Season 7, Episode 3
Beyond Steps: Nurturing Empathy, Reflection, and Co-Design in Education
Power in an eco system does not mean you are suppose to solve all the problems yourself. It means your are suppose to be in a relationship with the people that you lead, and understand what the problems are like for them.
– Morgan Vien
Hosts & Guests
Morgan Vien
Cyndi Burnett
Matthew Worwood
Resources
Episode Transcription
Beyond Steps: Nurturing Empathy, Reflection, and Co-Design in Education with Morgan Vien
Morgan Vein [00:00:00]:
Power in an ecosystem does not mean that you’re supposed to solve all the problems by yourself. It means you’re supposed to be in relationship with the people who you lead and to understand what the problems are like for them. Then your ecosystem will do the same.
Matthew Worwood [00:00:13]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.
Cyndi Burnett [00:00:16]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.
Matthew Worwood [00:00:18]:
This is the fueling creativity in education. Podcast.
Cyndi Burnett [00:00:22]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creeds topics and how they relate to the fields of education.
Matthew Worwood [00:00:28]:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.
Cyndi Burnett [00:00:36]:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.
Matthew Worwood [00:00:48]:
So, let’s begin.
Cyndi Burnett [00:00:49]:
Today, we welcome to the show Morgan Vienne. Morgan is the co founder and CEO of Design for Emergence, D four E. She is a systems change designer and facilitator who brings catalytic energy to her work. Morgan has a vision of the world as a place of equity and humanity.
Morgan Vein [00:01:08]:
Yes.
Cyndi Burnett [00:01:09]:
She hosts opportunities for people to gather in discovery and design so that they can navigate complexity and create collective ways forward using emergent and liberatory practices. She holds space for people to step into their power and exercise radical imagination in making sustainable change. Beyond Design for Emergence. Morgan is a designer with a Stanford D school and Liberatory design faculty at the National Equity Project. She has coached and design with the teachers guild, ex school retool at Ido, been a deep learning coach with envision learning partners and incubated ideas with the Mira Fellowship. Morgan was the principal of an arts integration expeditionary learning School, a founding teacher in Oakland’s new Small Autonomous Schools movement, and is a member of the Board of Trustees at Design Tech High School. Morgan, welcome to the show.
Morgan Vein [00:02:06]:
What’s up, y’all? Thanks for having me. We are so excited to talk to.
Cyndi Burnett [00:02:10]:
You today about design and emergence. So let’s start there. What is your perspective of design and why emergence? What do they mean? Why are they important?
Morgan Vein [00:02:20]:
I always wonder where to enter into these stories, right? But I think I’ll lean on the piece around what do they mean? First, design thinking is really about problem finding. It’s about listening and engaging closely and taking multiple passes to develop our understanding of the human need underneath a problem. And design invites us to be generative, to find possibility with our solutions in order to really disrupt the problem and not just chip away at it. I think design thinking is the practice that can disrupt some of the current conditions or contributing factors the best, right? And I specifically practice Liberatory design because of the huge need to apply an equity lens and a complexity lens to any problem we’re trying to solve. I personally really believe that systems are made of humans. And humans are incredibly complex and we’re the ones holding all those problems in place and have patterned ways of being to do that. And so practicing liberatory design as a creative problem solving practice that requires us to apply an equity lens, requires us to apply a complexity lens in our creativity is so, so important. I got into design as a school leader and learning about my own leadership and learning about the weight of being responsible for a community and looking to take it into its next evolution in terms of a model and a way of learning, right? Looking to be the one to host a group to make that transition. And the best way that I learned to do that was through co design, through sort of putting down the power and positional authority that I had as a leader. And to kind of say, yo, my imagination can take me sort of as far as it can, but this is going to take all of us. So what does it look like to lean in together and allow this process to hold us in figuring out our way? Design to me is really a change management strategy. It’s a way of leading, it’s a way of being in the world and being able to see. Now in terms of the emergence piece, we can all kind of lovingly look at each other here on this sort of virtual platform and remember that the last few years have been real wild, right? We have found ourselves in circumstances that have required us to be more agile, more flexible, more patient, and more disruptive in our thinking than maybe our lifetimes have asked of us prior. And in that the room for us to create space for emergence, which is really the process of coming into being. Emergence is the space between where things can come into being. They’re the ones that aren’t necessarily planned for. They’re the ones that the thoughts, the ideas, the relationships, the ways of being, the solutions that were not thought of until they came to be, right? And there’s a way that we can be in relationship with one another and in our work and kind of set conditions for there to be space for things to emergence, right? And that’s so, so important when we’re trying to imagine a world that we’ve never been a part of yet, right? When we’re trying to imagine solutions that will work in a future that we haven’t seen yet. So that’s design and emergence. And I will just add that the emergence piece really comes from the emergence strategy approach to change, right? That really is about being present, it’s about trusting the people, it’s about finding the conversation because whoever is there is the right group to be there.
