Teachers are individuals who deeply care about the development of their students and communities. However, as professionals, they regularly encounter and navigate complex systemic challenges in their daily work. In their daily practice, teachers are pivotal in challenging and dismantling harmful structures that impede their efforts to foster student well-being and curiosity. The path to real change begins with a candid acknowledgment of pedagogical shortcomings that contribute to classroom inequities, encompassing factors like race, gender, class, disabilities, and language. Equally important is a clear understanding of the systemic power imbalances that sustain these disparities. Educators who are socially and politically conscious employ design thinking and interdisciplinary pedagogy as tools for direct action, striving to reform unjust systems.
We invite you to join us for an interactive session designed to apply the principles of design thinking. Through engaging activities and discussions, participants will delve into identifying educational inequities in mathematics education, recognizing implicit biases, exploring the influence of social structures on educational disparities, and acquiring foundational tools for initiating meaningful change and promoting justice in education.
Learning Goals- Build a framework of design principles & tools that can be used as a basis for future interdisciplinary pedagogical design
- Create an action plan tailored to innovating educational change on an issue that holds significance to them
- (optional) Become a part of an ongoing community of teachers aimed to further support teachers in implementing design thinking to promote educational change and justice within their classrooms and schools. The six follow-up sessions during the 2024-25 school year will feature a panel of local secondary teachers (Mathematics, social studies, generalists) from public and alternative schools in the greater Madison area, actively leading educational transformation efforts despite existing inequities in mathematics education.
