Education By Design Not Default

There is great hope. The weight of childhood is heavy in America today. "Burned out" is not supposed to describe children. But it does. A growing list of performance requirements now comes accessorized with a longer list of labels and disorders for children who struggle to measure up. Required to earn (stickers, grades, a place in a good reading group or on the best team...) many children are confused about their identity and their purpose. Even more confusing is the lack of fulfillment children experience even when they get everything right and earn all the prizes. Is this it? This performing and earning cycle feels like bondage, not freedom. In front of a screen feels like a safe place to hide. Where is the hope? Childhood isn't a season of measuring up. It's a season of growing up. Education by Design, Not Default: How Brave Love Creates Fearless Learning is a bold declaration of the transformational power of experiencing love in childhood. More than a romantic dream or a heart emoji included in a text, love is the fuel of maturity. Love sees us when we struggle-and love helps. Children need help, by design. For generations who have experienced education as performing and testing, Education by Design, Not Default offers to recalculate the route we're offering to our children at school and at home. We can provide children an honest and love-based childhood-and offer the world more than perpetual adolescents. Love can launch trustworthy adults. Janet Newberry is an educational consultant committed to repurposing education. She is also a writer, speaker, and a self-proclaimed love researcher. Janet and her husband Doug travel America in an Airstream named Freedom, helping families have real conversations without shame, so children can ask for help in relationships of trust. Find out more on her website janetnewberry.com and join Janet and Doug on their Brave Love podcast.

We are no longer used to critically examining the meaning of “design”, which maintains an unexplored dimension in terms of the Power that can be exercised through the cyclic act of creation, preservation and disruption. This assumption induce us focus on the contrast between the “visible” side of the act that involves all its conceptual and practical manifestations, and a hidden or “dark” side that deals with politics and power play, but that however has an major influence in the process and its hierarchical dynamics. This implies an order on the surface seems to be naturally stirred by the so-called “perceptions” that reflect the preferences of overall public opinions: however, looking deeper, all the production acts involves a carefully controlled disequillibrium influenced by social, ecological, economical and political interests. The power fl ow in the act of “design” takes into consideration the paradoxical contradiction between its potentiality and its preservation of power.

Despite great progress around the world in getting more kids into schools, too many leave without even the most basic skills. In India’s rural Andhra Pradesh, for instance, only about one in twenty children in fifth grade can perform basic arithmetic. The problem is that schooling is not the same as learning. In The Rebirth of Education, Lant Pritchett uses two metaphors from nature to explain why. The first draws on Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book about the difference between centralized and decentralized organizations, The Starfish and the Spider. Schools systems tend be centralized and suffer from the limitations inherent in top-down designs. The second metaphor is the concept of isomorphic mimicry. Pritchett argues that many developing countries superficially imitate systems that were successful in other nations— much as a nonpoisonous snake mimics the look of a poisonous one. Pritchett argues that the solution is to allow functional systems to evolve locally out of an environment pressured for success. Such an ecosystem needs to be open to variety and experimentation, locally operated, and flexibly financed. The only main cost is ceding control; the reward would be the rebirth of education suited for today’s world.

Universal Design in Higher Education looks at the design of physical and technological environments at institutions of higher education; at issues pertaining to curriculum and instruction; and at the full array of student services. Universal Design in Higher Education is a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners on creating fully accessible college and university programs. It is founded upon, and contributes to, theories of universal design in education that have been gaining increasingly wide attention in recent years. As greater numbers of students with disabilities attend postsecondary educational institutions, administrators have expressed increased interest in making their programs accessible to all students. This book provides both theoretical and practical guidance for schools as they work to turn this admirable goal into a reality. It addresses a comprehensive range of topics on universal design for higher education institutions, thus making a crucial contribution to the growing body of literature on special education and universal design. This book will be of unique value to university and college administrators, and to special education researchers, practitioners, and activists.

At the heart of any discussion about the future of libraries is the future of librarians—and how well our instructional programs, especially the Master of Library Science (MLS) degree, prepare them for their careers. This book continues the critical conversations around preparing future librarians.

Faculty in higher education are disciplinary experts, but they seldom receive formal training in teaching. Higher Education by Design uses the principles of design thinking to bridge this gap through practical examples and step-by-step instructions based on educational theory and best practices in pedagogical and curricular development. This book offers practical advice for effective teaching and instruction, interdisciplinary curricular collaborations, writing course syllabi, creating course outcomes and objectives, planning assessments, and building curricular content. Whether you are a seasoned professor or new instructor, the strategies in this book can improve your practice as an educator.

This practical and accessible workbook is designed to support student-teachers, NQTs and beginning teachers as they develop their teaching skills, and increase their broader knowledge and understanding for teaching design and technology.