Teaching to Transgress using Design Justice Principles

Overview: Social workers on the frontline of urgent social problems need new practices to create impact. Necessary, difficult conversations and decision-making leads to transformational change for student learning and organizational culture. In this session, presenters share perspectives on the principles of design justice and how it can enhance social work education.Proposal text: Social work has begun to adopt design thinking - but should do so with intentional commitment to social justice. Design Justice is a systems framework attentive to what shapes our ability to access, participate, and design change in the world. Constanza-Chock’s work on Design Justice explains how design thinking creates access and participation of marginalized communities. In social work, this means that design also shapes students' ability to access, participate, and contribute to meaningful, transformative learning. Design in social work is a necessary tool for social change and macro practice. Presenters share what it means to be a social impact designer. A social impact designer addresses structural inequities across our social systems. Instead of denying that inequities exist, they instead use Design Justice to examine assumptions and unintended consequences within their design processes.

Social work education incorporates design in many ways: instructional design, curricular design, classroom design, and more. Uncritical design approaches that do not intentionally attend to the experiences of marginalized and disenfranchised learners perpetuate and exacerbate inequities (Costanza-Chock, February 2020). Thus, we should embrace design approaches that are attentive to those learners for whom social work education has not typically been designed. Design Justice provides a framework for doing so.

Design Justice centers and prioritizes people who have been marginalized by design (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Design justice challenges us to recognize how design(s) exclude or exploit certain people and communities. Costanza-Chock (2018, 2020a, 2020b) states that the goal of design justice is to more equitably distribute the benefits and burdens of design. In social work education, we should recognize that our educational designs have both benefits and burdens for students, and we should embrace design processes that bring a more equitable distribution of benefits to as many learners as possible by centering the experiences and needs of learners who are marginalized by our educational designs. This means taking a hard, critical look at our educational designs and recognizing exclusions and even exploitations.

We also want to caution, as bell hooks does, against making gestures toward design justice without committing to the transformation required to change the structures of inequality and oppression that shape our students' lives (hooks, 1994). There is real, and challenging, work to do, and we cannot allow ourselves to stop at small moves.

In this proposed session, presenters create the space to dialogue about the design justice principles by asking what social work educators and administrators can do to achieve these principles in social work education and social work. We will highlight the work we are doing in a DSW Program. Specifically, we will share three design justice strategies we have implemented: intersectionality, participatory design, and liberatory education.

Elements of this session will also include considering ways to redefine the faculty’s role in the learning process, redesign courses, operationalize the design justice principles to address the Grand Challenges for Social Work, and implement new ways to impact the culture of social work education. Finally, we will include a design justice exercise to engage participants.