Matthew Worwood [00:06:09]:
Just to build on that, I would say it’s not just about finding the conversation and being present in the conversation, it’s making sure that you’re listening as well. You can sometimes have the right people in the room, but there can still be a disconnect, even right down to vocabulary. What one word means to one person isn’t necessarily how it’s interpreted by the other. Any thoughts about how we can kind of facilitate that idea of being present, encouraging us to listen more as well?
Morgan Vein [00:06:38]:
One of the things that I want to call in there with that question around dialogue is the really important and foundational piece of Liberatory design, which is co design, right? This container of liberatory design invites us to make sure that one we’ve done the deep, thoughtful, slowed down listening to determine who are those most impacted to those perspectives. Not other sort of experts with letters on the end of their name or whoever has the power to solve the problem. But actually those that are sitting living the problem, right? And that design piece and oftentimes what you have then when you’re bringing together power and you’re bringing together systems folks, and you’re bringing together those who are sitting in the storm of whatever the problem is that you all are working on, you end up with a number of really divergent perspectives. And that’s where it gets, I think, to the dialogue piece, right? Which is that in order to really engage in problem finding and then to design creative solutions that will work for more folks, finding those divergent perspectives and bringing them together as a host, right? This is where we activate our host leadership to say, I’m not the leader and I know the way, I’m actually the convener. And I’m really stoked that we all get to be here together. Let’s truth about how this is going for us, knowing that the goal is not necessarily consensus, the goal is actually empathy and understanding. Let’s understand the complexity of these divergent perspectives and look at those together and then let’s receive them from an empathetic and compassionate piece so that we can figure out how your brilliance and your opinion, while different from mine, might contribute to the magic of this solution. And that goes for kids, y’all? That goes for kids. That goes for the leaders of this country. I mean anyone of any age, right?
Cyndi Burnett [00:08:29]:
You keep using this word liberatory, and I love this word liberatory because it sounds like liberation, but I don’t actually know what it means. So in the interest of clarifying different opinions, tell us more about liberatory and liberatory practices.
Morgan Vein [00:08:43]:
In these moments when I have an opportunity to really share and teach Liberatory design and work with folks, I’m always going to reach back and name the folks at the National Equity Project and the D School at Stanford who came together to create what is Liberatory design. And as I mentioned to you before, you type that into your doc and it says this is not a word. And it is. It really is. And so Liberatory design is a process and a practice right? And the Liberatory piece, I love to unpack this because one of the things that I often say to a room when I have the good fortune of hosting one, is that liberation is a very subjective thing, right. What you define as liberation and what I define as liberation are going to be really different depending on what that feeling and experience is in our imagination. And I say imagination because I myself and anyone I know so far I haven’t asked you to yet. But I don’t know that I have a really clear definition of what liberation means for me. I don’t think because I participate and contribute to so many of these systems that I was born into and I’m still trying to learn and understand as a human, I can’t say that I’ve actually experienced liberation and I can’t say that I can define it for someone else. What I can do though, what we can do is continually get closer. And so this piece around liberatory in the Liberatory design allows us to generate self awareness and it allows us to be in tune with the practices and the ways of being that get us closer to what feels like liberation, right? Allows us to sort of notice where there’s inequity that we’re contributing to or that we can call out and be in community then around and accountable to. Like how are we doing this together and how do I show up to that? I have found that practicing design from a place of Liberatory design is a way that we can then sort of co define our collective liberation as we move through it. Right? And that’s not sort of an end game, it’s an in process game, right. Because there’s a transference of power when you’re practicing Liberatory design. It’s a way of sort of looking at our different perspectives and our different positional authorities, our different biases, all the bits that we’re bringing to the table and being able to say like, okay, this is serving us and this is not, and saying that to one another.
