3.2 Presentation Outline
In this outline, Open Education Instructional Designer Veronica Vold summarizes key themes and claims from the keynote presentation. It is intended to orient future participants to the presentation video recording on the next page and to capture the speaker’s major questions for the open education community in Oregon.
Outline for Designing for Equity: Moving Beyond Inclusion 101
Part 1: What is Education?
Jess begins the presentation by discussing three questions:
- What does it mean to design education?
- What makes up education?
- Who makes the design decisions?
Jess makes three key claims to help to define education as an “an activity that is situated in a complex place and time”:
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- Spatial design determines conditions for learning
- Florence Nightengale, the founder of modern nursing and hospital design, recognized that indoor ventilation was a significant factor in patient recovery
- Increasing the ventilation rate in schools can raise children’s scores on tests and speed at tasks, and reduce absences
- Form (content and educational technology) codifies conditions for learning
- The syllabus sets group agreement, rules, mores, rubrics, and marching orders. Jess asks: are multiple means of student expression and time flexibility built in?
- Zoom access and layout in the LMS interface determine expectations for interaction and engagement. Jess asks: do instructors and students have choices about the platforms they use to communicate?
- Jess points out that educators must ask a question when designing education: Who benefits and who do not?
- Use of power determines conditions for learning
- Teaching and learning are relational activities.
- Designing interactions can make some people feel brave and some people feel disempowered.
- “Wherever we have people, we have power. What we do with that power is what matters.” What do we do with power as educators? What do we tolerate?
- Spatial design determines conditions for learning
Part 2: Backpacks and the EQ (Emotional Intelligence)
In the second part of the presentation, Jess uses the metaphor of a backpack to explain that people carry complex ancestors’ experiences, personal histories, and personal preferences and needs into the room with them.
- Jess asks, “At what point pedagogically do we see eachother? At what point do we see what is in the backpack of others?”
- Jess explains that all of us “contort ourselves to fit into the circles in education” and yet when are there open conversations about racial and disability-related differences between instructors and students?
- Jess points to BC Campus’s Guiding Questions: Creating Equitable OER with Intention [Google Doc] in order to challenge participants to move away from the “tactical” approach to education and instead “step directly toward the EQ [Emotional Intelligence] in education”
- tactical approach = noticing how your own positionality influences how you create content
- EQ approach = noticing how you interact a