Defining the Challenge, Connections, & Research

February 7, 2019

-Jade

I eventually got to do the research around “history and healing”, so I shared the notes from my desk research. There is a book called <<The Mis-education of the Negro>> where I learned a lot about important historical perspectives. Although it mostly reflected on the history of higher education for African Americans, it provided us with a lot of historical facts and reminded us to be mindful when working on designing education/curriculum for African American students and historically marginalized communities.

Then, to follow up on our rush-ended meeting on Tuesday, we gave ourselves a few more minutes to think through and craft the How Might We question for our design challenge.

We temporarily feel good about working on: “How might we provide/introduce a process that strengthens students’ capacities to navigate the social challenges around them?” With this HMW question, we want to emphasize the impact of DFC framework as a tool for students to feel capable and empowered when facing the social challenges over the outcome of a social change project. 

Finally, we identified possible connections for us to reach out to in the Baltimore City School System. We plan to talk with, and interview a handful of teachers to help further guide our approach and research.

In the evening, we went to a community event “Black Teachers Matter 2019” held by Teachers’ Democracy Project.

They used the Fishbowl discussion method to present different teachers’ stories and opinions on topics about black teachers.

They talked about: 

– Why mentor is important for a teacher?

– What are the challenges of teacher certification regulation?

– Black teachers’ retention rate.