrid–well, to a virtual event in the midst of COVID and now we’re going to be doing hybrid events with some people in-person, some people virtual so, you know, I do whatever I’m asked basically; I’m the figure-it-out kind of guy.
Dana 02:59
Can you tell me a little bit more about your education background and then maybe about your professional background before you were at the Space Center, and how you ended up here.
Chaka 03:08
Alright I can do that. So as I mentioned, I started working in informal science education when I was 14 as a learn-to-earn intern at the California Science Center, and the purpose of that program was basically to take underserved youth, give them an opportunity to have a summer job, and also to have them teach some of what they learned to students even younger than them. So it’s sort of a first job slash mentoring opportunity, and it was my first real dive into informal education.
Chaka 03:44
I really, really liked working there, so I went to boarding school, but every time I could come home for the summer, I would apply and get that job. I did that for 4 summers and that sort of graduated into an adult version of the same program. So when I was in college, I would still come back during the summers to work as a summer camp intern and then after I graduated college, I went back to be an instructor for summer camp and the year after I graduated college, I was sort of trying to figure out what I wanted to do; I didn’t really have a good idea.
Chaka 04:15
I graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Yale University. And all I knew was I didn’t want to go into electrical engineering. I had a mentor show me around his office. He was in electrical engineering. He wanted me to work for his company. I believe it was Boeing–this was several years ago at this point..a decade ago..gosh I’m old. But he showed me around his office and it was just so quiet; you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was just so siloed. No communication; everyone was just working on their projects trying not to make any kind of noise. I couldn’t work in that kind of environment so after 9 months of trying to figure that out, I went back to work one more year as a summer camp instructor at California Science Center. And after that summer ended, an outreach coordinator position opened up at California Science Center, which I took. I took the opportunity and I got the full time position and that was when I started thinking of informal science education as a career. And so since then, I’ve just been trying to grow as an informal educator and continue to learn as much as I can. I got this position at Space Center Houston about 2 years and 9-10 months ago and there’s been a lot of growth here. I’ve learned a lot. And so I very much see myself continuing in this field for the rest of my career.
Dana 05:57
That’s awesome; you found a job that you love. So in terms of your position in education, how do you approach designing a learning experience?
Chaka 06:11
First thing to consider is the audience. So we have a lot of different types of learners here. We typically break them up into 3 major categories: skim, swim, or divers. So, if they just want to skim the surface, doggy paddle a little bit, we’d have experiences designed for those people. If they want to swim a little bit more, like swim from one end of the pool to the other, we have experiences designed for those. And for the deep divers, we have up to a week-long course where they can actually get into the meat and potatoes of our programming. Depending on the level we’re going to give different focal points that they can center around.
Chaka 06:57
If we’re talking about a person that is just walking through the museum, just wants to have a good time with their family, we try to amplify the big moments and create a fun experience around that. We have what are called popup labs here; that allows us to build off of something cool that’s going on right now in space science. For example, the Blue Origin launch, that wasn’t too long ago. That had Captain Kirk go up into space for the first time in real life. We are building programs around that because actually we got a grant from Blue Origin to create programming for underserved youths in this area. So it’s just really quick; we’ll have maybe 3 minutes with them, and it’s like how can we give them an experience that doesn’t necessarily teach them everything they need to know about a topic, but how can we make them feel more curious, and when they go home they want to maybe look up more about it or want to learn what Blue Origins is doing and why their mission is to get more people to go to space.
