A design course for every student

An Illinois high school developed a math class that uses STEAM and design thinking to spur creativity and empathy while teaching real-life skills.

At the beginning of each school year, high school math teachers Lara DeMoya and Jose Manuel Arias point students in their STEAM Design Thinking and Innovation (DTI) class to shelves filled with recyclables and art materials and give them an assignment: Make something that wasn’t there before. The only parameters are that their “something” must be innovative, and they must use the whole time allotted to them. Typically, the students flounder. (The teachers’ toddlers, on the other hand, excel when given similar instructions at home.)

“The students really want us to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it,” DeMoya said. “They don’t remember how to think outside of all those constraints.”

Evanston Township High School (ETHS) in Illinois is integrating STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) with a human-centered design curriculum to help students reharness their creativity. STEM education is rooted in late-20th-century efforts to help students compete in the global marketplace by building skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (Blackley & Howell, 2015). It has been lauded for its transdisciplinary approach to equipping students with the skills they’ll need in a high-tech future (Madden et al., 2013). Integrating the A – arts – in STEAM adds creativity to the mix.

Process over outcome

STEAM DTI is grounded in six key processes: collaboration, communication, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and empathy. We de-emphasize perfectionism, competition, and risk avoidance.

During the first semester of the class, students collaborate on short design challenges that involve engaging with those around them, like creating a way for the school community to get to know ETHS’s safety team. They interview, research, go over ideas, and generate feedback. Learning comes from doing. “We’ve talked to plenty of people who didn’t make huge impacts on our [final] project, but there was still extreme value in talking to them,” former student Aidan remembered.

In the second semester, students work on a capstone project, identifying a need or opportunity in Evanston and implementing a project to respond to that issue. This year, projects included designing a better sensory space for students with disabilities and running art workshops to support Black and brown students’ self-expression.

STEAM DTI focuses not on product or profit, but on community design. It has no course prerequisite and doesn’t require large sums of money or an elaborate space, just a willingness to engage with others and with higher-order thinking. And yet, it’s not an easy class. “There’s a lot of failure, but it’s in a good way,” Logan, a former student, said. Students who typically excel in school — who consistently get high grades, turn assignments in on time, and thrive when given very specific directions — often find STEAM DTI challenging, mostly because of the importance the class places on process over outcome.

By the end of the course, students are more adept at working with others and thinking deeply. Former student Claire remembered volunteering at a school event where she and a STEAM DTI classmate bounced ideas off each other about what could make the school better and considered holding focus groups. “Suddenly we were like, ‘STEAM has changed the way we think,’” Claire said. “Everywhere I go now, all I can think about is ‘What would I do to improve this?’ And then I think, ‘Well, what’s really the problem?’”

Designing STEAM DTI  

STEAM DTI was born out of an observation that math education at ETHS needed an update. “More than ever, because of artificial intelligence, we don’t need to know as many formulas,” Arias said. And beyond that, traditional mathematics classes can be seen as a barrier for students who don’t easily catch on to math concepts or don’t have access to as many resources to catch up. Typically, mathematics is sequenced in a linear fashion; you can pass on to the next lesson or class only if you can apply the class’s current processes. Liesa Klyn, who co-created the original curriculum and taught the first three cohorts, said, “Students of color were overrepresented in groups without access to higher math classes.” How could the school offer a math class with more varied entry points that was still rigorous?

Kristen Perkins, the Northwestern University-ETHS partnership coordinator, helped to develop STEAM DTI. A former high school biology teacher, she now helps to connect resources at the high school and university to buoy educational opportunities at each institution. The partnership office has a specific emphasis on broadening STEAM programs, with a focus on diversity, college and career preparation, and identity. For STEAM DTI, Perkins took inspiration from a Northwestern engineering course called Design Thinking and Communication. That course aims to build empathy and communication in a field where creators are often distant from those they create for. When Northwestern’s engineering school shifted its curriculum in this direction, it retained more women and students of color. “The way that our society thinks about STEM privileges people with left, linear skill sets,” Perkins said. “Framing engineering as something that is collaborative, that is creative, that doesn’t have one right solution but that is really open-ended opens up different pathways and ways that [students] can see themselves in the work.” Perkins worked closely with ETHS Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Pete Bavis and an interdisciplinary team to create and propose the course at the high school level, and she now supports the course’s curriculum and event planning.

