Teach for America Creates Interactive Infographic with ThingLink and Canva to Explore Equity

Kyla Ball April 2, 2021

A youth-adult fellowship used online graphic design platform Canva when creating a highly impactful thinglink to showcase video testimonials. This memorable and thought-provoking piece of work put a sociological theory into practice in a brilliantly simple way. 

Teach for America

Teach for America was founded in 1990 and is an organisation established to improve the educational opportunities for children from low-income communities across the United States. TfA recruits a diverse corps of teachers for an initial two-years in high-need schools. It has since grown to foster Teach for All, a network of partner organizations across the globe. 

Aditi Garg is a graduate in government and politics and a former member of the corps from Cleveland, OH. Having trained as an early years teacher with TfA she now works as program director on the TfA staff working mainly in Ohio. 

The Enduring Ideas Fellowship

Aditi currently works with “The Reinvention Lab”, an exploratory space established by TfA in 2019. Here, young people, parents, caregivers, leaders and educators both inside and outside of TfA consider the future of learning and of the organization. In summer 2020 the Lab established the “Enduring Ideas Fellowship” – a diverse coalition of young people and adults from across America. 

Aditi Garg, Teach for America

Transforming the future of teaching

The fellows were asked to explore how adults in educational non-profit organisations can co-create and innovate successfully and meaningfully alongside young people, to transform the future of teaching in an equitable way. The big questions they explored were, in a post-pandemic world “Why can’t we just go back to school as usual? What might be possible instead?”.

From the fall they met online weekly to explore changes that needed to happen within the organisation and in the education system. Global best practices that disrupt the traditional models of teaching were explored and the fellows discussed what could be applied at TfA. They also made decisions on how to assign funding to some of these bodies via The Enduring Ideas Fund. In groups of 5-6 the fellows were then charged with creating an artefact to reflect their learnings that could be shared with others to promote the work of the fellowship. 

The Ladder of Youth Participation

The group of adults and young people that Aditi was in chose to create an interactive graphic using ThingLink in which their audience could be participants rather than passive viewers. It was based on the concept of The “Ladder of Youth Participation”. This concept, originally developed by Roger Hart in the 1990s, identifies 8 levels of children’s participation in projects. At the bottom rung is manipulation and at the top, youth-initiated, shared decisions with adults. The group discussed and demonstrated past individual experiences either in education or in youth activities and considered which rung these occupied. They also recorded external interviews with other young people to illustrate real examples for each rung.

ThingLink + Canva

Emma Jhoanna Tilitile, a talented young Hawaiian designer in the fellowship, created and developed the visual content for the artefact in Canva and worked on the template for the scenario imagery, infographic and layout, as well as the front page which frames the ladder and the choice grid. Emily and Khalilah (young people and high school students) and Delia (an adult partner who also works with the Reinvention Lab), worked on the content and questions and edited and integrated the videos.

They realised that they could use the conditional transitions function to really engage us as the viewer in each scenario, demanding that we make an active personal assessment of where we think each scenario sits on the ladder. In this way, as viewers, we are seeing each scenario from the perspective of someone who felt they had limited agency in a real situation. 

This combination of a bold and impactful infographic design containing clear and intuitive links to video testimonials of real experiences is a prime example of how to use the Canva+ThingLink integration to powerful effect. It demonstrates how to bring a concept alive in real world context and ensure the salient points are made both understandable and importantly, memorable using interactive elements. 

The thinglink was originally shared at a fellowship showcase with specially invited guests who participated in the ladder activity. After going through the activity, they were asked:

“After reviewing these examples, consider, where does your leadership naturally fall when using this tool and what variables impact that?”. 

Reactions from the audience after exploring the thinglink demonstrated how effectively it had illustrated the concept of the ladder. 

“It was really interesting engaging in this ladder to consider the relationship between intention and experience. If more adults were aware of this ladder, might we be more intentional about how we engage with students?”

“I really appreciated this [thinglink]…it gave me a chance to interact with it, in a way that I could “mess up”- and I could learn from it! I really liked that.”

This incredibly powerful and thought-provoking thinglink was presented on the Enduring Ideas website and may also used as a starting point for future rounds of fellowships. You can follow updates from Teach for America via their Instagram account.

“It felt playful…but also aesthetically pleasing…and we could create it really quickly! Overall it was a really great platform for the things we were looking for.”

Aditi Garg, Teach for America 

Using infographics with ThingLink

Infographics are a compelling choice as base media in ThingLink because they synergize the best of visual storytelling and concise data representation. With the rise of content marketing, the appeal of infographics has grown exponentially due to their ability to present complex data in a digestible and visually captivating manner. When infographics are integrated into ThingLink, they transform into dynamic, clickable canvases that can house a plethora of multimedia elements, further enhancing data visualization and engagement for the audience.

Canva is an ideal infographic maker for beginners, with thousands of fonts, visual elements, photos, and free tutorials on design. Simply download your design as a jpg or png file and upload to ThingLink as your base media. Alternatively you can use the Canva integration within the ThingLink editor to create your design. Canva have a huge range of infographic templates to get you started. As well as static infographics, you can even incorporate some of their animation templates to create an animated infographic video.

Examples of interactive infographics in action in ThingLink

In these blogs we look at various types of infographics, maps and other graphics:

• How do you create interactive maps?
• Best interactive infographics
• Interactive infographic examples
• How to create an interactive infographic with ThingLink and Canva

Further questions?

As well as contacting us if you have any questions, please join our social media communities and connect with ThingLink Educators. We are incredibly proud of our groups, how they embrace ideas and share, they will only be too pleased to welcome you! 

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