If you want to Design at the Margins, Start with Yourself
Educators make sense and apply equityXdesign to school redesign.
equityXdesign is a practice. It is a verb. A remix of professional and personal experiences in school leadership, school design and redesign, community organizing, and equity work, its words and meaning are best revealed through application and action.
While inspiring, it may be a mistake and an overgeneralization to take the framework literally and focus solely on the outcome, rather than the process it takes to achieve its full expression. Because the equityXdesign framework was conceived by thinking, doing, and reflection, it is best understood in this praxis. In other words, we have to apply the framework in real, authentic settings in order to understand what it means and we also have to observe how others apply the framework to allow the revelation of complementary meaning. More importantly, we must be aware of how we are changing as we apply its principles. Herein lies a rich opportunity for transformation.
There is no better place for this praxis than the school house.The capacity to exclude, marginalize, and other a human is not exclusively reserved for people of European descent. It is only reserved for people who are blinded by their own power and privilege. Yet, it is the very power and privilege that we have been taught and coached to achieve that can become an albatross to any emerging equity practice. As we achieve, we ascend from the margins. So far in fact, returning as outsiders is a journey that requires deep self work. How do we get to the margins? How do we see our way there? Who helps us? If the margins is the location where equitable design must begin, how do we get close and what do we do once we arrive?
These questions are real, practical, and can be answered best by those who are actually doing the work of equitable redesign — the practitioners — the leaders, teachers, and students who are tackling historical systems of inequity in the design of our school walls. These are their stories and their reflections after one year of applying equityXdesign to the school redesign process.
The leaders, Amanda, Joel, and Susana live in the Northeast. They each play a leadership role for design teams engaged in high school redesign planning, with support from the Barr Foundation as part of their Wider Learning Ecosystem Project.
- Joel is a director of impact and engagement for a charter school in New Haven, CT (Common Ground)
- Amanda is an instructional coach for a large public high school in Manchester, CT (Manchester High School)
- Susana is a communications director for a large urban district in Massachusetts (Somerville Public Schools)
Think about how your innovation has evolved since you started redesigning your school with a lens of equity.
Amanda: Sometimes we’ve been surprised at the pace. The more people we bring in, the more we need to slow down and build a common understanding before moving ahead. That often seems like a frustrating task at first, and then we end up being so glad we did it.
One of the things we keep talking about are these moments where everything starts to slow down. And those of us who have been in this redesign process from day one, kind of get frustrated with that at first. Our natural reaction when things slow down is to ask ourselves, “Wait, what did we do wrong?” But, really that is an important part of the process. As we increase our stakeholders and bring more students to the table and families, and more community partners, different stakeholders, we HAVE to stop and slow down and make sure that we are all using the same vocabulary and that we have the same understandings. Then, we end up leaving that conversation so glad that we did bring the stakeholders in, especially students, and glad that we slowed down. And we have to stop getting frustrated when that happens. That has been an interesting process for us. We are used to go-go-go all of the time.
Joel: That’s a big question. I have been surprised by (1) our success in engaging young people deeply in the process, and (2) the continued challenges of meaningfully engaging classroom teachers in the whole of the change.
We had this vision of students leading the change as one of our core design principles — and that is a daunting and audacious design principle. It is also where we have seen the greatest success: engaging students in crafting the school vision in ways that are clear and accessible, and also in developing specific new pieces, like new courses and new models.
Though I should not have been, I have been surprised that teachers are really stressed and anxious. A significant piece is about where they fit into the design process. Community partners are more deeply engaged than ever before. Students are leading the change more than ever before. Teachers are feeling the culture shift.
Susana: One of the big things for us is that we thought we were hearing students when we first started this process and that we were listening. But we quickly learned that we were bringing our own assumptions to the process and students were more than willing to provide really specific information and share what their struggles are and how they feel about any changes that happen at the school. It has been a little be surprising too at the level of feedback and the consistent feedback loop that we have to have in place to ensure that staff members who were not involved in the planning committee group just feel heard. There are a lot of changes going on at the school including a new building and all of the other work that is happening impacts the way people are experiencing the redesign.
I think the biggest surprise for us has been just how intense the feedback loop needs to be in order to ensure that staff members who are not actively involved in the planning process feel engaged and heard. I think we also have learned how intentional and targeted we need to be in ensuring that we are hearing from the most vulnerable student populations and to meet students where they’re at.
How have you changed and what have you noticed about your own leadership practice?
Amanda: I’m an instructional coach, not a principal/admin, so my role might be a bit different. I tend to be a strong influencer and it’s been an interesting process as I try to STOP influencing and do a lot more listening.
Joel: I’ve noticed myself being more deeply connected to students as a school/organization leader, and more aware of some of my limits and growing edges. I was appreciating what Amanda from Manchester said about being an influencer rather than someone with positional authority — recognizing the dynamics around trying to enter a change process sideways. Because of teacher uncertainty and stress, and because they have been my peers for a really long time, knowing how to manage those relationships has been a little bit scary, from a personal point of view. My colleagues are some of the most important people in my life so, it is stressful. And sometimes I wonder if we are on the right path.
Susana: I’m more aware of the challenges that students and staff members feel on a daily basis, and feel more empowered to do what I can to support them, to listen carefully, and to work with them to affect some necessary change.