In line with ETHS’s collaborative nature, Perkins positioned Northwestern as an anchor partner that communicates with local and distant professors about projects. Taking inspiration from the Big Data as Art collaboration between Northwestern and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she teamed up with Stanford University’s d.school, which has a focus on collaborations with K-12 schools, and the university’s NU Public Interest Program (NUPIP). Through NUPIP, the school hired a recent graduate each year to help teach and plan the class, choosing fellows with varied backgrounds to bring ongoing new perspectives to the course.

Centering the design process

David Kelley at the design firm IDEO coined the term “design thinking” in the early 2000s (Gram, 2019). He was not creating a new way of designing so much as branding what his company already did: industrial design with a human-centered approach. The designers created products like defibrillators and insulin pens, considering aesthetics and function. Kelley went on to found Stanford’s design school.

Design thinking includes:

• Identifying an issue or need.
• Gathering context and listening with empathy to those affected.
• Articulating the root of the issue.
• Brainstorming and prototyping solutions.
• Testing.

At ETHS, we push students to build relationships with and deeply involve the people their issue affects most and to use their own identities and experiences as driving forces. Centering the people who are impacted means being purposeful about devising solutions that the community can sustain, if it chooses to do so, after our students support the initial implementation.

What does this look like in practice? This year, a group that focused broadly on inter-neighborhood inequities in Evanston decided to center their capstone project on attracting business to a Black-owned corner store by the high school. The independently owned shop is in a ward without access to a high-quality supermarket and whose residents have high levels of food insecurity. The group surveyed the owners, community members, and students to explore why people didn’t visit the store more. The consistent answer? People didn’t know about the store. Or they passed it daily but had never gone inside. The students’ initial solution ideas ranged from opening a branch of the store inside the school to renovating the storefront to make it seem more inviting. But after reflecting on their conversations and running ideas by the owners and community members, they settled on simple ways to acquaint students with the store. They filmed a promo video to share in weekly school announcements. They also suggested specific student deals to the owners that would draw in more customers and walked friends and acquaintances to the store from the high school to introduce them to the owners.

Going through those five design-thinking bullet points — often going back and doing some of them over again — helped the students turn an issue they were originally overwhelmed by into a tangible effort. The homepage of the website they created to showcase their project read, “This isn’t a report about the racist history of Evanston; it’s about what four high school students are trying to do about it. This isn’t the solution, but it’s a first step.”

Addressing potential downsides

Design thinking asks us to use a critical lens. It would only be right to do the same for the process itself. And, indeed, there has been pushback against design thinking (Iskander, 2018; Vinsel, 2018). The main critiques are rooted in two beliefs:

• That it locks people into a specific, unalterable process.
• That it gives empathy too much power, resulting in ideas that are often unrealistic and give people disconnected from an issue undue permission to design.

These critiques have some validity – but they apply to a distilled version of design thinking that has emerged with the process’s growing popularity. So, in our class, we take inspiration from the roots of design-thinking principles and center equity, grounded solutions, and critical thinking by emphasizing nonlinearity and designing with – not for – those impacted by an issue. And then, as former IDEO designer George Aye says, we “get out of the way” (Ackermann, 2023).

Emphasizing nonlinearity and process

Arias described the class as “controlled chaos.” The teachers give students assignments and describe what they want to see them doing: brainstorming, reaching out to people, prototyping, and reflecting on their work. But aside from encouraging students to return to certain steps and asking students to complete steps in certain ways to build their skills, the teachers don’t have specific criteria for what the work should look like.

DeMoya acknowledged that to an outsider, and even to the students, the class work can look like play. “But there’s so much intentionality behind each thing that we do,” she said. Students develop different mindsets. “We’re watching them grow in these nontraditional ways,” DeMoya said. Former student Jazminé said of the course, “I appreciated the level of independence and trust that we were given.”

Design with – not for

Aye says that despite IDEO encouraging a “beginner’s mindset” with clients, he observed something more like tourism when employees took on projects. They’d fumble their way through projects, take pictures documenting work with people of color, then move on. At his own studio, Aye attempts to elevate what a local community is already creating and advocates for community members to receive resources to further those processes, without focusing on himself as the designer.

