Weeknotes #3: Lockdown Learning Edition
Week of 25 January
Week 3 of term and I can start to feel the departure from the early term calm. I am trying to intersperse healing experiences to help me feel grounded when I’m feeling so time poor. One example, our puppy Coco made such lovely company during an enrichment lecture this Thursday.
Living in parallel is a challenging part of the delicate (and often precarious) juggling act of homeschooling/my study/Florian’s work, but the kindness that we show each other helps so much. Florian and Max continued to work their way through the Star Wars series while I watched a lecture on urban food systems, gratefully eating the dinner Florian had prepared and delivered.
I think all of us are trying to find comfort in whatever way we can, and like many our family has turned to basic, elemental practices — walking in the nearby fields, cooking, and food. We have also developed a growing appreciation for the role that creative pursuits and self expression have in providing that comfort we are now seeking with unusual fervour.
This week my son’s big homeschooling task was to complete a series of four chapters on a mountain adventure of his choosing—for him an opportunity to indulge in his fascination with Japan and Mt. Fuji. It’s hard to describe the delight in seeing Max tackle the writing with relish, a furrowed brow and laughter escaping as he comes up with a particularly delightful idea. Especially when writing has required him to overcome his fear of failure, of not knowing, and of embracing messiness.
Here is a blurry version of the final chapter of his adventure — an exuberant finale of a narrow escape from the Hibagon (Japenese equivalent of the yeti) by Max and his companion, Coco the dog. Food always a central part of Max’s story endings, no surprise given the important space it holds in our family.
The classes that stood out most this week were the ones that hit my emotional core.
In my Health and Wellbeing in Cities we are focusing on urban food systems. We’re exploring how green spaces and urban gardens/agriculture are linked to/foster health and wellbeing. We’ve been asked to pick an image of a community garden in our city and deliberately depart from an analytical frame of mind to one that grounded in the senses and emotions. I chose to write about my parents’ community garden in San Francisco, and enjoyed sitting in the space for an hour, even if only in memory.
Photo elicitation is a method of interview in research that uses visual images to elicit comments. Dr. Gemma Moore, our course lead, used this method as part of the VivaCity2020 Research Project to understand how city centre residents in England perceive, understand, use and interpret their local environment. It is a way of giving research participants a high level of control over the direction of the research and to help surface feelings and emotions.
My Transformation By Design was provocative in a different way. We explored design thinking as a way of life and a way of work, the power behind the design thinking mindset which organisations like IDEO have made famous and which has become a dominant force in public sector change.
Bringing design thinking into the practice of the public sector organisation I worked for was central to my work. I was reminded of the work I did with Kat Sexton, Adele Gilpin and their service design team when re-designing Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s early years support for children under 5. We spoke so often about the importance of both mindset and emotional safety with this type of work. Here and here are the blogs Kat wrote capturing our work.
Part B of our design thinking mindsets exploration, a critique of the design thinking kool-aid that many of us have drank, via George Aye, co-founder of Greater Good Studio. I’ve included the series of questions George posed to my class (which form part of his own practice). I think they are powerful, and largely absent from any conversation about service design practice—or most social change efforts, for that matter. The questions reverberated throughout the group, and continued to ripple afterwards.
I have mixed feelings about this session. In a forum of this size (especially a virtual one), you run the risk of glossing over individual difference. While cohort members have much in common, it is also likely that we are in different places in our journey of reflecting on power and privilege. It is so hard to address that nuance in a face-to-face forum (I’ve yet to experience an exemplary one), much less on Zoom. It doesn’t mean that these conversations should be avoided, but it’s important to acknowledge that major caveat — thank you Rowan for doing so during the session.
My feelings also reflect my complicated relationship with power and privilege (does anyone have a simple relationship with power and priviliege?). They reflect the fact that my background intersects a myriad of identities — Latino (via my Honduran mother), White (via my European-American father), woman, childhood trauma survivor, mother.
On the one hand, I have had the privilege of moving across White and Brown worlds with ease. Growing up in the Philippines, my skin colour gave me the ability to blend in, to leave the confines of the compound where we lived and enter spaces without being singled out for being light skinned or blonde.
At the end of the day, however, my very presence in the Philippines represented American political and economic force. As the daughter of an American executive I could always retreat into comfort and privilege. We lived in the Muslim south of the country, where Americans run some of the world’s biggest pineapple plantations and where Islam and Catholicism uneasily co-exist. Even at a young age, I always knew that my tenure in this heartbreakingly beautiful place was temporary, that I could always leave if necessary.
While there were occasions in which people unkindly pointed this out to me that the colour of my skin was inferior, like the time my light-skinned, Dominican classmate told me (and my whole 4th grade class) that I could not read the princess’ part because of my darker skin, growing up in Latin America and the Philippines mostly buffered me from the type of overt racism I might have experienced had I grown up in the US. And yet, I’ve also been painfully aware that what people first see of me is my brown skin—and that at first glance people will likely fail to appreciate the complexity of life experience that lies beneath the surface. I felt the liability of my skin colour even more accutely when I moved to the California in 1996, at the age of 16, even though having a White American father provided me with the access that someone who looked like me wasn’t supposed to have.
George’s talk also prompted me to think about the cost of not speaking up, taking me back to my work evaluating an Afro-Centred school in Detroit — back in my days as an education consultant. This school was built on an unapologetic vision of Black empowerment. In the over 60 schools I visited across the US, I have never witnessed such intense, unconditional love and care for children. And yet, on all traditional metrics this school was failing. While we acknowledged the school’s unparalleled emotional safety and care, our evaluation of the school was not favourable.
I had intense moral misgivings about our evaluation brief. My personal background and education training prompted me to recognise that this school was doing something special and counter-cultural. While I worked incredibly hard to honour the school’s mission and approach as much, it was impossible to do this school justice when we were using the wrong metrics. I knew this, but did not have the courage or confidence to state what was simmering in the pit of my stomach.
This experience is burned into my psyche and serves as a constant lesson that frameworks which appear to be value neutral usually favour the dominant. it is also a painful lesson that brown skin does not innoculate you against tacitly upholding racist practice. This school should have been supported to fulfill its radical vision, not measured against a framework that represented an inherently White view of education and schooling. As Bryce Huffman wrote in his Michigan Radio piece, its closure represented a loss to the community that hurt Black children the most.
A similar risk exists with design thinking, and while I find design-based approaches have great potential to inspire social change, design tools need to be used with a great deal of caution, self-awareness, and humility. I would like to explore and understand how this looks like in practice, bringing my whole self to that exploration, including my previous training in education for social justice, as well as my work with anthropologists, community organisers, restorative justice practitioners, to this work. I’ll do my best not to lose sight of George’s provocations, including the ones here.
