David Clifford Workshop

Saturday morning and a Zoom call with David Clifford. In some ways I was really looking forward to it - new learning, new ideas, but in other ways I was wondering what I was doing - another online call for the week, tired after the first week back teaching, and disappointment that we were not there in person as we were meant to be. So I had mixed emotions going in to the call but was feeling great and inspired again by the end of it.  This funny video link was shared - just a reminder of how mad some online calls can be! Here are my notes from that call. Thanks to David for letting me use some of his slides here as well - really helpful to illustrate what he was talking about.

David said right at the beginning 'Any system produces what it was designed to produce'. We are all getting exactly what was designed. We are all designers but we need to practice with more intention.
He got us to design a vase on paper, then to draw a way to appreciate flowers and then we shared these. He said our group was the most diverse he had seen ever! Generally people draw a vase without flowers in it. We tell our students or teachers "do this thing". They are told what to do but we often miss the purpose - the purpose of the vase is the flower. The purpose for us is the students.

Embrace Complexity
When the going gets messy stay open to possibilities. Equity Challenges are complex. We need to wade through complexity with patience.
When we experience design goals we need to:
Feel cared for and engaged
Feel stretched and loved (not be in the panic zone - relationships are important)
Defibrillate your creative courage
He wanted us to leave the day with not solutions, but approaches. He went through our plan for the day - to build trust, build creative courage and to design, build and play together.

David shared some of his background with us. He came to Christchurch last year for TedX - a talk on 'Forget about T shaped people. We need X shaped people'. He has co-founded a middle school for boys. He sees schools as ecosystems that design humans so is wanting to create these to reimagine what schools can be. He is the founder of Design School X (DSX) DSX is currently all over the world, including here in Christchurch with Tamara's Boma project from last year Micro-credentials in Liberatory Design.
Schools were designed to manage, not liberate, thinking. He is also opening a Social Justice school.

"Who we are shapes what we see, how we relate, and how we design"

The next part of this workshop was about definitions.
Design
"Everything is designed, intentionally or not with outcomes that have impact" @equity design collaborative
Design is made up of Products, Spaces, Processes (how you manage, greet etc) and Systems (how we communicate).
We had practice to design something. We were split into pairs and told to design a desk for the other person. We had a few minutes to design something. This was designed from a personal lens and we made assumptions about what we thought they needed. There was something missing.

This led on to David talking about an Empathy Pause. We need to listen and use a user centred design. We looked at Design Thinking 101 and briefly went through each step.
Empathize - Understanding the experiences, emotions, motivation and needs of stakeholders. Empathy is "seeing and feeling as another" Sam Mogannan
Why do we need to empathize? To meet needs
How do we do this? with compassion for yourself and others. Stuff may come up for you from what they share with you. We need to have compassion. We have no idea what it is like to be a Year 12 during Covid19. We need to ask from a place of curiosity. About age 11 students start asking from a place of confirmation of own bias, not from curiosity.
We also need to ask with optimism and respect.
David told us the story of the Mono tribe who ground acrons by hand. Some engineers decided to make them a machine to do it much faster but they never used it - the grinding was only part of the process, the women used that time to get into a rhythm and to tell stories of the day and their culture. Much more behind it if they had asked and had empathy.
Methods to empathise:
Immerse - hard to do during Covid19
Observe - can do through internet
Engage - interviews, phone calls

We then went onto the second challenge - to redesign the desk after conducting and empathy interview with our partner. Normally an empathy interview would be 30-60 ins but we would have 5. Some conversation starters he suggested were:
Tell me about your relationship with school
What is your favourite subject? Least favourite and why.
How do you like to learn?
Tell me more...
They need to feel heard and that their needs are being met.
We then prototyped our design with tin foil - never though about using tinfoil to sculpt before - it works really well - have to do that again!
User centered design is rooted in empathy. The designer has the power by taking what you say and designing what they think you need - it has heirachy and is transactional.

Liberatory design thinking starts with design thinking. With practice you get an empathetic designer and they have good intentions but we have blindspots and can get baked into our design. Design thinking can feel a bit more like this picture. But the Design Thinking process was designed by middle aged white men and they did not check themselves in the process.  We need to be intentional and build time into our process to notice our biases, habits and assumptions. We may have feelings of bravado, thinking we are the saviour and doing good, or the feeling of poor you, or just being polite and our designs may inherit these. Is our data and written words asking out of curiosity or are we just trying to confirm what we think. "I like school, so therefore everyone should". If you don't check all of these things you are just going with the status quo.

So a group of people hacked the design thinking process for equity. They wanted to find out "How can design thinking powerfully serve as a force for equity + address the effects of oppression on education?" Equity work often doesn't have an "intentional and powerful approach to creating actionable change" and design can often fail to address root causes of equity. They came up with Liberatory Design Thinking which added Notice and Reflect to the process.

Equity... is the state that would be achieved if how one fares was no longer predictable by any social, cultural or economic factor. National Equity Project

Race and racism are designed by white people. Measurements in schools should bring out the full magic of students, not just maths and english.

Oppression - a system of unjust treatment built into our daily life, beyond individual acts. It affects everything we do (learning, leading, teaching, designing, living).

What they mean by Liberatory:
Enabling self awareness - freedom from the distorting effects from oppression
Transforming Power - design genuine opportunities to co-create in ways that add value to those that have historically been marginalised.'

