A wide-ranging academic journey throughout the eastern part of the United States eventually led Andres Bustamante west to UC Irvine’s School of Education. A bachelor’s degree in developmental psychology from Emmanuel College in Boston was followed by a Ph.D. in the same discipline at the University of Miami. Next stop: Philadelphia, where a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University’s Institute of Education Sciences introduced him to the concept of “playful learning landscapes” – places for play that can build upon skills learned in the classroom. He joined UC Irvine’s faculty in July 2018.

With a focus on early childhood education, Bustamante and his team at the STEM Learning Lab are busy developing interactive learning spaces to enhance science, technology, engineering and math education in places where families gather – parks, playgrounds, grocery stores, even bus stops. Through collaborative partnerships with schools and community organizations – and by integrating the thoughtful input of local families in their design process – members of Bustamante’s group are creating opportunities for young children to learn in ways that are powerful and effective because they are also engaging, joyful and fun.

In this episode of The UCI Podcast, the associate professor of education and faculty director of UC Irvine’s Orange County Educational Advancement Network guides us on a tour of the playful learning landscapes he has helped install in schools and community locations throughout the city of Santa Ana and explains how and why they’re already making a difference.

“Skedaddle Back,” the music for this episode, was provided by Nathan Moore via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

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TRANSCRIPT

Cara Capuano/The UCI Podcast:

From the University of California Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast. Our guest today is Andres Bustamante, associate professor of UC Irvine’s School of Education, and director of the Orange County Educational Advancement Network, also known as OCEAN. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor Bustamante.

Andres Bustamante:

Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m super excited to share.

Capuano:

To say that you have a lot going on feels like a total understatement and we’re going to try to get to all the different ways that you serve UC Irvine, and our local community, plus the many exciting projects that you have going on. But first I want to get to know about you. What drives you? Why did you choose the field of education?

Bustamante:

I think education is one of the most valuable things that a society can invest in. So, there’s a really famous saying that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment.” So, that’s why I’m really passionate about early education – starting early and building a strong foundation for learning. And specifically, I spend a lot of time in science education, which gives kids a tool and a process to learn about their world. That’s what kids want to know – they want to know why, why, why, and they want to explain the phenomena that are around them in the world. And so, science gives kids an approach – systematic approach – to learn about how things work, and that gives them a foundation that they’ll take with them for the rest of their lives.

Capuano:

That’s such a great point, because when I think about little people, the question they always ask is “Why?” And you’re helping to provide the why.

Bustamante:

Mm-hmm.

Capuano:

Around the time that you arrived here at UC Irvine in 2018, you were one of many co-authors from multiple universities, as well as the Brookings Institution, of a paper titled “Learning Landscapes: Can urban planning and the learning sciences work together to help children?”

Now, the School of Education, when you arrived, wrote a brief introduction about your work on their website and it’s, quote, “Bustamante designs and implements classroom- and community-based early childhood science interventions that target domain general learning skills, such as approaches to learning, executive functioning, and social emotional development in children and families living in poverty.”

I would like to paraphrase it. From what I know of your work, this is what I’d say: “He helps envision and design super cool interactive play spaces and education stations at schools and in various locations in our community, such as parks, bus stations, and stores. Through their experiences at those installations, students and their families can foster a deeper connection to learning and even grow to love it. How would you describe what you do?

Bustamante:

I think you nailed it. We are trying to reimagine our everyday spaces – parks, bus stops, grocery stores, laundry mats, doctor’s office waiting rooms – anywhere where families are spending time, we’re trying to imagine them as opportunities for play and learning because I feel really strongly that learning should be joyful and fun. And we know from decades of research that learning is more powerful and effective when it is joyful and fun, and kids are more engaged.

And then the other big part of it for me is the partnership with community. So that learning opportunities are not only deeply embedded in research and developmental and education science, but also, community values and cultural practices and the things that are familiar and that resonate with people locally because it adds a whole other layer of building on communities’ assets, which are, again, their everyday practices and cultural histories, which are so rich and provide so much context and meaning for learning. Those partnerships, for me, bring the projects to the next level, as well as partnering with local institutions so that the installations are made possible, are sustained, are replicated and spread. And so, that partnership portion of it, to me, has been really exciting and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done in Santa Ana, in partnership with that community.

Capuano:

One thing that I’ve noticed about the in-community installations – it seems like they’re all designed in a way that the whole family can participate.

Bustamante:

The Playful Learning Landscapes installations for the public spaces in Santa Ana were literally designed in partnership with local families. And so, the ways that the designs came out really reflect the families’ values and priorities. And, very explicitly, families told us we want to create learning opportunities that are intergenerational: “We want our kids learning from and with their grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. And we also want grandparents and aunts and uncles to be learning from our children because young people know a lot about technology or, in the Santa Ana community, there’s a lot of English language learners. And so, this dissemination of learning up and down generations of families was an explicit priority.

And so, as we created our designs and prototypes that was a goal, that we’d iterate on the designs and try to make them more collaborative, more social, and more intergenerational. I think it’s, again, reflective of a core community value in the Santa Ana community, which is this idea of “familismo,” or really prioritizing family time as a top priority.

