Designing for Equity: Every Student Every Day Design Challenge
I write this reflection with Orlando on my heart. As a proud member of the LGBTQI community and a woman of color, I am fluent in the experience of the margin — how we think about the margin, how those thoughts evolve into a discourse, and how the discourse moves to action. It is these actions that create impact. Our discourse matters.
Our young people who experience truancy are vulnerable to the usual suspects of our urban narrative — at-risk, dropout, under- employed, unemployed, unwed mothers, and multiple fathers. This story is all too familiar. The same actors play the same roles with the same lines on the same stage — a true tragedy of the commons.
The standardization and normalization of this experience routinizes our discourse, response, and our interventions. As a community, we talk about the disconnected children and their impact on the economy. We legislate policies that blame them and their families for their experience. We pilot processes to change behavior, often laced with perverse incentives. Quantitative data approximates the experience of students and families. And fifteen to twenty percent of D.C.’s students are still chronically truant. We can do better.
Changing Something Significant
When the DC Equity Lab launched in 2015, we faced many questions: How might we change the actors and their roles in service of equity and design? How might we change the experiences of marginalized people? How might we transform the hearts of the privileged? How might we change our dialogue and design a different story? How do we do better?
On June 4, more than 80 students, teachers, community members, policy makers, police officers, and government agency employees gathered at Phelps High School to write another draft. Our task: reimagine equitable and innovative ways to solve the complex puzzle of chronic absenteeism. The Every Student Every Day Design Challenge was an intentional partnership between the Deputy Mayor of Education’s Truancy Taskforce and the DC Equity Lab. This collaboration reimagined an experience for the city that aligned our intentions to our desired impact for the most marginalized young people.
We started with empathy. The DC Equity Lab team trained the Truancy Taskforce in the practice of empathy interviews and unpacking the implicit bias that exists in current practices. We interviewed students and families about their school experiences and synthesized this data into five unique user needs statements. And more questions emerged.
As the day approached, we were charged with another challenge: connect everyone to the interviews led by the Taskforce. In other words, how might we emotionally engage and invest all people in the empathy work led by the Taskforce? We decided to enlist slam poets from Split this Rock, a social justice poetry collaborative. Verses flooded the room with emotion, enabling the emerging community to connect their heads to their hearts before moving to ideation.
Michelle Molitor, founder of the Fellowship for Race and Equity in Education, taught us how to shift from a hegemonic to a transformative discourse in eight minutes. Discourse 1, the hegemonic discourse, is the language typically used to talk about, question, and plan the work of schools, change, or reform. This dialogue supports and maintains the status quo without appearing unresponsive to outside demands for improvement. Discourse 2, the discourse of transformation, is the language that tends to be about uncomfortable, unequal, ineffective, prejudicial conditions and relationships in schools. This discourse creates space for ambiguity, change, and the opportunity to be a part of a purposeful structure. Using a structured protocol, we analyzed our current discourse and responses about truancy and their implications on achieving equity in Washington, D.C. We committed to a discourse of transformation for the remainder of the day.
After a brainstorming sprint, 11 teams prototyped and presented solutions before an esteemed panel of judges. By 6 p.m, ClassGram Live, FirstDay App, and #TeamASAP headlined a unique collaborative response to the complex problem of absenteeism and truancy in Washington, D.C. The winners presented their idea at the U.S. Department of Education Attendance Conference and will share their ideas to various governing bodies in the city. Students will also join the Truancy Taskforce in SY 2016–17 to amplify the voice of the most affected.
Practicing Equity by Design
For our most marginalized students of color, experiences with truancy and chronic absenteeism are linked closely to their institutional and historical disinheritance, our novice discourse, and our comfort with incremental improvement. Because truancy and chronic absenteeism has deep roots in issues of equity, the facilitation team — Caroline Hill, Christine Ortiz, and Michelle Molitor — had to design an experience that embraced the discipline of the design thinking and the moral imperative of equity. We grappled with this idea for months. Our central design question: How might we create a suite of technical design tools for moral work? The facilitation team prototyped tools, language, and sequences. Ultimately, the tension between the technical and moral revealed powerful insights that are applicable to any team committed to grappling with complex problems rooted in inequity.
