EduCon 2018

Through a process of decision-making by Formal Consensus, Michael and Sean will discuss with Educon colleagues how to design learning spaces together with the students. Student engagement in learning and citizen engagement in democracy are both at a moment of a paradigm shift in America, and they are inexorably linked together. We are developing a design-process curriculum which guides students and facilitators to envision and create new public schools from the ground up, using a deliberative consensus method. Because schools serve to reproduce social structures, we believe that radically democratizing school through reiterative participatory design will have long-lasting impacts on both learning in schools and democracy in communities broadly. Participatory design places the user - in this case the student - as the designer. Our practice is built around a participatory design curriculum, which has been through several iterations but still needs testing, evaluation and feedback. At Educon2018, we would love the opportunity to convene a workshop to do a limited-scale mock-up of our School Design process, treating participants as a “temporarily autonomous community,” and design a school as if participants would themselves attend that school immediately. This would allow us to simultaneously share our design concepts with participants, and allow us to refine our process based on observations and evaluations.If you are in the audience, you will walk away with a process for creating design elements or design essentials "with" students.