Capuano:

How has the Learning Landscapes project expanded and evolved during your time here at UC Irvine?

Bustamante:

I first got involved in the Learning Landscapes work as a postdoctoral research fellow at Temple University, and my mentor, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek – she and her colleague, Roberta Golinkoff, started this initiative. And so that’s where I first learned about it and got to engage in some of that work in Philly, which was really exciting, and it really sparked a passion for me in this work.

I was trained in a developmental psychology program, and then my postdoc was also in psychology. When I got to the UCI School of Education, one thing that really stood out to me was how interdisciplinary the space is. And so, in a School of Education, you have scholars from psychology, but also learning sciences, economics, sociology… like, it’s amazing!

And so, I got to connect with so many amazing scholars from these different disciplines and learn about the things that they do. And I’ve ended up building a really strong relationship with one of my colleagues here at UCI’s School of Ed, June Ahn, who’s an expert in participatory design. He’s a learning scientist. I really have learned so much from him.

I always did partnership work, so I always valued community partnership and really felt that that was necessary to achieve the goals that I wanted to achieve. But the intentionality and the planfulness and the rigor behind it – I was not trained on it, and I learned it right here at UCI. And so, that’s something that in my work has grown tremendously from just being in this very interdisciplinary space. And now when we say that we’re designing with local families, like we really mean it and it’s like a really thoughtful and careful process, from the practical design part, all the way to the scholarship that we write, where we were doing this in partnership with, with community and with families.

Capuano:

That’s just really cool. If anyone wants to experience the growth of the Learning Landscapes in person, there are actually several options in Santa Ana. This includes a giant interactive abacus at the bus stop on the northeast corner of Main Street and McFadden Avenue. There’s educational signage inside the Northgate Market across the street from that bus stop. At Angels Park, people can now find a pair of installations: a giant La Lotería game and “How Tall Am I?” which is an interactive height comparison tool. As well, Madison Park is going to have two installations: an “Eye Spy” interactive mural and Parkopolis, which is a life-sized board game promoting STEM language use and physical activity. What brought those projects about? What was it like to design them? Take us down that journey, please.

Bustamante:

Yeah, it’s been an incredibly exciting journey and a long one – we started this project in 2020. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and it’s a partnership with the Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI), which is a community partner in Santa Ana that’s local families as well as educators, community leaders, nonprofit organizations, all coming together to support families with children zero to eight, so early childhood focus.

With SAELI, we held a series of co-design sessions with local families where we had them dream about their community spaces. What would their dream park or bus stop or playground or grocery store – what would it look like and how would it support learning and development in their children? Ultimately: what is the vision and the goals that they have for the children and how could public space serve those goals and that vision?

And so, families did a lot of sharing about their goals and aspirations for their children, about the things that they want them to learn, which includes academic content like science and math and language and vocabulary, but also, how to share and how to support each other, and how to spend time in family and really get a strong sense of your history. We have a lot of immigrant families, and so they want their children not only to learn about the country that they’re in now, but the country that their family is from.

Through surfacing some of these ideas and values, we had families come up with prototypes of ideas, and then we actually built and mocked up the prototypes and had the families come in and play with them with their kids and give feedback. And so, it was this whole iterative cycle of design and iteration. And then we started on the work collaborating with the city of Santa Ana to actually have these things be fabricated and installed.

I think the partnership with the community, with SAELI and the city of Santa Ana is what made the project possible as well as really unique and powerful. We bring our expertise as education researchers to make sure that the science learning opportunities are rich, and the installations promote the kinds of learning that we know works best – so, hands-on, social, meaningful, joyful, iterative – but also, the designs represent the community in really special ways.

And so, I’ll give you some examples. You mentioned the “Abacus Bus Stop.” So, the abacus is a tool for counting – it’s like an ancient calculator. The reason that we decided to build an abacus is because we had multiple families share that when they were growing up in Mexico, or other countries, that they used the abacus as a tool to learn math.

And they were asking us, “Like, you know, it’s such a visual, hands-on helpful tool, like, how come my kids don’t use that? And how come the schools don’t use that?”

And we’re like, “We could totally do it. Like, well, let’s do a giant abacus!” And so, in that way – when families see that – it’s a familiar tool, and they get to share that with their children. And so, not only are they promoting math learning opportunities, but they’re sharing a little piece of them and their history.

Another example is at the Northgate Market – right across the street from where the “Abacus Bus Stop” exists – we put up some signage and one of the signs at the deli is a conversion chart. When you go to the deli, you have to ask for a certain amount of ham, you know? We had families – several families – tell a similar story about first moving to the United States and going to the grocery store to order their food and being used to kilos, because the whole world – the rest of the world – uses kilos and we use pounds.

And so, they had to order their food in pounds, and they would get twice as much ham as they needed, or half as much, you know, not enough. And they would get home and be like, “What is this? Like, this is not what I ordered, you know?” And so, there was this common story, and the families were kind of laughing and it was funny, like they had this common experience.

