Jessica Brown, Experience Designer for Business Innovation Factory, speaks about the importance of challenging the current, mainstream definition of success while considering the way curriculum could exclude certain demographics of students.
[MUSIC PLAYING] So I think often when we’re having conversations around equity, we talk about needing to change the measures of success. And for a lot of people that brings alarms, it’s like Oh, are you going to be watering this down. Why are you changing these things? What goals are we accomplishing by doing it?
Well, we just need to change what we mean by success too. We need to interrupt what has been the norm or what has been seen as success without any challenge and that hasn’t been serving a vast majority of students period. And especially hasn’t been serving black or brown students, students with disabilities, LGBTQ students, who are not seeing themselves in the curriculum, who aren’t getting excited.
I actually believe once you add equity, once you add a lines of who is missing who is getting replaced, who’s getting harmed, you’re actually getting much deeper into critical thinking. You’re getting much more rigorous but there’s so many reasons there’s so many barriers that are going to get in the way at the systems are still at work, even as we’re trying to change them, as we’re trying to push forward.