There are many ways to think about learning. One increasingly popular route is human-centric design, which overlaps with systems thinking, design thinking, compassionate approaches, inclusion, and much more. This episode was developed with the K-12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University. The leaders of the K-12 lab are sam seidel, Director of K-12 Strategy + Research, and Laura McBain, K-12 Lab Director of Community & Implementation. In turn, sam and Laura invited our other guests, including professionals and students. Please join us to learn from Durell Coleman, creator and director of Design the Future - an award-winning STEM program run in collaboration with top universities; Kwaku Aning, Director of the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking at the San Diego Jewish Academy; Tatiana Fakoukaki, ddddd; Owen Kent, a professional filmmaker, and entrepreneur; GraceBida is a senior at Wellesley High School; Edwin Galvan Robledo aaa, and Aaditya NAME aaa.
More about this week's guests:
Kwaku Aning and I am an educator, a professional wonder(er), a connector, an advocate for students, looking to connect the dots between education, tech, art, agency, and the stuff that I am yet to understand. Currently, I am the Director of the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking at the San Diego Jewish Academy but I have had the privilege to work in various roles within public charter and private schools over the past 19 years within education. In my current and previous roles, I have had the privilege to work with students on various STEAM and Project-Based Learning projects utilizing robotics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, and projection mapping. One of the highlights of this work occurred in the fall of 2017 when I produced four short 360 video documentaries for the United Nations on Fijian youth and the effects of climate change.
Laura McBain
Laura McBain (she/her) (@laura_mcbain) is a white designer, educator, and the co-director of the K12 lab at the Stanford d.school. As a human-centered designer, her work focuses on understanding the ecosystem of education and finding meaningful opportunities to advance racial and social justice. Prior to the d.school, Laura worked for 15 years at High Tech High serving as the Director of External Relations, principal of two school sites, and a founding teacher. She has taught middle and high school students in both charter comprehensive schools. Laura has a Bachelors from Miami University-Oxford, Ohio, and a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Laura is the Co-Director of the K12 Lab at the Stanford d.school. Her work focuses on how human-centered design can be used to provide equitable and innovative educational experiences that will help all students thrive in a changing world. In this role, she leads design challenges in education, designs new learning experiences for educators, and serves as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. One of her current design challenges focuses on how we might design new learning experiences that help educators understand and utilize design, futures thinking, and leadership to improve education. Formerly she was the principal of two High Tech High schools, designed and led the adult learning programs at the HTH GSE, and has taught middle and high school classes in public charter and comprehensive schools. Laura was the architect of the Deeper Learning Conference, a 1600 person, adult learning experience aimed at activating and galvanizing educators for large-scale learning change. Laura has a Bachelors from Miami University-Oxford, Ohio, and a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
sam seidel is the Director of K12 Strategy + Research at the Stanford d.school and author of Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). sam speaks internationally about education, race, culture, systems, and design. sam has taught in a variety of settings from first grade to community college. He has built and directed programs with/for young people affected by incarceration. sam was the Director of Partnerships, Annual Reviews, and Student Leadership for the Association for High School Innovation, a national network of student-centered school developers. Most recently, sam was the Director of the Student Experience Lab at the Business Innovation Factory. sam graduated from Brown University with a degree in Education and a teaching certification. He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia University's Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and a Community Fellow at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is always learning. You can find him on Twitter at @husslington
Owen Kent is a professional filmmaker and entrepreneur with a passion for assistive technology and social awareness surrounding disability. Owen additionally chairs the Investment Committee of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living. Owen believes that disability is a natural part of the human experience and can be explored meaningfully through storytelling and film.
Durell Coleman is the namesake founder and CEO of DC Design, a social impact design firm that uses Human-Centered Design to co-develop validated, long-lasting solutions to complex social problems. In his journey as a designer, Durell has worked to reduce homelessness and housing instability amongst low-income people of color, develop new approaches to criminal justice reform, reimagine healthcare service models, create apps that connect communities, and develop new educational models for the 21st century. Trained in mechanical engineering (B.S) and sustainable design (M.S.), he is a two-time alumnus of Stanford University and its famous Institute of Design (the Stanford d.school). As an educator, Durell regularly lectures on social impact design, innovation, and leadership at Stanford University. He is the creator and director of Design the Future - an award-winning STEM program run in collaboration with top universities that teaches high school students to design products for individuals with physical disabilities. He is an expert in multi-stakeholder, human-centered design; has been awarded the Jefferson Award for Public Service as a result of his work, and is one of the subjects of the PBS documentary: “Extreme by Design,” which is used as a design thinking teaching aid all over the world.
Aaditya Pore is an incoming Aerospace Engineering freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Co-Founder of FreePPEKC, a nonprofit that has manufactured and delivered over 8,000 units of PPE nationwide; and a Congressional Intern for Rep. Sharice Davids (KS-03).
Grace Bida is a senior at Wellesley High School in the Greater Boston Area and will be attending Harvard University in the fall of 2022 after taking a gap year. She is on a mission to address the inconsistently resourced US education system by developing tools and spaces to democratize access to academic opportunity for underserved populations and is passionate about using empathy to do so. Critical to her empathetic discovery work at the confluence of the human experience and the built environment is the integration of Sociology, Education Studies, and Urban Studies which she will continue to study and practice in college.
Howard Blumenthal created and produced the PBS television series, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? He is currently a Senior Scholar at The University of Pennsylvania, studying learning and the lives of 21st-century children and teenagers. He travels the world, visiting K-12 schools, lecturing at universities, and interviewing young people for Kids on Earth, a global platform containing nearly 1,000 interview segments from Kentucky, Brazil, Sweden, India, and many other countries. Previously, he was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist for The New York Times Syndicate, and United Features. He is the author of 24 books and several hundred articles about technology, learning, business, and human progress. As an executive, Howard was the CEO of a public television operation and several television production companies, and a state government official. Previously, he was a Senior Vice President for divisions of two large media companies, Hearst and Bertelsmann, and a consultant or project lead for Energizer, General Electric, American Express, CompuServe, Warner Communications, Merriam-Webster, Atari, and other companies.
Before the virus, more than a billion children and teenagers relied upon school for learning. After the virus (or, after the current wave of our current virus), basic assumptions about school and education are no longer reliable. School buildings may become unsafe for large numbers of students. The tax base may no longer support our current approach to school. Without the interaction provided by a formal school structure, students may follow their own curiosity. Many students now possess the technology to learn on their own. And many do not.
Reinventing.school is a new weekly web television series that considers what happens next week, next month, next school year, and the next five years. Hosted by University of Pennsylvania Senior Scholar Howard Blumenthal, Reinventing.school features interviews with teachers, principals, school district leadership, state and Federal government officials, ed-tech innovators, students, leading education professors, authors, realists and futurists from the United States and all over the world.
Each episode features 2-4 distinguished guests in conversation about high priority topics including, for example, the teaching of public health, long-term home schooling, technology access and its alternatives, the role of parents, friendship and social interaction, learning outside the curriculum, the future of testing and evaluation, interruption as part of the academic calendar, job security for teachers and support staff, setting (and rethinking) curriculum priorities, special needs, student perspectives on the job of school, the importance of play, the psychology of group dynamics and social interaction, preparing for future rounds of a virus (or cyberattack or impact of climate change, etc.), college readiness, higher education transformed, the higher education promise in an economically challenged world, and more. Clearly, there is much to discuss; nearly all of it ranks high on the list of priorities for raising the world’s children.
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