Matthew Worwood [00:11:11]:
I want to kind of shift this into a classroom environment and share some of the challenges that I still face. Sometimes when teaching trying to go beyond the procedural steps of methodologies like design thinking, it’s very easy to say I teach design thinking, I promote design thinking. And really what you’re doing is you’re teaching these kind of procedural steps. First you do this and then you do this, and then you do this. And we see a whole bunch of different creative thinking methodologies around this as well. And there’s a lot of kind of shared values. But when you unpack it in this sociocultural perspectives of creativity. Vlad Glavino talks about these idea of actions. We’re engaging in these actions. When we unpack some of our actions, there are certain things that I think we can teach beyond just procedural steps. And one of them is this basic concept of conducting research to assist us in checking assumptions and perhaps getting to know the end user. And I use the word end user, obviously more from that design thinking perspective, which I think can have a real focus on product design and industrial design. But whether it’s your audience, whether it’s the end user, whether it’s your students when I’m looking at a classroom environment and I’m having these types of conversations with students and I’m getting them to think about the end user, there is a point at which your knowledge is limited. And we kind of know that in the real world, you would then engage in user research, for example, so we can expand our knowledge. And of course, there’s still a whole bunch of assumptions we make about the data. But it can be so hard to go and get students, whether in K through twelve or in the university system, to actually engage in user research, to go and actually interact with an audience and learn about that audience. So listening to what you’re saying is I feel like there’s an opportunity for some educators out there who look at practicing things like design thinking to try and think about how they can identify a problem. And I love the word convener. Convene a discussion that allows us to kind of engage in empathy, engage in reflection, work, co design together, but a problem where we don’t have to go and do too much research, meaning that the knowledge is obtainable within the classroom environment. I know I spoke a lot there. I was wondering if you’re able to unpack everything I shared. But it is a challenge I face, right? Because otherwise you’re just going through a step. You’re saying, well, in the real world, we would typically go and do research, or we would say, okay, let’s go and spend a day conducting some research on these people who are similar to our end audience, and let’s propose an idea or propose a problem or have a conversation about how we think we’re impacted by the problem. But it’s not real research, at least from what we practice in kind of empathy and user research.
Morgan Vein [00:14:06]:
If design thinking is often presented as a sort of series of modes, what else is there to it, right? And what else are you actually teaching that’s not just those modes and the processes you spoke of. I’m also hearing you ask about as the convener and then the need for user research in design. What are the ways, when you’re in a design process to get closer to what those needs are throughout?
Matthew Worwood [00:14:37]:
Is that what you’re asking to make it clearer? I think that there is sometimes a challenge when you’re going and talking about the needs of others when you’re limited to your knowledge base. A classic example is let’s go and engage students in a conversation about how we can address problems that emerge during the pandemic. Unless you go and engage in a form of user research, which is going to take time, perhaps longer than a 16 week semester provides. You’re going to start making assumptions about your audience and therefore you’re missing the point of some of the core values of this process. So even though we’re going and having a discussion, we’re still to a certain extent doing what we’re not meant to be doing, which is generating knowledge on assumptions. And I’m talking specifically about a classroom environment. How do we as educators emphasize the importance of going and finding out everything you don’t know right about your user and then having the type of conversations you’re talking about?
Morgan Vein [00:15:38]:
I’m excited that you asked this because I actually really feel like the answer for how you do it in a classroom is the same way that you do it at a systems level and Liberatory design actually creates space for that. But there are a few sort of practices and pieces that I’ll offer here. So the first thing that I want to say is if you are engaging in design work and there is not time to do your user research or to do deep empathy work, then your circumstance does not have the conditions for you to do the work you need to be up to and is not setting you up to solve the problem that you are trying to solve. What that might mean is that there is power and resources and rules that are being put in place by humans who have decided that this thing that you’re working on is and that could be the teacher, that could be the administrator, that could be the mandate coming down from somewhere else. The thing you are working on is not worth the time and the room to give. It the due diligence of the deep listening that is required and the convening that is required to get closer to what the problem really is. In fact, a lot of times in those circumstance, those folks have already decided on a solution and they’re just setting you up to move through the process. We’re not super down with that process and we can get into more about what we ask of our partners when we set up to engage in this meaningful work. But to get back to your question, I want to speak first to a few pieces around Liberatory design that help us stay in the zone of not making as many assumptions and certainly checking ourselves when we do so. One is as designers, right? Matthew, you and I can both speak to the empathy work. That can look like immersion, it can look like interviewing, it can look know participation, it can look like deep listening over time. It can look like a key panel, it can look like lots of things. And I would even err on the side of saying that when it’s done. Well, it’s not so far as a discussion because you as a designer and listener are not inserting so much of your perspective and sort of that tango that one does in a discussion. Actually you’re creating a container and a space and you’re responding only to tend to what the speaker is offering you, right? And to sort of draw more forward there in a way that allows them to kind of get to the pieces that they really want on the table, but beyond the empathy mode in design. And I do want to actually plop here to say that design thinking is often taught as linear and it’s not. Design thinking is really about a set of mindsets that you can apply in terms of how you hold yourself in your community to doing the work. And then it’s about reading the signals of where you are in your process to understand what mode you need to go back into. It’s not linear. I’m down to debate that with folks. It’s not linear. But to that end, I would say that if after that deep empathy work, the defined mode invites you to try to get clear and take a pass at what we think the problem is. In Liberatory design there’s also a mode called inquire and in the early stages of Liberatory design it was called Probe. What that is about is actually finding safe to fail opportunities, which are opportunities that will not cause harm in the process. Finding safe to fail opportunities to check in with those that are most impacted and say hey, what do you think about this? Or am I on the right track? And allow again back to that emergence piece and back to the pivot and the shift opportunity. Allow then for the design work to be informed along the way. And you can inquire in all kinds of different places in your process and we recommend you inquire often. In fact, if you set up your design work properly, you’ve got a bunch of those people sitting next to you and so when they tell you that it’s not quite right, you listen, right? That’s actually the smartest way to do it in my opinion. I’ll also call forth the See the system mode of Liberatory design, which is really the complexity mode and it allows us to look from many different angles at the contributing factors that are holding the problem in place. That sounds overly complex, but when we start to think about what are the relationships between people, how is the work organized, how does information flow, where is there room for identities, what are the structures and processes? Right, there’s all these sets of questions that allow for you to notice the channels that are open, that are closed, that are all the sort of conditions, right? That’s what helps us get at conditions to go oh, and you can kind of locate ripe opportunities in that way to understand the problem. Again. If you have everybody leaning in to do that work and you can go back to see the system to think about what does the solution do in the system, then you all are pressing on your bias and your assumptions as you go. Now to the classroom level, because it feels like we can talk about it on a systems level quite a bit. To the classroom level. Yo. There’s nothing more powerful than a shadow experience, and it doesn’t take long, right? So if you are working on a problem and someone is impacted by that problem, whether it’s teachers shadowing students or students shadowing teachers, or maybe you’re working on some disability justice with your class and you’re trying to figure out how to make your space more accessible, what does it look like then, to do a real shadow experience? That’s not observation, but it’s actually immersion. I’m going to move through the classroom with this disability in the way that you do, and I’m going to physically experience that. I’m going to start at your house and figure out what travel looks like. I’m going to eat with you. I’m going to try to do this work with you and notice that the way that they’re teaching it, if I have low visibility, for example, like my best friend does, there’s things that she needs in her context in order to be able to see differently or see clearly. So I think the shadow experience another one is I know you’re familiar with the idea of a panel, right? And young people get to listen to panels all the time. But one of my favorite ways to do that is actually closer to what is a Kiva protocol. There’s modified ones, there’s less modified ones, but oftentimes a way that that is done is to invite folks who have a particular lived experience to be at the center. In that context, you actually don’t invite, again back to like, it’s not a discussion, it’s really just a centering. The voices of those who are most impacted with some prompts and allow for their stories and their sharing to just exist. It’s not a hey, what about or let me press on. That it’s none of that.