Chaka 8:04
If we have people that are swimmers, we have day camps and those are usually going to be for kids. We do professional development for adults and teachers mostly and also for career professionals. And for those people, what we try to do is, we already have identified what they’re looking for because they’ve selected a certain program. We just try to give them the connection points between that thing that they enjoy and how it can impact them in their daily lives. So for example, if we’re doing something with business professionals and we brought them here because they enjoy space science, but they don’t really see it as something that connects to how they live their lives or run their businesses, we will create a program that shows how the trajectory of the space program actually mirrors the trajectory of lots of different businesses. Making that connection feel a little bit more deep and clear, so that they can actually start to pull out nuggets of information that can impact them directly in their professional lives or in their daily lives. And for our deep divers, they already want to know everything so we just throw as much information as we can at them. They are a very different type of group; they already are motivated to learn. We just say “Here’s all the information. What do you want to do right now, and then what do you want to do next?”, and we’re going to keep creating and keep scaffolding learning and just basically let them go nuts, do whatever they enjoy.
Dana 09:40
So when you think about the topics that you want to cover, do you have specific learning objectives in mind?
Chaka 09:48
Always. All of our programs have learning objectives. For some of the programs — specifically, we have lots of grant-funded programs we have to actually try to measure how those learning objectives were accomplished, or if they were accomplished. For a program about robotics, it’s going to be pretty easy because you’re either going to have them build something at the end of the day, or they’re going to have to code something and you can judge the thing that they have. It’s a little bit harder for things like the professional development. We don’t always get teachers or professionals to answer our surveys; getting people to respond to surveys is very difficult.
Chaka 10:31
But what we often try to do is, specifically for our educators conference that we do once a year, we have these moments where we can just sit and talk about what went well for them the year prior, and what they could use back in their classroom or what they took to their organization or business, and then judge our learning objectives based on what they’ve told us.
Chaka 10:56
Right now, we started a brand new program called the Chevron Innovation in Schools Program. In it — we had our first iteration in the spring — it’s like pulling teeth getting these teachers to tell us anything about how the program went, but the little bit of information that we did get was actually super useful, and one of the biggest things that we learned was the challenges that we create for these programs are often too difficult for elementary school kids. But we really want to involve elementary school kids. So we’re going to have to revamp our approach and probably split the program a little bit more into defined challenges, different levels for different grades. And that was always our intention, but we thought that the general challenge could be the same for everyone, and just have the students submit the projects to the best of their ability. But having seen these surveys, it is very clear that we need to be able to make something easier just to get the elementary school kids in the door.
Dana 12:06
Got it. So I guess kind of on that topic, it sounds like you work with a lot of different groups of people, from teachers and professional development programs and students. So I know you did touch briefly on this, like with the swimming analogy and depending on how deep the learners want to go, but is there anything specifically that you can think of where you cater how you design or approach designing an activity based on the group?
Chaka 12:38
Yes, the thing that I’ll say first is that we thrive on repeat attendance. So we get a lot of the same students that will come through all of our different levels of our camps. The earliest camp they can attend is called our Explorer camps and they can attend that starting at 4 or 5 years old. And they can have a different camp every year that’s up one level. So what we’d like to try to do is scaffold all the learning so that something they learned in their first camp is applicable to their second camp, but they’ve learned a little bit more about it and can use it in a different way. But we also, at that point, have to create a camp such that if you didn’t attend the first camp, you can still get a lot out of the second camp. And so we work a lot with, well we’re in Texas, so we work a lot with TEKS, the standard for education in Texas, making sure that what we do is aligned with the expectations of teachers. Just to make sure that if a student comes to us, they are likely going to be able to just slide right into our curriculum and not be overwhelmed. Always knowing what the students are learning in school is very, very helpful.
Chaka 14:06
It’s hard to do. We always try to have a wild moment in each of our camps and it has to be different for each grade level because if you have the same “wow” moment in a 4 or 5 year old camp that you have in a 7 or 8 year old camp, then the second the 4 or 5 year old gets old enough for the 7 or 8 year old camp, they’re not going to be excited. So one of the things that we always try to do is find something new and exciting to put in a camp or in a program that actually will make someone go: “Oh my gosh. That’s so cool.” It’s not always easy, but I think we’ve done a really good job of it and in terms of our camp programs, the highest level that you can go right now is our high school Space Center University or Space Center U. They get to do something that none of the younger kids get to do. They get to go scuba diving and do missions underwater as if they were training to be an astronaut as the astronauts do train. And so we find those little nuggets, those little things like, “alright, if you stay in these programs you’ll get to build to this.”
