What is it about?
We describe our journey to create a 21st-century STEM curriculum that teaches students to shape technology for the greater good. This is a curriculum where systems thinking and ethics are built-in, not ancillary. Specifically, the paper addresses how: 1) An enduring technology-design curriculum needs to focus on the verbs, not the nouns, of the practice. 2) A full-bodied compassionate approach to education—hands, head, and heart—can support students to find their expressive courage and agency. 3) When designing an educational, program, understanding the greater social context and developing intended student outcomes can create a program with a more significant impact.
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Why is it important?
Increasingly technology is shaping culture, politics, commerce, and thus just about everything else on the planet. The impact of technology has changed dramatically in the 2000s and will continue to increase. We need a 21st-century curriculum to train 21st-century students to be prepared to skillfully design with this new power of technology. Ultimately we need students to graduate with the skills to create a positive effect on earth's 8 billion people and all other living things.
Perspectives
This paper represents my journey as an educational "Intrapreneur." This was a job I took on after 10 years at IDEO. I do not talk about the many struggles but instead, I focus on the outcomes. The outcomes are what will inspire colleagues and they work to align and hopefully reduce the friction in the journey of educational innovation. For other educational mavericks, I hope this paper inspires others to make significant curricular changes.
Kristian Simsarian
California College of the Arts
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Design education can change the world, interactions, February 2019, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3305362.
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