Equity Pause
Covid19 has created a global pause for us to take stock. The normal before Covid19 was oppressive. How do we ensure we take an Equity Pause so we design something different?
Liberatory design cards - Process, Mindsets and DoNows
Design Thinking was designed to make money, Liberatory Design Thinking was designed to liberate humanity.
Need to exercise our creative courage and be a designer for equity.
This is about being a life long learner - not going to happen overnight. We need to have an understanding of self and systems.
We then spent half an hour going through the mindsets and choosing one we felt we did well at and one that was going to stretch us.
I chose "Share, don't sell" as my one I was doing well at. I feel I always want to share with others and I invite feedback to whatever I do. I am open to learning and growing and always keen for others to be involved.
A stretch for me was Bias towards experimentation. I think i tend to have a final solution in mind instead of going with the flow and letting experimentation take me wherever it does.
We shared these chosen mindsets with each other and then looked at how we might use them to change our original designs.

Equity Centered Design - as opposed to empathy or user centered.
Equity moves at the rate of trust - we need to take time to earn trust - needs to be co-constructed/liberatory.
Christopher Emdin "White folks who teach in the hood" Some great quotes from him here. Talks about us learning from each other, not us teaching and them learning.

So what?
We did a reflection on what we had notices so far I noticed that there was much more emphasis on empathy and equity, not just the design process. More on relationships and about knowing yourself and your biases.
Others thought:
You think you are noticing but not doing it in depth with care and love
Have to keep going back and test ideas - it's not linear
All 8 mindsets have strengths and growths to be had, depends on the context
How much conscious and concerned effort it takes to not show your influence - and how different the outcome could be
Want to have student voice heard throughout the process
Mindsets in time of Covid19 - what happens environmentally outside the design process
NZ is Ok with cultural competencies to a degree, some of these mindsets marry up well with our competencies - all about relationships and cultural responsiveness
Neurodiverse lens needed as well - a culture in itself.
If I thought I was strong in one mindset but actually wasn't, then it could trickle down through the design
Makes us aware of how we affect the design process. Need to practice self-awareness.
How who I am shapes what I see - culture shapes our perception
Need to take on board and take a walk in their shoes while also looking in the mirror to make sure our biases are not harming them on the way.

How might we use this process in our projects?
Reminding me to use these mindsets at each step and put the bias lens over everything (not just a te ao Māori lens)
Use the Equity Pause
Student voice most important - the ones we need to hear from are the ones we may not always go through (designing with the margins)
Collaboration - more voices at the start
Check the pulse of students throughout the day - getting feedback from then, what are they experiencing?
Invite students to the design process - need to feel heard
If the voice is not used, how disempowered the student feels
Bias towards experimentation - easy to create learning opportunities that are open ended - it's OK to not have an ending
Been designed to feel the pressure to have an outcome, we need unschooling and learn to let that go. Just perpetrating the mindset we have had for a long time.
Need student voice and student agency
Good opportunity to design something to help whanau and friends at home at the moment
Crucial you design who it's for and check ourselves on the way.

Final reflection
I used to think...
Now I think....
I commit to...

I used to think that design thinking was useful but I didn't use it often
Now I think I need to use Liberatory Design Thinking as it caters more to my beliefs anyway
I commit to running the Liberatory Design Thinking lens over my creative thinking

Other people's commitments:

use equity pause more often
ask outliers in the process
empower diverse and take away own biases
trying things out earlier
taking an equity pause to think about this
letting project take it's own course and go with that
try to get students to see themselves as the centre for their own learning
see those in the margins at the centre
being aware of my own biases'

Questions
How do you not tokenise students who are at the margins?
Empathy arc - trust, authentically asking them in the process. Don't pick them to make us feel important. If we bring in student voice, especially the margins, how do they see their voice throughout the process. If you ask them, then go in a different direction, they will hate that. They are experts in their own experience. That has been systematically erased.
Stop, think, equity pause.

Pasifika - how can you involve whanau as well?
Designers bringing in families authentically is still rare.
Opportunity to invite whanau voice into schools but parents of marginalised students often have a negative view of school. Need inviting in. They are anxious and scared of being screwed over again. Fins someone who doesn't look like you (white middle aged male) and already has the trust in those communities, You still have the responsibility to own the work. You need to model humility and courage to the communities you want to earn trust with.

15 Elements of White Supremacy culture - Tema Okun
White Supremacy Culture article

Conflict of interest - students making choices which are not always good.
What I want vs what the student wants
What do you want students to learn or feel?
Too much freedom too quickly can be hard.
Easy to consume, not so easy to produce
Every himan needs to make things with their hands
The maker inside of us has been designed out of us
Need scaffolding
Learn what they come with and what they don't. Then scaffold so they can get success in bits.
Too much freedom can be chaos - create and environment to feel lived, heard in learning process and provide key nudges then eventually they will make good choices.
Schools make good slaves. Lots of relearning needs to be done so they can learn to make good choices.

Use of the word love - we don't use that much in schools
Foster strong, warm, demanding relationships but not love.
Love is not something we expect to come out in the design process or school context.

Love is the thing that will save humanity

Great morning - I learnt lots and have really enjoyed going over these notes again. More thinking and learning :)





Great tools from DSX