Our reflections on our discourse permitted play with the word equity itself. We played with our current constructions. We reframed it as different parts of speech. An idea under renovation, we grabbed our linguistic tool belts, a blank blueprint, and went to the site. We grappled about how we talk about equity. How do our current constructions of the concept limit our experience and our ability to achieve the maximum benefits? Is equity static? Is equity a destination? Is it a verb or a noun? Is it both? Is equity something we do and not that we are? Is it a practice like yoga or meditation? And if it is, what are the necessary postures or stances? To build this emerging insight, I will exercise a bit of artistic license and flip the metaphor from a stage to a practice. For the new frame of equity as a practice and I will offer four postures needed to achieve the maximum benefits.
Posture 1: Meta-Equity — Creating the Conditions
Our country’s story has normalized and justified separation and isolation. When we separate, we become ineffective communicators across difference and we are unable to leverage our community strengths. This threatens the equity practice. We were intentional about bringing diverse stakeholders together across race, role, gender, and socio economic status to build relationships and lay the groundwork for community. We also began the day at a common starting point. All participants were introduced to the design thinking process together, building a common language for design and change. Then, some really cool things happened. Small shifts in power and authority ensued. Young people became the experts. Youth of color and police officers engaged without threats of emotional or physical violence. Policy makers learned about the nuances of the truancy experience from those who are most affected. The most vulnerable and affected were positioned to lead. For a moment, all of us assumed responsibility for this problem and acknowledged our power to solve it.
These conditions allowed solutions to be designed with communities and not for communities — interrupting latent hegemonic assumptions about agency, engagement, and the ability to create knowledge. We have a strong hunch that this posture is a requisite for the equity practice.
Posture 2: Role Play — Discourse Under Construction
We used a design thinking process with strategic modifications. One feature was a strategic reflection after the problem definition and ideation stage. The reflection recognized the power of language and discourse to influence ideas, beliefs, actions, and ultimately culture. In order to write a different story, we have to use different language. We need to replace our current discourse.
The crash course in the hegemonic and transformative discourse raised awareness of our unintended participation in the status quo. When participants noticed that hegemony dominated their conceptual understanding of truancy and that understanding would only lead to incremental change at best, they were motivated to shift to a discourse of transformation and think and talk through this lens for the rest of the day.
Posture 3: Inclusive Change — Reduce the Barriers
This experience was modeled after Startup Weekend, a 54 hour immersive experience that offers the taste of life in a start-up. We quickly learned that a two day design experience excluded the people we wanted to engage. All people have transformative ideas. The duration and cost of an experience grants permission for the emergence of these ideas. We did not want to exclude the people that were most affected by issues of racism and inequity. Not everyone can afford to pay $100. By shortening this experience significantly and making it a free event, we reduced the barriers to entry and welcomed more people to the equity and innovation conversation. We must ask if our standards act as hindrances and create invisible barriers.
Posture 4: Equity Pauses — Stop the Clock
A sense of urgency can mask hegemonic strategy. Our common discourse of urgency and business-as-usual creates little time for reflection. In many ways, our pace of life eclipses our awareness. The strategic equity pauses stopped the clock for us to reflect on our language, ideas, hunches, and their alignment to a discourse of transformation. Without this moment to think, our brains default to the familiar and the known, making a repeat of past practice and impact not only possible, but probable.
Our pauses also revealed that we have the power to stop the clock because we control it. We have a hunch that when the privilege pause to assess the impact on the oppressed, we have a greater chance of achieving the full benefits of the equity practice.
We don’t have all of the answers. Few of us do. We do have some strong hunches about how to practice equity in community to solve complex problems and how we can build a common language and process for change in a community. We also have some emerging insights about how to engage the most affected in service of achieving equity by design. Recognition of the four postures as requisites for equity is just a starting point. The impact of their flow could be transformative. There is much work to do. We know that we need to stay in community with each other. We need to actively stay close to those who are different — and let this change us. We need to be changed.
In the spirit of praxis, we will continue to test our insights and hunches. We will keep moving.
For Orlando. We slay. All day.
A special thanks to our friends at 4.0 Schools for their unwavering support.
