Getting to Work in New Orleans: Ten Years of Partnership with Cooper Hewitt’s Education Team
By Michelle Cheng and Kim Robledo-Diga
“St. Bernard Parish was totally devastated by Katrina. Every house, everything, was destroyed, and there’s a lot of planning and design that can take place in [students’] own neighborhood. I tell the kids, you are all going to be the ones to rebuild. It’s the younger generation that has to rebuild if they are going to keep the community alive.”
Albert Carey, St. Bernard Parish Schools
In 2006, one year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Cooper Hewitt educators traveled to the Crescent City with one simple idea in mind: empower the New Orleans education community and youth — people without a background in design — to help New Orleans’s recovery using design thinking.
Cooper Hewitt had just begun the process of building a national educational platform for introducing design thinking into classrooms across the country. While design thinking had long been shared in design studios and colleges, and even migrated into business school curricula, an understanding and application of this methodology was not at all a part of the country’s K–12 education vocabulary. As the nation’s design museum, Cooper Hewitt wanted to change that. We created a professional development workshop to introduce the design process to educators. In the workshop, educators solve a theoretical challenge using the design process — from identifying the user to brainstorming to prototyping solutions. We then work with educators to help them integrate design thinking into their lesson plans. Our hope was that students equipped with these tools would gain vital skills needed in the twenty-first century — empathy, creative problem solving, and learning from failure.
In New Orleans, however, the design challenges weren’t theoretical. They were real and personal because the students, educators, and their families were the actual users, and design solutions for rebuilding the city’s neighborhoods and infrastructure were urgently needed. Despite the enormity of the disaster, Cooper Hewitt educators were keen to get involved with the hope that our design education curriculum would empower New Orleans’s educators and their students to have a voice in the changes being made in their communities after the storm.
After landing in New Orleans we went door-to-door successfully connecting with district leaders, schools, community partners, and designers. During that initial visit, we found that principals and educators were excited to participate in our design thinking workshops, but also desperately needed a break from the recovery process. Too many people, including the educators themselves, were still just recovering from the storm, and emotions remained very raw. In response, and thanks to support from Microsoft, we made the crucial decision to bring thirty-nine educators from eight New Orleans schools to New York City. In a weeklong program that united civic leaders, designers, museum curators, and urban planners the educators focused on diving into the design process in a safe, restorative environment.
These newly trained citizen designers returned to their classrooms in the fall of 2007, ready to share these tools with their students and work collaboratively to identify a challenge or opportunity to tackle. Dozens of design proposals came to realization during this school year.
At the end of the school year in 2008, Cooper Hewitt hosted its first Design Fair in New Orleans. The destruction from Hurricane Katrina was still recent, but designers and organizations had started taking action to construct new buildings, repair communities, and more. The Design Fair showcased the design projects that Cooper Hewitt–trained educators led during the school year. Local design firms such as CITYbuild, Concordia, Global Green USA, and National Design Award winner Make It Right were invited to show the work they were doing in New Orleans and rebuild the city. For the first time, students’ voices were heard alongside those of the men and women tasked with rebuilding the students’ communities. This moment was monumental — and it motivated us to continue to connect students with the rebuilders of their community.
Our professional development program in New Orleans became an annual event. And as its reputation grew, the program evolved with the needs of the students, the educators, and the schools as they moved beyond the immediate aftermath of Katrina. We invited educators from other cities across the United States, including San Antonio, Chicago, Chattanooga, and others, to travel to and participate in our New Orleans workshops, which now encompassed design challenges beyond disaster relief. In the program’s current form, educators focus specifically on a curriculum challenge, so they leave with something that they can immediately implement in the classroom.
As Cooper Hewitt started to extend its national reach and develop a design- based curriculum for integration into K–12 classrooms, our relationship with New Orleans deepened. The students, educators, and city of New Orleans itself were integral to our efforts to prototype, iterate, and refine our training for K–12 educators. At each and every training, school visit, and lesson plan review, we learned from real in-classroom and community implementations of design solutions. This ten-year relationship with New Orleans and its community helped Cooper Hewitt refine the professional development training we execute across dozens of cities around the country today.
The tight bonds among members of Cooper Hewitt’s education department are attributed to our frequent trips to New Orleans together. Dozens of staff members have logged multiple trips over the past ten years, contributing a small part to the recovery of a great American city.
Cooper Hewitt looks forward to bringing our national professional development program to New Orleans in the next decade. The city serves as a flagship venue for the museum and will continue to inform our development of best practices as we bring Design in the Classroom across the nation.
Michelle Cheng is the Professional Development Manager and Kim Robledo-Diga is the Deputy Director of Education and Interpretation at Cooper Hewitt.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2016 Design Journal, published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
