Each year, our eighth grade students embark on this project to better understand and personalize the social justice issues that emerge from their study of post-Civil War US history. This project connects them to individuals and organizations that are making a difference in the community and beyond. Through this process, our eighth graders come to better understand the rewards and challenges of active citizenship and the need for all individuals to choose to participate. Two benchmark points on what we hope will be a life-long journey our the Social Justice Project Blog that students maintain to document their site visits and learnings and our annual spring Social Justice Teach-In during which the eighth graders plan and run a set of workshops and assemblies for the rest of the middle school.

An exciting addition to this year’s work has been the development of what we hope

will be an ongoing collaboration with the faculty and students at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation (DSI) program.  Last week, graduate students in DSI’s “Disruptive Design,” a primary source research methodology class, joined us to provide a series of interactive workshops for the eighth graders.  The workshops were at helping our eighth graders to better understand how to gather information when they are “in the field” doing their site visits with a wide range of organizations and individuals engaged in social justice work. Together with the students from DSI, our students explored a range of ideas as evidenced from the images below and in this research methods “toolkit” that that students received.

The design of last week’s workshops also modeled important techniques that our students can use as they start to think about the workshops that they will design and lead for their middle school classmates in the spring. The next phase of our collaboration will involve a visit to SVA where DSI students will pilot workshops that they are developing for their course projects and our students will provide feedback. The third phase will involve DSI students providing feedback on the projects that our students will develop for the Teach-In.The Design for Social Innovation program was established to provide a “path for designers who want to work at a strategic level within business, government and the social sector to solve the major challenges humanity faces, and to offer non-designers an opportunity to learn to use design to create positive impact.” It is our hope that this relationship provides an additional opportunity for our students to gain insight into how they can choose to make the commitment to social justice, activism and innovation a part of their life’s work.