Matthew Worwood [00:22:27]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:22:36]:
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Matthew Worwood [00:22:47]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:23:02]:
To learn more, check out Curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. I also love those examples, and I’m curious taking this work from a higher level. So I love what you did in terms of the classroom and what could be done in the classroom when you’re working with a whole school system, a whole educational system, and you look at it. And I know when we originally spoke, you said, I don’t do as much at the classroom level. It’s much more at the higher systems level. Can you share with us an example, without naming names, obviously, but of something that you’ve done that has brought the work that you do into a school system.
Morgan Vein [00:23:43]:
What that calls forth to me, it makes me want to talk a little bit about the conditions and the work that needs to happen at the systems level in order for impacts to happen in schools. And then it also makes me want to call forth just a few project examples, I think first, quick project sample snippets and thinking about even like, who calls us, who are we working with right now? Let’s maybe start outside the traditional Ed sector first to say, like, right now we’re working with a growing and scaling organization, a series of autism clinics, which is in the Ed space and is parallel to the Ed space, right? But in terms of, like, early babies, right? One to five services for young people with autism. And with them, we actually have done some really meaningful work around designing for belonging, for the different stakeholder groups in their context in order to change the game around how those families and young people as clients sort of emergence that developmental time. So that’s a kind of far out example. Let’s talk about a closer one where in our country there’s lots of foundations that wield lots of money and power and are often looking for ways to make the change that they seek, that they want to put money behind. And so we have gone into context to work side by side with them and other organizations to support redesigns of high schools across the city. We have gone into context at the district level to use liberatory design and design for belonging, to help them navigate consolidation and closing of schools and how people feel in that. And I would say probably the one closest to your question is, we have supported districts and then the cohorts sort of in that district to redesign layers of their school. So, like, let’s redesign these middle schools. Let’s use a design practice to figure out what the design principles need to be to drive the vision, curriculum, instruction, resource allocation, culture, design, all of values, vision, all that good stuff. What are the design principles that we want to anchor in in order to do that work? And all of that work? You don’t start with, hey, adults, what do you want to do? You start with, hey, students, what is school like for you? Where do you spend your time? How do you navigate? Who do you go to? What do you learn? What signals you get about mattering? What signals do you get about being able to be creative? Right? Where do you not, right? So that’s where all those conversations start. And so you can see that our work kind of jumps in at different places. But I would say for even in the project with the autism community where we’re thinking about organizational design, we’re working with young people and families. That’s who we have in front of us to be like what is this experience like for you? So that’s how I would say that this work sort of touches that context. And then if it’s okay, I would love to circle back to what the conditions are at the systems level. And I really want to bring this in because as I was talking about your topic on creativity and what fuels it and where are the ripe contexts and how might we sort of amplify and fuel more of it. I’m brought to a piece that is such a core value on our team and in the work that we do, which is that it’s fractal and that comes from emergent strategy, right? But the ways that we are in the one to one relationships is exactly the ways that we are on the larger community scale amplified in major, right? And so when you have an upper tier of an organization, could be a school district, could be at the state level, keep imagining all these different contexts. If you have an upper tier that’s run by power, run by compliance signals that falling in line is the way to be, then your ecosystem is going to behave that way. If your upper tier is run by being collaborative, by being agile, by being creative, by moving in a humanized way and knowing that power in an ecosystem does not mean that you’re supposed to solve all the problems by yourself. It means you’re supposed to be in relationship with the people who you lead and to understand what the problems are like for them, then your ecosystem will do the same. And it’s really that simple, right? So we are constantly when we’re thinking about whether or not to say yes or no to work, we’re thinking about readiness and really having some conversations with leaders in that organization or in that context to say who has the power over the problem that you’re trying to work on and then the most impacted. And are you willing to bring those groups together to do this work? Because that’s what it’s going to take. And some contacts are like yes please, we have no idea how to do that. But down to host the space, we’ll show up ready to get in the mix and we’re like cool, let’s do it. And sometimes you have folks that say it was really great to hear about the work that you do, but I don’t know if we’re quite there, right? You don’t end up engaging with them because power gets comfortable. You’re comfortable and you have power, you do what you can to keep it. And that’s in. Service of liberation and it’s not in service of young people who are we’re supposed to be preparing them for a world that doesn’t exist yet.
