Designing Positive School Communities
Designing Positive School Communities
Where Did Design Thinking Come From?
User-focused problem solving is an approach that has been used for years, under many different names. Design thinking is also called public-interest design, because it is a way to inspire people to work together to create solutions that are in the interest, or will benefit, people in a community. You can use design thinking to help you find solutions to all kinds of problems.
Designing Positive School Communities is part of Crabtree’s “Design Thinking for a Better World” series. Each book in the series uses a six-step design thinking process to explore how to make communities better:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
- Reflect
After explaining the design thinking process, Designing Positive School Communities explores three projects dealing with inclusive communities. Each project then presents three cases and asks students to choose a ‘case’ to explore more fully using the design thinking process. The case studies give the students choices among very concrete examples.
Which person would you like to help? Choose either Marisela, Ahmed, or Farah’s case and use the design-thinking steps to create a solution to their problem.
The projects in Designing Positive School Communities look at “Challenges to New Students”, “Accessibility in School Communities”, and “Bullying at School”. The bullying project includes cases around verbal bullying, cyberbullying, and social bullying. The cases are all applicable to Canadian and American schools and include examples from both.
The photos are well-chosen to illustrate the text and engage the students in the topics. The layout of the text is easy to read with clear text, highlighted text boxes, and attractive visual aids to draw attention to various aspects of the organization of the information. For example, Designing Positive School Communities includes a text box making the connections between ignorance, fear, and prejudice.
Where Does Prejudice Come From?
Ignorance > Fear > PrejudiceMany people are scared of new things or of things they don’t understand or are ignorant about. This fear can lead to prejudice. To be prejudiced is to have unfriendly feelings directed against a person or a group of people without good reason.
Also included are “Mindset Tips”, instructions for how to empathize, suggestions for how to pick the best idea to move forward, reflection questions, and many more very concrete strategies for each step of the design thinking process.
Designing Positive School Communities encourages and supports students to become change makers in very concrete ways. If you are interested in using a design thinking process to explore community issues around the challenges faced by newcomers, accessibility, and bullying, you should have a look at this book.
Dr. Suzanne Pierson instructs librarianship courses at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.