The corner store project was a perfect example of what it looks like to design with, Arias said. The owners “were very involved in the design. It almost turned into this partnership where it wasn’t like ‘Oh, I’m designing what the corner store wants,’” Arias said. “It was more like, ‘We’re doing the same things together, so let’s provide some emphasis on what they want to do, and what else can we do to promote that work?’”

We push students to build relationships with and deeply involve the people their issue affects most and to use their own identities and experiences as driving forces.

Often, our students are part of the community the project focuses on. A couple of members of the corner store group already were frequent customers of the establishment. They were inspired to bring it into their project because they’d experienced the owners’ kindness. But they thought beyond themselves; they hoped that introducing younger students to the store would create a customer base that grows sustainably over time.

Centering STEAM principles 

Dale Leibforth, mathematics department chair at ETHS, sometimes is asked, “Is this a real math class?” His answer is yes: “In mathematics, we always are working on problem solving, critical thinking, and justification. And this course does that every single day.” Students contextualize and define problems; reason through issues with context-informed knowledge, research, and strategies; propose solutions; give and receive feedback; and collect quantitative and qualitative data. These actions directly align with ETHS’s core belief that math should play “a vital role in developing thinking, questioning minds” (Evanston Township High School, n.d.) and with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) practices (Council of Chief State School Officers, n.d.):

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
•  Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
• Model with mathematics.
• Use appropriate tools strategically.
• Attend to precision.
• Look for and make use of structure.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

We also bring each STEAM discipline into the class. This year, we visited a mural wall at Chicago’s Loyola Beach to explore art as a vehicle for change. The wall was first painted 30 years ago in the hopes that beautifying the wall would curb graffiti. Now, an annual repainting weekend is an occasion for community gathering. We asked groups to design murals that responded to our school’s annual theme, “healing in solidarity,” and displayed the murals at a multiday class event.

We’re also intentional about approaching challenges with different lenses. Early in the year, students designed gardens and brainstormed and responded to questions that professionals in each STEAM discipline might ask. For mathematicians, it was, “How can we organize garden beds to maximize our produce output?” Technologists asked, “What kind of lighting could we implement for an indoor garden?” The students’ frustration at how difficult it was to keep their questions within their one discipline was useful for them. We get much further, they saw, when we consider these disciplines in tandem.

Assessing the course’s impact

STEAM DTI is revolutionary because it disrupts the way students think about learning and cultivates imagination. “Our students have gotten really good at thinking inside a given box where they know exactly what the dimensions are supposed to be and exactly what’s supposed to go in the box,” DeMoya said. “But in this class, we’re asking them to rethink the box.”

One of the most telling measures of the power this course holds is students’ ability to articulate exactly which skills transferred to their lives. Lily, from the class’s first cohort, said she developed a different kind of empathy: “I think I was empathetic before, but now I think I’m smart empathetic.” Another student from the first cohort, Aidan, learned while collaborating with classmates how to tune into each person’s work style, which he transferred to his swim team instruction. “Without even thinking, when I would approach someone who’s much quieter or didn’t need so much being amped up, I immediately changed how I approached that person,” Aidan said.

Jazminé is now at Drexel University majoring in fashion design and minoring in social entrepreneurship. She starts projects with a brain dump-style brainstorm, inspired by STEAM, to organize her thoughts. Another former student returned to the school for a visit earlier this year and took questions from the current students. She was in training to become a nail technician while saving money to start her own business and apply for college. “This class taught me how to talk to people in the real world for my job,” she told students, “and I use that skill every day.”

References 

Ackermann, R. (2023, February 9). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? MIT Technology Review.

Blackley, S. & Howell, J.L. (2015). A STEM narrative: 15 Years in the making. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 40 (7).

Council of Chief State School Officers. (n.d.). Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Council of Chief State School Officers Learning Portal.

Evanston Township High School. (n.d). Mathematics/About math.

Gram, M. (2019). On design thinking. N+1, 35.

Iskander, N. (2018, September 18). Design thinking is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo. Harvard Business Review.

Madden, M.E., Baxter, M., Beauchamp, H.M., Bouchard, K., Habermas, D., Huff, M.J., . . . & Plague, G.R. (2013). Rethinking STEM education: An interdisciplinary STEAM curriculum. Procedia Computer Science, 20, 541-546.

Vinsel, L. (2021, December 6). The design thinking movement is absurd. Medium.

This article appears in the September 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 1, pp. 29-33.