The d.school, in partnership with the Stanford Graduate School of Education and StreetCode Academy, joined a transformative initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This pioneering project, EdTech Remix, launched a vibrant community of practice dedicated to advancing equitable K-12 edtech design practices and products.
Making K12 educational technology equitable
“Education is most powerful when it’s communal, when there’s joy, when there’s love, when there’s community, and that’s what this cohort represents.” This quote from cohort member Aaron Schorn, Head of Growth and Community for the edtech company Unrulr, speaks to the spirit of EdTech Remix, a transformative initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that’s fostering a community in which stakeholders interested in issues of equity in EdTech product development can collaborate to generate new design strategies, user-centered initiatives, and feel a sense of belonging.
Too often educational technology, or edtech, replicates rote learning, ignores students’ culture and context, and exacerbates inequity – and too often, edtech designers committed to equity feel siloed. We’re building a community of edtech designers, funders, students, educators, researchers, pedagogy experts, and education network and nonprofit leaders to change that.
We have brought together a small cohort of edtech designers who are collaboratively learning, surfacing, and developing new equitable design strategies. As sam seidel, d.school director of products+publications and co-director of the K12 Lab, put it, “Designers need a place to come together and just get into it together, get real nerdy, talk about what’s happening, what needs to be happening, how to make it happen. That’s what this is about.” These designers are committed to equity, and some of them are building products they needed as young people.
As member Romane Armand from Book of Rhymes put it, “I love the concept of human-centered design and equity-based design because it starts with people and it ends with people. Some of us, we have that empathy because we struggled, we didn’t feel seen, heard, or valued and now we want to change that.” Tiffany Green from Uprooted Academy also shared: “I do this for little Tiffany, first gen, low income, student of color, high achieving, and I needed all these tools that are here. Being part of this community as a founder means that I get the best of other people’s ideas who have the resources.”
In addition to the designer cohort, we’ve launched a much broader network of stakeholders in order to foster a more connected ecosystem. Networking sessions, conversations about topics like school district procurement and artificial intelligence, and in-person meetups are just some of the ways members of the community are finding new collaborators and generating new ideas–all with the shared goal of creating equitable technology for all educators and students.
Credits
sam seidel and Isabel Huff