Matthew Worwood [00:29:25]:
Can I just build on that a little bit? Because one of the things I’ve really loved what you’ve shared, is reminding us that we are human and we’re complex. And I think we live in a world where I think we’ve all been trying to simplify some of the challenges that we face in today’s society. But we are complex. And I think one of the things that there are so many different variables that exist. I think there is power being comfortable, but then we’re also dealing with the fact that a known system is also a comfortable system. It’s a predictable system, there’s less ambiguity in the system. And of course, I would say we also are creatures of habit. So everyone within that system, and I’m focusing specifically on a school building, know what they’re meant to be teaching at exactly what week of the semester they’re meant to be teaching it what resources they need. And so when we’re talking about dismantling a system, what is not necessarily dismantling, I’m not suggesting you’re saying that, but trying to work within the system, there is a recognition that if we disrupt too much of the system too quickly, it might have a ripple effect that can start impacting lots of people. And you use the word safe to fail. So I’m just curious, how do we begin to dismantle the system or look at the system or modify parts of the system, but do it in a way where we’re safe to fail in such a very busy time of the year? For example, because schooling is complex, it’s hard, and we are all creatures of habit.
Morgan Vein [00:30:52]:
I should just be transparent here and say that if it were up to me, I would just invite everyone to leave that system because we’re going to spend a year to design something completely different. So if you know anyone who has the power in that context, give them my contact info. But that being said, leadership is one of my favorite topics next to design. And I have a magical power of being able to see the matrix around it, which is kind of cool. And it takes me back to the privilege and opportunity that I had to lead that Arts Expeditionary School, arts Integration, Expeditionary Learning School. And I think what I want to say in that and I want to quote my dear friend Renee Benavides, who’s a somatic coach and a designer as well, she always says that we are always in practice of something. We are always in practice of something, whether intentional or not. And I just really connect to that when I think about these microcosms. Because if we really remember that systems are made of humans who are habitualized and practiced and conditioned to do things a certain way, then what you are really dealing with on a change level is a bunch of humans that have the same practice. And so the question becomes how do you change practice? And then the question becomes how do you set the conditions for practice to change? Because it’s comfortable and because it’s rewarded and because it’s recognized and because change actually isn’t sustainable at a constant rate, right? It ebbs and flows and you get momentum. So some of the key learnings that I have had that I think help respond to this question are really around stepping back and asking yourselves as a community because again, a leader behind a closed door is useless to leading the people, in my opinion. How do you step back as a community and create space for that? Step back to be able to look broadly with kind of less judgment and sort of less bias. But actually just as if you’re clear in your why, if you’re clear in the fact that you are running a school or you are participating in an ecosystem, you’re teaching here. And our purpose is to do X for our young people. And then you can step back and really look across the board and ask yourself those same seat of system questions that I was pulling forth before. This is what we say we do. What are we actually doing? How do we spend our time? How do we spend our resources? How are we in relationship with one another? What are our communication patterns? If we can ask ourselves those questions and start to kind of see the matrix of what is what you can actually do in that is use that as a location opportunity to find the things that you have to do, right? Like so and so with the power is going to come through and be like you didn’t teach X or you didn’t assess y or you didn’t whatever. Find those things because we want it to be safe to fail. We’re not trying to get in trouble here, right, and then strip the rest away, right? So you can kind of ask yourself, is there an opportunity here for us to use this block of time differently? Is there an opportunity here for us to shake up the schedule on these days? Is there a way that we actually want to shift roles and responsibilities?