Chaka 15:16
For the adults, they get to do everything, but the thing that adults get to do that none of the kids get to do is: we have identified a company called Bastion that actually trains astronauts and the thing that they train astronauts on is the helicopter underwater escape training (HUET). So what we do with the adults that we can’t do with kids is we put them in a… I’ll call it a fake helicopter. It’s not a complete helicopter; they’ve taken off some parts of it, but it’s sitting on a crane and they get dropped into a pool. Actually for the program that we’re going to be doing next week, it gets flipped upside down and the participants have to escape the pool in order to survive. It’s like an actual crash landing. This is how you train astronauts; this is how you train Marines. It’s really cool. I got to do it once. It blew my mind. So, we focus on creating those wild moments and then building learnings around that, something that’s hard to do in a classroom, but because we’re informal, we can do those kinds of things.
Dana 16:34
Wow, that’s intense. That’s awesome. That sounds like so much fun. And for the final question, do you have any advice for people trying to change career paths from a non-educational or instructional design role into an educational or instructional design one?
Chaka 16:58
The thing that I would say is if you are looking to change careers and you want to be some kind of educator, identify something that you like to do, that you may have thought about teaching to someone or you have taught someone and it went really smoothly. For me, I have an electrical engineering background. So the first camps that I was involved in were all around circuitry or building robots and things like that. And because it was something I knew well, it was easy for me to translate that into teaching. You know what they say: if you really, really know something, teaching it should be a breeze, or you don’t know something until you teach it or have taught it. Take something that you think you know, and see how well you can teach that to someone else and that will be a good indicator of how ready you are to be an instructor or be an educator and it’ll show you what your weak points are because as an educator for — don’t say 19 years! Oh my gosh, 19 years — as an informal educator for going on 19 years, there are still bits about education that I have gaps in, but because I know what my strengths are and I know what topics I can teach well, I have been able to thrive in this field. I have my sights set on becoming a director of education or vice president of education somewhere and in order to get there, I’ll have to fill in those gaps. But it’s OK to have gaps if you’re still learning and if you’re trying something new, you’re going to have gaps. So don’t be afraid of that; just know what you do well, know what you can teach well, and start there and that once you get some of the basics of teaching or informing or instructing from teaching the things that you know, then you can pick up new things and use the same methods to teach things that you are less knowledgeable on. I had to learn a lot about space science for this job and it’s really cool. I love space science now but it wasn’t automatic for me, so, give it some time start with what you know.
Dana 19:17
Yea, at least it’s not “throw away everything you already know”; you start with something and then just go back to that. That’s good advice. Well, that concludes this interview. Thank you, Chaka, for speaking with elearningdesigners.org.
Chaka 19:33
My pleasure.
Outro 19:34
Hey everyone, thanks for watching! We hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about Chaka, and his approach to designing learning experiences, especially in informal education programs. His perspective as someone without a formal education or instructional design degree definitely provides insight as to how someone can make that transition. If you have ideas for future content, let us know. Thank you!
More About Chaka
Chaka Jaliwa joined Space Center Houston in January of 2019. In his role as an Education Specialist he has project managed the Space Robotics Challenge, a NASA Centennial Challenge dedicated to informing the future of autonomous robotic assistance on and off the planet, and guided the Education Department through a digital transition during the course of the pandemic. He also creates innovation challenges to engage the public in solving problems similar to those faced by NASA and other spacefaring entities.
Chaka began his informal education career at the California Science Center, final home of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. After graduating from Yale University with an Electrical Engineering degree, he was selected to be the Outreach Coordinator where he developed new programming around the Space Shuttle and also led training courses for the Guest Services staff on Endeavour. Chaka has nearly two decades of experience in the informal education field.