Liberatory design thinking—a way to address equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems—can help campus leaders rethink policy and practices for non-tenure-track faculty.
Summary
Serving as a resource for higher education leaders, this paper can help campuses make policies and practices more equitable for non-tenure-track faculty by using a liberatory design approach. This approach includes the following phases: organize, empathize, redefine, ideate, choose, prototype, buy-in and test. It also includes equity mindsets, notice and reflect throughout. Each phase is described and illustrated using two case studies.
Key Insights
- To be successful, designers in higher education must navigate, collaborate, and negotiate with stakeholders and coalitions in ways that are not usually present in the private sector.
- Successful higher education designers infuse equity-mindedness, both inward- and outward-looking, into every phase of design thinking.
- In the liberatory design model, designers are encouraged to engage in activities that promote self-awareness of identity, values, emotion, assumptions and positionality before beginning the design process.
- Conducting self-awareness activities first, before engaging in other phases of design thinking, helps to build relational trust among the team.