Cyndi Burnett [00:34:16]:
Right?
Morgan Vein [00:34:16]:
In design, we call all of those things that you can change levers for design. They are the things that you can shift and change in order to change a context, right? And you can prototype around those and then test them in small safe to fail ways to see what they do. So like in the school that I led, we realized that we were way over on instructional minutes and we had this grand vision of teachers teaching across contexts, these beautiful, meaningful, rich, long expeditions. And we wanted it to be arts, integrated. We wanted young people to be making real useful projects and materials that could make the world better. Well, that takes a lot of collaboration time, and it takes a lot of research, right? And it takes a lot of network building. And if teachers were going to be the ones who had to do that, then they needed the time, the space and the structure to be able to be in the work that meaningfully. And matter of fact, if we wanted them to care that much, they also needed time and space and acknowledgment to bring more of their own personal expertise in humans. Like, right, if they’re activists outside of school, we’ll bring that here, we need that in here. So we created an additional minimum day, which created another two and a half hours of collaboration a week. And we decided that we were going to make it so that everybody in our building, myself included, all descended upon what was the library at that time. We called it like the Den. And we would all just work in that space and we would actually do a quick work plan and then you would have all your meetings, you’d have all your design jams and was there. So you’d have everyone across different roles and powers and grades and departments leaning in to figure out how to enrich this thing. They’re trying to do this intercession or this expedition or whatever else. And that’s just an example of like, doing that’s not going to hurt anybody because you’ve looked across the context and you’ve been really thoughtful about what it’s going to do, right? And then you’ve also located opportunity to flex all the things that you’re practicing that you actually are not in service of your vision. That’s what I would recommend.
Cyndi Burnett [00:36:28]:
I do want to know what this idea of Stoke is. What is Stoke and why is it necessary for curiosity? That’s going to be our second to last question.
Morgan Vein [00:36:37]:
So I spent a year during the pandemic time with the Mirror Fellowship working on a project. And I won’t give all of the different pieces of that, but where that project ended up being after a bunch of listening and empathy work that I did was around exploring Stoke. So stoke is the feeling and feeling stoked, right? You often hear it in the context of like snowboarding or skateboarding or like, oh, so stoked. And really what that is though, and we all have the feeling, is this feeling of you’re on the precipice of anticipation but also capacity, right? So you’re like, I can do this. But you’re also like it’s like on the edge, which is such a dope place to be. Because if you think about the cognitive dissonance that’s required for learning to occur, then getting to that place of stoke where you’re so excited and so passionate and capable, but also like it’s on that edge. It’s a feeling that we want to cultivate, right? And so a lot of the work that I did in that year in Incubating. That idea was working on supporting people to find and locate their own conditions for their stoke. And so I created and developed a bunch of tools and a few different sort of design experiences to be able to support individuals and teams to locate that precipice within themselves.
Matthew Worwood [00:38:06]:
So, Morgan, we finish all of our episodes by asking our guests to share three tips that educators can take away and begin implementing or thinking about. When it comes to promoting creativity, or in your case, design thinking in the.
