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Dreaming up a new future - towards the design of a co-created leadership academy

Esai Reddy, Joe-Dean Roberts, �Christine Immenga, Daniela Gachago, �University of Cape Town

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Christine

Joe-Dean

Esai

Daniela

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Project set up

Start August 2022
Part of a larger project “UCT LEADS”
Focusing on research aspect/principles to guide UCT leadership academy
Parallel process to the larger set up of UCT LEADS
Weekly meetings, facilitated by CILT & DSA
2 student teams

One more involved in course design
One more involved in facilitation of workshop / research

Emergent design: designing as we experience it
Loosely based on emergent strategy (amb) & EquityXDesign approach

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SAP fit for the South African context?

Highly diverse context
Much stronger power differentials
Call for decolonisation / student led (not just inviting student as partners)
Can we actually all participate equally?
Not much focus on process of how to work together in the literature equitably

Introducing EquityXDesign (2015):

As leaders from the racial equity and design and innovation spaces, we offer equityXdesign — a new way to think about and approach achieving equity. equityXdesign creates the conditions and relationships for inclusive innovation. A process for anti-racist and equitable design, it is guided by three central beliefs: innovation’s need for inclusion and intentional design, the indistinguishable relationship between the past and the present, and our moral imperative to live in the future we desire to create.

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eXd framework

3 Beliefs:

5 Design principles:

Historical Context (See)

Radical Inclusion (Be Seen)

Process as Product (Foresee)

Design at the margins

Start with yourself

Cede Power

Make the invisible visible

Speak to the future

We can only design a socially just product if we work together in a socially just way

3 beliefs: historical context, radical inclusion and process as product

5 design principles: design at the margins, start with yourself, cede power, make the invisible visible and speak to the future

3 Beliefs:

Historical Context

- “the past is present in the people, things and systems of oppression that we are trying to re-design”

- Thought of as a “series of design decisions”

- historical context matters as it reflects how past design decisions have influenced and shaped system and our perspectives.

Racial Inclusion

- “problems of inequity (racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, etc) exists because of habits of exclusion”

- requires us to create spaces to celebrate and leverage the full diversity of our identities and use them as tools to create a more equitable reality

Process as Product

Emphasis on equity as a verb (a way of being in the world) to show that the process should be equitable too.
When designing, the process must therefore be equitable as much as the final product or end goal.

5 design principles:

Design at the margins

- when we focus the design on those who are at ‘margins’ (left out / in the background) then we are designing for all rather than the ‘average’ or ‘middle class’. When we continue to design at the middle, we continue to create distance between ourselves and those at the margins.

Start with yourself

“Our identities create our lens for the world and how we make sense of it”
Our identities impacts how we design. We should be aware of our biases and blindspots as well as how our experience and thoughts impacts how we design.

Cede power

“When our power excludes others, we cede it to include others”
To know what power exists in the given dynamics that we work in; to be aware of our own powers and to give power to others in the design process that should be making decisions too.

Make the Invisible Visible

“Implicit biases, power dynamics and invisible structures all govern relationships with people in our organisations, schools and governments. By making them visible, we can assess the impact on people and create a space for reflection and repair.”
Constantly making the invisible structures visible - the default ways of engaging, the norms unspoken about, the social structures. We need to bring it up (make it visible) and speak about it to constantly to address inequity.

Speak to the Future

“There is insidious power in language and discourse to influence and control ideas, beliefs, actions and ultimately culture. In order to write a different story, we have to use different language. We need to replace our current discourse”
History and power are embedded in the words that we use to describe our experiences - be intentional about the words we use in the design process and in our design.
Be comfortable inventing new words to create an equitable society.

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First reflections: A space that feels different

Centres student voices / ceding power

�Encourages multiple perspectives

Open and caring space / allowing for emergence

“we got a platform to speak but then also we got platform with our own facilitation groups… then we had to cede power not just be these imposing figures as well” (Tebogo)

“engage with like, like-minded people, and like, see different perspectives on leadership” (Sitaarah)

“I think the first thing that pleasantly surprised me was how long it took to, like, configure the space to, like, make it right for what we needed to do” (Asanda)

“And as they were continuing, the ideas just became bigger and better and more coherent” (Joe-Dean)

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First reflections: A space that feels different

Centres student voices / making space for students -> but also creates “hypervisibility” of students

Encourages multiple perspectives -> “Group Think”

Open process / allowing for emergence -> takes time and sometimes hard to trust / especially if you are from hard sciences

“you can't force anybody to do something. So as much as you want to make them visible, if they want to be invisible you kind of have to let them be” (Shalom)

“when I think of research I think of like a very methodical like a process” (Abicha)

“I felt like not groupthink, but I felt like like relatively similar opinions on leadership, like, although there was like rich discussion, and different like angles and like different perspectives” (Asanda)

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Third Spaces

“that space where oppressed and oppressor are able to come together, free (maybe only momentarily) of oppression itself, embodied in their particularity” (Bhabha, 1990; 1994)

“‘‘Different identities…remake boundaries within the conception that there is no ‘One’ or the ‘Other’ but an ‘In-between’, a place where both past and future can work together to create a new outlook’’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 219).

space where people’s conceptions, perceptions and lived experiences are often contested and continuously constructed and reconstructed: “the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives” (Soja, 1996, p. 5)

“third space as a place of reﬂection, renewal, and change in which two supposedly oppositional worlds are re-imagined to identify tensions, conﬂicts, exaggerations of distance, commonalities across domains, sources of insight, and inspiration for action.” - third space can lead to change in first and second spaces (Flessner, 2014)

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Conclusions

“Repositioning students as partners to staﬀ does trouble power hierarchies in higher education (Seale et al. 2015; Bovill et al. 2016; Mercer-Mapstone and Mercer 2018), but those involved in these partnerships also recognize the diﬃculty of achieving true ‘equality” (De Bie, 2022)

: We each aspired to achieve the positive aspects of partnership without leaving space for the nitty-gritty messiness…For us, this meant being friendly, supportive, respectful, polite, diplomatic—nice. …We unintentionally left no space for conﬂict …” (Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017, 6)

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References

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

de Bie, A. (2022). Respectfully distrusting ‘Students as Partners’ practice in higher education: applying a Mad politics of partnership. Teaching in Higher Education, 27(6), 717–737. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1736023

EquityXDesign (2015). Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned. Medium. (n.d.). Retrieved July 7, 2021, from https://medium.com/equity-design/racism-and-inequity-are-products-of-design-they-can-be-redesigned-12188363cc6a

Mercer-Mapstone, L., Dvorakova, S. L., Matthews, K. E., Abbot, S., Cheng, B., Felten, P., Knorr, K., Marquis, E., Shammas, R., & Swaim, K. (2017). A Systematic Literature Review of Students as Partners in Higher Education. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i1.3119

Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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“Design is a living practice, not a done thing. It is a medium for building relationship between ourselves and those who will benefit from or be harmed by our design choices; and as such, design is iterative, a praxis—a process of doing, examining, reflecting, doing... and of never getting so set in our ways that we forget there are always new things to try”. (Morris, 2021)

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Open questions