What was scary for me, was as a district staff member working at the district level, my role is a bit different from many people in this work, it is a bit scary to venture into this type of work. But, what I found is that people, my colleagues are seeing me in a different role, and I am supported and I am learning SO much about the challenges that teachers and students face, what it is like on an every day basis to be in a school and in a classroom, and that has helped me to get a different perspective on the work that we are doing, and how we need to change our approach to supporting our staff members and making change that is going to have a positive impact on kids. It is also a little bit scary, similarly to what Joel mentioned. We have people who have been incredibly involved in this work and are REALLY thinking outside of the box and are taking a close look at what changes need to be made in order to effectively serve every student in our community. And there is always that fear that in the end that something is going to present a barrier.
How does your redesign transform the experience for marginalized students?
Amanda: I think about a few things with regards to this question. I think about how we’ve conferenced with every single freshman to talk about their passions and goals in helping them with academy choice. I also think about how some adults said, “Fifty percent of these kids aren’t going to care.” Literally, every student we talked to cared deeply about their passions, goals, and academy choice.
We thought that we needed to get students in the right place. We have these academies and different experiences to engage them while they are there but they’ve got to be in the right spot. We had tried a lot of things in the past, but it was not one-on-one individual engagements, driven by students and student needs. So, we changed that. This year, I helped train the trainers by conferencing with students, while people watched, and I watched while they conferenced with students and we met individually with every single freshman in our school, about 450 kids or so! We pulled up their learning inventories and electives they were taking and it was a lot of time and human resources to do that and make that connection — one- on-one with every kid.
And a lot of the adults still said,”You know what, you are doing all of this work and it is nice idea, but you know what, most kids are not going to care and you are doing it for nothing.” We said, I guess we will find out, won’t we. I personally spoke to about 200 students. Whether I was listening to someone else’s conversation, modeling, or leading and I will tell you not a single student said that they did not care. Every kid cared. Every kid wanted to be heard. It was really powerful for us. It continues. It is only the beginning.
Joel: Yesterday, I was pushing into our new 10th grade interdisciplinary core, where they are studying education justice as a theme. They are exploring the question, “What does educational change leading towards justice look like?” The conversation shifted so much when students started talking about what sort of classes and learning experiences they were hungry for. There was such excitement. One young woman said that, “We need a class in self love and personal finance.” That was the best thing I heard all day.
There are such bright spots, like that one. I am also noticing that we have changed a lot what students expect to know and rely on. For instance, the bell schedule is different today for those 10th graders. The student groupings are different today. Students are in a different spaces today as well. I am coming to the understanding that students who have faced complex trauma have come to rely on the little bit of structure in their life called school, and we have destabilized that through the change process. School didn’t work for them before, but within the old structure, they knew how to navigate it, in a way that kept them relatively safe.
That is a dynamic that I am really aware of right now. School as it is doesn’t work for marginalized students — that was a primary motivation for our redesign. I can see places where our pilot/prototyping, and the planning process itself, are shifting students from the margins to center in really positive ways — centering their strengths and interests, allowing them to share what doesn’t work. And, the change process can take away structures that vulnerable students have come to rely on, which can cause additional challenges and marginalization in the short-term.
Amanda: We have had a couple of times and usually it is just one on one. It is in a setting that feels safe. We have had students express a concern that — the way I say it might be an over exaggeration perhaps — but the concern that I heard was that “Please don’t experiment on me.” And that is totally justified. We are changing and there are a couple of things that we are working out as we go. We are doing pilots and some prototyping and if there is a student for whom that bit of stability is important, we have to recognize it. It is tough.
For us, we have had to step back and say, “Whoa, we don’t want to be experimenting on students.” We have had to stop and listen and hear student voice and start to ask them and say if you are worried about this, talk to me. And hear the concerns and figure out what we, adults, have to do to support. That approach has helped.
Summary:
Inclusion Drives Innovation: Whether it is your own leadership practice or the form and function of an institution that is ripe for change, once you include other people and become closer to their experience, the form and function of the design changes and the designer changes as well. The time to include, share language, and ideas is the stuff of real community. That is radical.
Move One Step With Discomfort: Sometimes when we are paving the road less traveled, the first bump in the road is just fear. When we set big and audacious goals, there will be team members who mean well and will share their feedback in order to conserve attention, resources, structures, and historical designs. As innovators, it is important to hear this intent to conserve the current system, recognize the discomfort that change generates, and move one step beyond it. Amanda’s one step connected her to 450 children.
Disruption vs. Transformation: For the most marginalized, there is a relationship between disruption and transformation that must always stay in focus. A system that might not meet our objectives maybe be working just fine for someone else. School might be working for a child who looks at the school institution for stability and psychological safety. This must be balanced with the adult perspective that has a different (read: not better) line of sight. Both of these visions must be balanced and given attention in the change process. It is important that the bias stays to the margins and their experience and voice is radically included throughout the process.
When equityXdesign extends from concept and theory to action, meaning is revealed not just for the other, but for ourselves. We walk into ambiguity. We reveal the our own assumptions that are imbedded in our constructed selves. We see what needs to be changed and how we need to change.
What is the first step when designing at the margins? Start with yourself.
