Black Lives Matter.
We are Anti-Racist, Anti-Injustice & Anti-Poverty.
We are Anti-Racist, Anti-Injustice & Anti-Poverty.
Why do we exist?
- To tend to the soul of school.
What does that mean?
- Justice and love are at the center of a healthy soul.
How do we do that?
- We use human centered/equity focused design to:
- design learning experiences for adults,
- connect people and organizations,
- connect theory to practice around creative leadership.
What is at our core?
- We believe people are transformed by experience and reflection upon those experiences.
- We believe people are transformed by doing super rad (i.e., sophisticated, original and creative) work that meets the needs of an authentic user.
- We believe big change starts with small courageous acts.
- Teachers are the innovators we need. We use human-centered design to activate teacher creativity and to equip educators with the tools, processes, and mindsets to confidently meet the ever-changing needs of students and our schools. We also know teachers need conscientious principals who have their backs.
- We seek to disrupt generational poverty.
- Innovation in education is not a destination nor a final product, but rather a way of thinking and behaving to support schools to continually create value for members of their community. We use a unique form of human-centered design to unearth unarticulated needs of users, to develop prototypes, and to test those ideas rapidly with an eye toward (re)iteration. The innovation is creating innovators, not innovations, creating local innovation ecosystems, and connecting newer communities of practice with more established networks.
What do we know?
History teaches us that under the right conditions, young people do some of the most original, powerful work. They lead revolutions, invent new technologies, create new cultures, new forms of expression, new genres of music, and even new kinds of government. With their enthusiasm and zest, they throw themselves into work. With their fresh perspectives, they see old things in new ways.
Since young people have so much energy, creative capacity and desire to do original work that is useful to the world, the core function of public education should not be content delivery. Instead, education should be about positioning young people to leverage their talents, tastes, and interests to make meaningful contributions to the world. A question we should start asking is:
How might we support learners in doing high-quality, creative and intellectually challenging work that has a real audience and a real impact?
In some of our nation’s most elite high schools, this is already happening. But, how often do our young people within historically underserved communities have an opportunity to do work that really matters?
What if students worked like biologists, physicists, environmentalists, humanitarians, ethnographers, urban developers, agriculturalists, artists, composers and film makers as they studied specific phenomena and what if they created a short film that captured their experience?
Fighting for equity in education, should be about fighting for youth to do REAL, meaningful work that gives them power. The democratization of computational tools should be used not for content consumption but rather for world-class creative work--especially women, people of color, and people in poverty. In doing real work that reflects their tastes, interests, and identities, those who have been structurally oppressed will gain access to economic and expressive power.
Teachers want to do this type of badass work. No doubt, but have we created the conditions for teachers to do this work? Have we developed, created the capacity for teachers to notice, define, dream and create authentic learning opportunities?
Someone should DO something about it and we’re not waiting for someone to arrive.