Imagine a world where everyone in America learns and works in a place that acknowledges their racial identity, prepares them to lead and participate in our economy and democracy with dignity and respect, and repairs and restores relationships that keep us divided.
Imagine a world where leaders in America co-design and co-create bespoke and equitable learning experiences with their communities.
Imagine an ecosystem where networks of leaders support each other in designing innovative and equitable learning cultures and schools that enable every child to develop and share their gifts.
Imagine a national ecosystem with certified leaders who are able to lead across lines of difference and private and public spaces that can be designed to heal, restore, and scale equitable policies and practices.
Introducing the Latest Framework for equityXdesign
In order to move forward stronger, wiser, more connected, and integrated than before, we must continue to re-design for equity. We must continue working to solve problems rooted in systemic oppression. The reprise of the equityXdesign framework offers tools that can help us accelerate equitable design at this moment in time.
Historical Context Matters for Radical Inclusion
The past is present in people, things, and systems of oppression. The past was designed, and the present is being designed. We are all designers.
Design at the Margins by Starting with Self
Explore how designs for equity must become designs that heal, restore, and repair. The new equityXdesign framework includes healing and the attention it brings to the restoration and repair of individuals who have the ability to transform relationships between people.
One Body, One People, and Defining Problems
The Public Body—the interdependent network of all bodies bound and rooted in the earth—creates a dynamic cosmic accountability that requires us to emerge as better humans for ourselves and our progeny. Equity problems and challenges are those that tear the Public Body apart and impact individual bodies. A design at the bleeding edge must attend to our bodies first as a requisite for the equitable design—the appearance, movement, and flexibility of our bodies creates our biases and how we make sense of the world. Healing is integral to an equitable design process.
Designing A Healing Discourse
If equity designers aren’t healing the impact of inequity and oppression in themselves, they will only create experiences and products that do not heal. Adopting a healing discourse acknowledges our shared membership in the universal Public Body, and the impact of segregation, the disease that holds inequity. Trauma-informed responses and social-emotional learning (SEL) are sound practice for students who have experienced acute and chronic system traumas. So it’s only fitting that practices for equity integrate these ways of being for adults and centers them as integral to enabling Radical Inclusion.
Radical Inclusion is the Process
The problems of equity work—racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, etc.—are rooted in our distance from one another and our habits of exclusion. Radical inclusion is the intentional elimination of barriers that exclude others. Different bodies, stories, and experiences must be invited into the innovation conversation to create spaces where everyone can bring their full selves and be equally valued. This is radical inclusion.
Cede Power to Make the Invisible Visible
Integrating Process and Product Enables Equity
Foresee the process as a product. Equity is a verb. It is a process, not an end point. A daily practice of radical inclusion will enable equity, because how we do anything is how we do everything. Inclusive design practices raise the voices of the marginalized, strengthen relationships across racial divides, shift positions, and recharge our democracy. Designing with equityXdesign reprise enables us to not just look at oppression, but to move past it.
Practicing in Public Speaks and Designs the Future
Equity work remains the work of our time, and this movement needs a studio. One that allows us to practice new relationships with ourselves and design new ones with others. We offer three studios as collaborative learning spaces where participants can begin prototyping new relationships, learn more about and begin to build the foundations of what is needed to scale and design equitable systems. We offer three studios as collaborative learning spaces.
Put It Into Practice
Learning Studio 1:
Learn to Document
Substantiating and Legitimizing Equity Learning with Portable, Immutable Credentials and Equity Learner Records
Explore how we can substantiate our learning, document our journey, and share our growth. Blockchain technology can help us create meaningful documentation of our equity work and allows us to assist all learners on their journey to become more equitable professionals. With an organized education ecosystem reoriented to healing the Public Body, we can tactically see redundancy and strengths in the current ecosystem. This is personal and private work—since we are in a relationship with each other, we need ways to share our private journey publicly to make our collective practice transparent.
Learning Studio 2:
Learn to Heal in Public
Immersive, Unbounded, Interactive Learning in the Metaverse
Explore how virtual reality can be used as a tool to transcend the traditional barriers and boundaries of separation. The metaverse—a collection and connection of virtual worlds that provide experiences that are social, immersive, and interactive—holds unprecedented promise to provide an unbounded and immersive learning experience which could allow children, teachers, and leaders to learn together, regardless of their physical location.
Learning Studio 3:
Learn to Repair
Learn to Repair, Learn to Redistribute, and Learn to Heal
Explore how educators can reimagine themselves as equity philanthropists, funding the necessary innovations to accelerate our repair, healing, and collective restoration. How might we decolonize wealth and learn to repair, redistribute, and heal? Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) provide visibility into how an automated, autonomous, educator led fund could accelerate and sustain equity work in classrooms, community centers, and other healing spaces.