Youth-Adult Co-Design and Design Partnerships

Catalytic Resources to Transform Student Experience

Educators and other adults need to develop practices, tools, and mindsets to effectively listen to students and partner with them to co-lead change efforts. We can move from education as a practice of "doing to" young people, to sharing power and co-designing new solutions together. Approaching school redesign and transformation in this way is responsive to what our students are asking for, and aligns with what the research and science of learning and development shows young people most need and deserve from their schools and learning environments.

The National Equity Project developed this suite of knowledge products related to youth-adult design partnerships in 2023. The resources here represent key lessons and recommendations from our 5+ years of leading networks of school districts alongside our collaborative partners in the BELE Network.

Co-Design as a Catalyst for Equity: Gain an understanding of the power and promise of co-design.

Many educators are coming to understand the importance of student, parent/caregiver and community voice as they make decisions and create programs that serve these stakeholders. Co-design pushes us to go beyond just centering the needs and realities of those we’re designing for, and to create processes that allow us to design with. This opens up whole new possibilities for how challenges get understood and what solutions can emerge.

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Developing Youth-Adult Design Partnerships: Learn ways to implement youth-adult design partnerships.

Efforts to bring about greater equity in schools are generally driven by adults. And, very often, these adults don’t share the racial, cultural, and generational identities of the historically marginalized youth for whom they are designing solutions or interventions. This means adult-driven design efforts typically lack the voice and input of the young people these efforts are meant to serve. Not surprisingly, this absence of their key perspectives and experience tends to significantly limit the potential effectiveness of these efforts. Authentic partnership, on the other hand, can be transformative for students, as well as for adult educators. This resource offers some ways to envision and create what we name as youth-adult design partnerships in service of greater equity in schools.

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Setting Conditions for Co-Design in Youth-Adult Design Partnerships

When young people, especially those marginalized within systems, bring their lived experience together with adults who bring their professional expertise and influence, powerful change becomes possible. Because this type of partnership often goes against the grain of business as usual in education systems, it is vital to pay attention to creating conditions that allow such work to thrive. We offer a set of considerations and practical guidance focused on creating conditions to support meaningful, impactful design partnerships.

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Using Liberatory Design to Center Student Experience

Designing truly equitable environments requires young people at the table as co-designers. This resource focuses on ways groups can structure a design process once a team is in place with supportive conditions. A group can have an intention to work together, but without a basic design process to help guide the work, it’s easy to get stuck or lose momentum or operate less effectively as a team. Various types of design processes exist; here we detail how to use Liberatory Design as an effective process to center to student experience.

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We hope these resources and tools catalyze a new paradigm of approaches to schooling and school redesign.

We will share and explore more ways to use these resources in 2024. In the meantime, here are some ways to connect with this work: