I facilitated a day-long workshop at a performing arts school in the Bay Area as an introduction to Liberatory Design and Maker Empowerment. It was a school wide PD, so we spent the day making and working together towards designing creative, liberatory, equitable, project-based learning for all students.

To ground and focus our design practice as teachers, we learned about the mindsets and stances necessary to the liberatory design process through movement based activities. We experience several different maker activities in order to explore the Agency by Design framework. This framework identifies maker empowermenet as a sensitivity to design and inclination to shape one's world through building, tinkering, re/designing or hacking. We know that anything that has been designed can be redesigned. We experienced these maker capacities through using thinking routines, lots of different documentation, reflection, and design challenges!

Lastly, we explored the idea of learning partnerships from Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain by Zaretta Hammond. We looked at the parts, purposes, and complexities of a reading about Learning Partnerships which "provide an approach to ensuring that students outside of the sphere of success will have access to all the social, emotional, and educational opportunities they deserve.” We used all this to find alignment as a school to start designing project-based lessons.