In 2021, as part of the work in the d.school’s K12 Lab, we created materials that focused on building racial justice mindsets and practices for educators in our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools.
The same patterns of racial disparities that we see in broader society play out in our nation’s schools in areas such as resource allocation, disciplinary actions, special education referrals, and graduation rates. These disparities appear as gaps on graphs but represent violence on children.
These tools summarize several years of work and learning. While some of the context has changed since we produced it, we believe the content is as relevant as ever. We hope you'll take a spin through it and let us know your thoughts.
Our reflections: The work is driven by our hearts and passion.
We are grateful to be able to share tools relating to racial justice, including a learning deck and an intention-setting activity. We are grateful for having had the opportunity to do this work, grateful to our students and collaborators with whom we shaped it, grateful to Lala Openi who helped bring the learning deck to life visually, and grateful to you for making time and space to engage with both the deck and the activity. In order to share this work publicly, we need to share a bit about how it feels to do so:
“What does it mean to share this work? It’s honestly a little like sharing a piece of my heart. I can’t help but feel super vulnerable, a little raw. This work has changed and shaped me in so many ways. Reflecting on the journey, it makes me a little embarrassed about where I was when I started, gives me confidence about how far I’ve progressed, and keeps me humble about how much more I need to do for the world and myself. It’s emotional for me to share this work because it’s more than a list of workshops and activities, it’s the relationships I’ve made along the way, the challenging realizations I’ve had, and the formation of new visions for what could be.
“I hope that this work speaks to others in a deep way. I hope sharing it invites folks who are curious and creative to come join us in building something meaningful, something that will continue to help us grow and love one another. I fear this work will be passed off as yet another DEI framework that companies/orgs/schools half-heartedly try and abandon. I know some of this is inevitable, and also that this work is and forever will be for those who seek justice and liberation in their hearts and communities.”–Louie Montoya
“As I wrote my intentions for this year a few words rose to the top—ease, joy, and abundance. I deeply believe that building a world that honors people who have been historically excluded and marginalized can not be done in isolation. We need each other. We don’t have to like each other, we don’t always have to agree on tactics, but we do need each other. We need one another to create communities of trust and care. We need one another to strategize, organize, and disrupt powerful, oppressive systems. Our work came from the depths of these needs—from being burnt out, hitting the wall of white supremacy again and again, and feeling alone in championing equity within entrenched organizations.
“This work is an offering to our former selves and to others who don’t yet have the language to describe the pain of being unheard and under appreciated. At their best, the tools that we have built and are building will foster ease, joy, and abundance. Ease by offering a community to support us both when activated and when we need rest. Joy as we begin to model the behaviors that deeply honor our humanity—and because there is so much release and laughter in liberatory work. Abundance as we realize we all have so much to contribute and we can join together with our knowledge, gifts, and resources to bend our futures towards justice.”— Jess Brown
“I wonder if it would be easier to keep passion-work and work-work separate—punching a clock enough hours each week to pay the bills and then engaging in actions with the audacity and desperation to change the world ‘on my own time.’ Nevertheless, I find myself with the privilege and challenge of doing work I care about deeply as my full time job. With that comes moments of trepidation and joy—like when it is time to publicly share work that has been close to my heart: what if it is misinterpreted, abused, inadequate, or ignored?
“Sharing some of my fears and hopes for what will happen as we float this particular piece of work out into the world helps me release it…
“(An incomplete list of) fears: that this work will be taken out of context; that larger conclusions will be drawn than we are trying to suggest; that it will somehow ‘position’ us and the institutions we represent as experts on matters upon which we are learners; that it will be viewed as a commodity (‘intellectual property’) that can be owned, stolen, or sold.
“(An incomplete list of) hopes: that this work will inspire action; that we will get to learn from those we share it with; that they will teach us what we got wrong or don’t understand yet; that it will be sampled, remixed, and taken forward; that we will look back at it in a few years and feel a mix of pride for the quantity and quality of the work we put into it, nostalgia for the time we shared as we created it, and that good kind of embarrassment you feel when you look back at something you made and realize how far you’ve come since.”–sam seidel
The work: If educators learn about racism, they’ll rake anti-racist action.
Through conversations with educators and young people, and through experiments with tools and resources in the field, we've developed experiences to support people as they address racial inequity. One of those experiences is Designing (Ourselves) 4 Racial Equity, a Stanford course designed and facilitated by Jessica Brown, Louie Montoya, and sam seidel. It included Stanford students, staff, and community organizers across the country. It focused on the intersection of racial equity and design and was centered on tools and resources to push students’ equity work.
As our first design project in this class, we invited our students to co-create a set of prototypes to help keep our intentions active and present throughout the course.
This is an activity to help students create community norms and intentions. An educator could use this prior to having students engage in challenging conversations. These intentions will help students identify what they need to have productive dialogue, and allow the class to design tangible actions to help ensure the community upholds these student-sourced intentions.
For groups of students or colleagues to have generative conversations about difficult topics, we as teachers and facilitators must help build a strong set of intended ways of being and engaging with one another in order to create brave spaces. These intentions are sometimes called “group norms,” “ground rules,” “expectations,” “agreements,” and probably many other names! Too often groups talk about intentions at the beginning of a class or workshop, but never return to them.
The Intention Prototypes were designed for our class, by our class. We came back to these every session. We believe they are powerful and can be used elsewhere, and that other groups of students can create their own intentions and prototypes as well. We’ve provided links to three downloadable resources on this page. Here are descriptions of each with a bit about how to use them (they have further instructions once you open them).
Designing Our Intentions: Discussion and Ideas. This Google Presentation template can be copied and used to facilitate a group of students or workshop participants through discussing and coming up with ideas for norms and intentions.
Designing Our Intentions: Prototype and Share. After the group has created ideas for norms and intentions, you can use this whiteboard template to guide the participants to further develop their ideas and share their prototypes. If you use a digital workspace like Mural or Miro, you can make this template a background. You could also recreate it physically (on a whiteboard or paper) or print it large enough to work on it directly.
Intention Prototypes. This Google Presentation can be shared as a real world example of what can emerge through this design activity. The intention prototypes in this deck can also be borrowed and used directly by other groups.
The goal: We will transform the education system; when we transform the education system, we transform society.
The aim of our work is to present focused actions and resources for the path forward. With that goal in mind, we created a learning deck called Get Down with the Mission, which focuses on building creative courage and racial justice for educators in our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools. The actions and resources in the deck include:
Tools and Trainings for Antiracist Action. We want to curate, refine, and design our racial justice resources so that they are accessible, cohesive, and easily translate to action for educators. The change we want to see: Educators building their equity design capacity; Creating more relevant and transformative educational experiences for young people.
Strategies for Self-Care. We want to build out self-care resources for educators to use whenever they need. These might include resources such as a reflective journal and a self-care starter kit. The change we want to see: Educators having space to move equity work forward without being burnt out; Self-care being a more central theme in equity work.
Communities of Support. We want to codesign and prototype new experiments to help us identify how to make communities of practice scalable and more sustainable. The change we want to see: Educators relying on their collective experiences and expertise to tackle complex social issues; Equity work becoming more decentralized so that when there are changes in a school or organization (such as changes in leadership) equity work will still continue.
We hope you'll find these tools useful.
Credits
Jess Brown, Louie Montoya, and sam seidel
LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL