Designing Voice
Student Self-Identity Advocacy
Brief: "...To assess curricular needs around the theme of immigration and identity, focusing on US Mexico migration in K-12, and find innovative ways to assist the teachers with their lessons using design thinking methodologies and communication skills."
- Gala Narezo, Professor and co-founder of Public Project at Pratt Institute
The subject of educational practices is extremely complex, as is the subject of immigration and identity. After working diligently to find appropriate resource materials, we began to synthesize all of our research to suit our project goals.
The class' presentation boards at out end-of-semester survey (12/14/12)
1. Jon Dicus worked with Gala Narezo to develop the overall branding for the project, seen above, and throughout the supplementary projects as well. This will allow further projects to be developed and expanded upon under the Designing Voice umbrella.
2. Engagement was developed by Charlene Sequeira and Lena Lin on the basis of finding a simple and effective way to incorporate STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education methodologies into the classroom. They created three categories of topics (culture, art, academic subject) via printed cards, or a spinning wheel device. Based on a given lesson, the students would be tasked to incorporate the randomly selected elements into their project. This would then guarantee a creative component to the lesson, work to accomodate learners of all types, and add a fun element of surprise.
3. Expression was the largest group project in the class. It included the collaboration between Mona Bagla, Rachna Batra, Jon Dicus, Karin Storm Wood, Amanda Sepanski, and myself. Our focus became to attempt interjecting communication design practices directly into the classroom. Through our research, we found that the ability for students to refine an idea and effectively communicate it through visuals, language, or their combination, was lacking. We came to the conclusion that developing the ability to effectively do such things will help students to develop their own voice, and ultimately their own identity. The photo above shows a couple examples of our groups own visuals from a "dry run" of our lesson, as well as the video we made to explain our process better. Due to time constraints, we were not able to test out our methods in the classroom, but hope to do so soon and be able to refine our ideas further.
4. Language was developed by Sarah Alfarhan, incorporating her own life's journey as a bilingual/ bicultural person, and the development of her own identity in the use of language. For the project, Sarah developed a workbook to help students understand themselves and others through the vehicle of language as well. The photo above displays a sampling of the books she researched and referenced for this project.
