Display your sense of civility and democracy and buy a yard sign — Petworth News Update: Sales have closed. We'll try to have them ready for pickup on Saturday, 12/10 during the Art & Craft Fair on Upshur Street around 4pm. There's been a growing national trend to display your desire to welcome all neighbors, no matter where they're from, what language they speak or what they look like. I saw a great sign in a neighbor's yard this week, and posted the above photo to Instagram.
Sparks Fly - March/April 2011 Can imagination be taught? Evidently, because the d.school’s innovation hothouse is changing the way people think. A first-year graduate student in the management science and engineering program, Asha Gupta had barely started Design Garage, a course aptly characterized as an "imagination dunk tank"—and she was getting soaked.
Essential Partners This election season, we've spent a lot of time obsessing about November 8th. We watch debates, we share memes, we pore over maps, heralding the candidate of our choice and criticizing their opponent. But little attention has been paid to what happens after November 8th. Institute of Design The d.school’s K-12 Lab team is abuzz with learnings from the recent DT2Schools Workshop. The workshop brought together teachers and administrators from 8 different schools, including two teachers from the Lab’s international partner Riverside School who came all the way from India. In addition to schools, representatives from Teach for America’s curriculum design team also attended. Teachers were immersed in design thinking with two cycles through our design process. They then turned immediately to apply the design process to their own curriculum to take design thinking back to their schools. Projects that were seeded during the workshop included such diverse concepts as a Second Grade Fairy Tale unit, an Empathy Tea for New Teachers, and a Design a Backpack Activity for 5th Grade Parents.
Participate in NCDD’s #BridgingOurDivides Campaign As the election winds down, ballots are counted, and the debates about the many decisions on the ballot finally have clear outcomes, we have arrived at a time when we as a field need to take stock of what we should do next. A major theme of our NCDD 2016 conference in Boston was how D&D practitioners can help repair our country’s social and political fabric, both after this bruising and bitter election year, but also in light of many of the longer-standing divisions in our country. NCDD has made an ongoing commitment to answering that question, and as part of that commitment, we are calling on our members and others to enlist in our new #BridgingOurDivides campaign!
Repressive Tolerance, by Herbert Marcuse (1965) THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period--a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Frame Shift Consulting Now that we all know about bias in the workplace, what can we do to stop it? The Ally Skills Workshop teaches simple everyday ways for people to use their privilege and influence to support people who are targets of systemic oppression in their workplaces and communities. This includes women of all races, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ folks, parents, caregivers of all sorts, and people of different ages. We’ve run the [Ally Skills Workshop] 4 times and the impact has been fantastic.
Welcome! Thank You for Joining The List You should soon have an email in your Inbox asking you to confirm joining the list. How exciting. If it doesn’t arrive soon, contact Berkun directly and he’ll add you manually. Guest Post: A post-election guide to changing hearts and minds [Trigger warnings: sexual assault, racist police violence, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Semitism, child sexual abuse] Valerie Aurora teaches the Ally Skills Workshop, which teaches people with more power and privilege how to stand up in small, everyday ways for people with less. She also trains people to the lead the Ally Skills Workshop. She is a long-time Captain Awkward reader and recommends the blog in every workshop she teaches. Hey Awkwardeers, Many of us are grappling with how to use our skills and influence to resist the upcoming Trump administration and the hatred and violence that it inspires.