Using Liberatory Design to Center Student Experience

Outline

10 min: Opening & framing; trio conversation: Share a time when you experienced a sense of belonging as a young person. What contributed to this feeling?
25 min: What is liberatory design? Overview trio conversation: What stands out to you?
Does anything here connect to ways you approach your work?
20 min: How can we design learning environments that center student experience? Video example & trio conversation: What stands out to you from this story?
What Liberatory Design mindsets might be important to consider when supporting students and adults to engage in this kind of listening and sharing?
5 min: Close

Supporting research

This session is grounded in research that links student engagement, experience, and academic success.

Liberatory design is a field of practice for social learning and problem solving; it is a human-centered design method that puts equity and complexity at the center of the co-design process. It brings together ways of knowing from equity, complexity, and human-centered design to show an ideal that is user-centered, situated, interactive, collaborative, and participatory. The National Equity Project’s approach to liberatory design is situated within our Leading for Equity Framework, an approach we have evolved and applied with thousands of leaders in schools, districts, foundations, nonprofit and other organizations for 30 years.

A recent third-party evaluation of a liberatory design project indicated that:
90% of participants used the mindset of “work to transform power” to reflect with others to in their organization on team dynamics; 87% of participants used the mindset of “embrace complexity” to come together with others from multiple perspectives for collective sensemaking; 84% of participants used the mindset of “work through fear and discomfort” to actively create space for difficult and uncomfortable conversations; 84% of participants used the mindset of “recognize oppression” to define organizational equity challenges; 83% of participants used the mindset of “exercise creative courage” to discuss innovative and creative ways to address their organizational equity challenges;79% of participants used the mindset of “take action to learn” to develop specific ideas to address their organizational equity challenges.

Liberatory design is particularly complementary to transformative SEL (Jagers et. al, 2021) as a “a process whereby young people and adults build strong and respectful relationships that facilitate co-learning to critically examine root causes of inequity and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, communal, and societal well-being.” At its root, liberatory design is a collaborative problem solving approach rooted in relationships, especially across differences in identity, role, and power.

In addition to the National Equity Project's 30 years of experience, this transdisciplinary approach draws from a multitude of research and resources including:

Banerjee, Banny. (2008). Designer as Agent of Change. A Vision for Catalyzing Rapid Change. Block, Peter. (2018). Community: The Structure of Belonging. Escobar, Arturo. (2017). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.