Morgan Vein [00:38:19]:
Classroom, I know you were super stoked on the idea of shadowing, so I want to bring that forward. If ever you have a hunch or young people have a hunch around a problem they’re trying to solve, create time and space for them to go be with folks who experience that problem, and not just by observation, but by doing and experiencing it themselves. Number two, I would say practice storytelling. Right? We said in the interview, you’re always in practice of something, support young people to practice being storytellers and to follow their own emotion and evoke emotion through story and others, because that capacity is really powerful to understanding human need. And I think the last one, practice reframing. Imagine if every time we had a discussion in a classroom and someone said it’s like this, or this says this, have a practice around reframing and turning that thing around like a prism to see it from a different angle, because that practice is a direct path to building your creativity muscle. And I really believe that the creativity is a muscle and we can all build it.
Cyndi Burnett [00:39:28]:
Well, Morgan, thank you so much for joining us today. I know my mind is buzzing with ideas and thoughts, and I wish we had more time, but maybe at some point we can bring you back.
Morgan Vein [00:39:38]:
Cool. Thank you for having me.
Cyndi Burnett [00:39:40]:
So this concludes this episode of the Feeling, Creativity, and Education podcast. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague, and we will make sure we link all of Morgan’s website information in the show. Notes. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.
Matthew Worwood [00:39:56]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.
Cyndi Burnett [00:39:59]:
This podcast podcast was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett and edited by Sina Yusefzade. The episode was sponsored by Curiosity to create.
How can we raise more awareness to human needs and wants when engaging students in design thinking activities?
In this episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast, hosts Matthew Worwood and Cyndi Burnett sit down with guest Morgan Vien, Co-Founder and CEO of Design for Emergence, to explore the power of design thinking and liberatory design in education. They dive deep into the principles of design thinking, emphasizing the importance of problem finding, generative solutions, and understanding human needs. Morgan shares insights on the emergence strategy approach to change, highlighting the significance of setting conditions for emergence and reflecting on system goals.
The conversation delves into the challenges of implementing design thinking in the classroom, with Morgan discussing the limitations of solely teaching procedural steps and the importance of empathy, reflection, and co-design. She also shares her experiences working on projects with the Mira Fellowship, focusing on cultivating conditions for Stoke – a feeling of anticipation and capacity. The conversation broadens to explore the concepts of liberation and liberatory design, stressing the need for self-awareness, addressing inequities, and co-defining collective liberation and power dynamics.
Throughout the episode, Morgan provides practical examples and insights on how to apply design thinking and liberatory design in education, whether it’s redesigning high schools or creating collaborative spaces. They also discuss the importance of conducting user research, deep empathy work, and actively listening to those impacted by the problem. Overall, this episode offers valuable perspectives on fueling creativity and driving change in the education system through the power of design thinking and liberatory design.
Guest Bio
Morgan Vien is the co-founder and CEO of Design for Emergence (D4E). She is a systems change designer and facilitator who brings catalytic energy to her work. Morgan has a vision of the world as a place of equity and humanity. She hosts opportunities for people to gather in discovery and design so that they can navigate complexity and create collective ways forward. Using emergent and liberatory practices, she holds space for people to step into their power and exercise radical imagination in making sustainable change. Beyond Design for Emergence, Morgan is a designer with the Stanford d.school and Liberatory Design Faculty at the National Equity Project. She has coached and designed with the Teachers Guild x School Retool at IDEO, been a Deeper Learning Coach with Envision Learning Partners, and incubated ideas with the Mira Fellowship. Morgan was the principal of an arts-integration, expeditionary learning school, a founding teacher in Oakland’s New Small Autonomous Schools movement, and is a member of the board of trustees at Design Tech High School.
Debrief Episode
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Podcast Sponsor

We are thrilled to partner with Curiosity 2 Create as our sponsor, a company that shares our commitment to fostering creativity in education. Curiosity 2 Create empowers educators through professional development and community support, helping them integrate interactive, creative thinking approaches into their classrooms. By moving beyond traditional lecture-based methods, they help teachers create dynamic learning environments that enhance student engagement, improve academic performance, and support teacher retention. With a focus on collaborative learning and exploration, Curiosity 2 Create is transforming classrooms into spaces where students thrive through continuous engagement and growth.