About The Course

We are all living in challenging times that our past experiences and training may not have sufficiently prepared us for. What inequities are more visible now? What inequities are emerging? How can we start designing the equitable future we want to live in now?

Liberatory Design is an approach grounded in the National Equity Project’s Leading for Equity Framework that knits together human-centered design thinking with an equity lens and a complexity stance.

Many leaders approach their system’s challenges and change initiatives as complicated problems to solve, but equity challenges are more than complicated – they are complex with unknown problems and unknown solutions. For complex challenges like developing a distance learning plan, addressing disproportionality in discipline, even developing a new strategic plan, emergent solutions must be found through dynamic interactions of diverse people and networks working together. 

Liberatory Design pushes participants to move toward dynamic approaches to problem solving and decision-making and can support your efforts to lead change and create more equitable teams, organizations, and systems in ways that respond to this moment and lay groundwork for longer term transformation. 

Participants will:

• Develop an understanding of the Liberatory Design Approach, including the non-linear “process” for weaving this approach into their work and the mindsets needed to take careful and effective action 

• Develop and use equity, complexity and design lenses to clearly define their equity challenges and take quick, productive, liberatory steps within their spheres of influence

• Generate ideas and actions to take between sessions, and after the course, to apply the Liberatory Design approach in their work

• Regularly share their applications and insights with other participants in service of creating a learning community and deepening our collective understanding of the Liberatory Design approach