And so, we took that very unique experience and translated it into a design that would help not only promote conversation around measurement and units of measurement, and systems of measurement and conversion, but also uniquely connected to the local experience. So, if you did that conversion sign in a community that didn’t have a large proportion of immigrants, like it wouldn’t make any sense, you know? So, it’s something that is special and uniquely connected to this community and these families. And so, it makes me very proud and very excited to see how families engage with these installations because they were designed by this community, for this community.

Capuano:

You’ve shared a lot about the community installations of Playful Learning Landscapes. What about the ones in schools? I’m especially interested in “Fraction Ball,” which was launched at El Sol Science and Art Academy in Santa Ana.

Bustamante:

Back in 2018, a colleague and I, Kreshnik Begolli, went to meet with teachers at El Sol Academy, which is our charter school in Santa Ana, to talk about how we could design their schoolyard as a playful learning space. We went to meet with the teachers, and we told them about Parkopolis and some of these playful learning landscapes designs and got them really excited about the possibilities for collaboration and how we could really bring their schoolyard to life and envision it as a space for deep learning.

And, in our researcher brains, we were thinking like, “Okay, we’ll get the teachers excited, and then maybe we’ll do some piloting and try to apply for a grant to support our work.

That’s kind of like the process that we do. And usually when you apply for a grant, the first time it doesn’t get funded. And so usually it’s like that second time around. So, we’re thinking like a one- to two-year timeline. And the teachers… we end the meeting, we’re like, “So, what do y’all think?”

And they’re like, “This is amazing! Let’s start tomorrow. What do we do first?”

And I’m just like, “Uh, okay, yeah. Let’s start tomorrow. Love the energy! Like, well, let’s throw it back to you. What do you think? This is your school; these are your students. Like, what should we do first?”

And one of the teachers said, “Well, we just repaved our basketball court, but we haven’t painted the lines on it yet. So, like, I don’t know, could we do something there?”

And I got super excited because I’m a basketball player from when I was a little kid all the way through college. I still play in the “old man leagues.” It’s my favorite pastime. And so, I said, “Okay, let’s think about it.”

And so, through conversations with the teachers, we identified fractions as a really big barrier in kids’ math trajectory, math development. Up until fractions, math is pretty accessible. Students feel okay about it. And then once fractions enter, you start hearing kids say stuff like, “Oh, I’m not a math person.” Or “Math’s not for me.” Because it changes a lot of the rules: all the way up until fractions bigger number means more. But all of a sudden, a bigger denominator, it means you’re dividing into more pieces. So, it actually means less. And the way that kids often learn fractions is very procedural. They’re memorizing steps and they’re flipping in “the butterfly” and “cross multiply.” And, you know, and they’re confused. They don’t… because they’re not looking at physically, magnitude-wise, what are they doing? What is a fraction?

And so, we got together with some colleagues here at UC Irvine in the School of Ed. So, Drew Bailey, Lindsey Richland, June Ahn, Kathy Rhodes and Kreshnik, my colleague that I mentioned, Kreshnik Begolli. And we put our heads together with the teachers, and we came up with this design where the three-point arc of the basketball court is now worth one whole. And then there’s smaller arcs closer to the basket worth a quarter point, a half a point, and three quarters of a point. And then the left side of the court is decimal representations, and the right side is fraction representations. And so, kids can see that one half and 0.5 are the same value, same magnitude, just written with different notation.

And then they keep track of their score on a number line on the side of the court. And so, this builds on decades of research in math cognition and math education around number line training and embodiment and play. And so, we started at El Sol Academy and then began working with Santa Ana Unified School District in 2020.

And for the last five years, we’ve been working really closely with teachers and students to create games, activities on the court. And we’re testing the impacts of those games through experimental studies. So randomized control trials. So, we’ll take a big group of kids and randomly assign half of them to play “Fraction Ball” and the other half to do “business as usual” math class. And consistently throughout the project in the last seven years, we’ve seen, strong positive impacts in favor of “Fraction Ball.” So, the kids are learning and we’re really excited and proud of that.

And this year, because of the really close partnership with Santa Ana Unified School District, we’ve been able to scale up within their district. And so, we are now in 27 schools in Santa Ana Unified. And this is part of a project that’s funded by the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund – AERDF. And it’s a broader project called “EF+Math” – Executive Function plus Math. It’s a program and “Fraction Ball” is one of the funded projects in that program.

And so, this year we are doing an experimental study with 5,000 students and we are in Santa Ana Unified School District, Lynwood Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District. So, going up into LA and working with teachers and students to make joyful and exciting math learning experiences that are helping kids learn.

Capuano:

Maybe someday we’ll see fraction ball at all the elementary schools.

Bustamante:

That’s the goal. Definitely! (laughs)

Capuano:

That is very cool. What a great story! I love that the school was ready to start “the next day” on this project.

Bustamante:

Yes.

Capuano:

But when you have a winning idea, this is what happens.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Bustamante. This was a really fun conversation – enlightening and inspiring.

Bustamante:

Well, thank you. I enjoyed it.

Capuano:

I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UCI Podcast is production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.