university-wide educational vision development
university-wide educational vision development
May 2023 - Sep 2023
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Opportunity
Opportunity
Tasked with an initiative at Tufts University to develop a university-spanning vision for education, the Vice Provost for Education engaged the TTS Design Practice to design and facilitate the process for community engagement, discovery, and ideation around a vision.
Challenge
Challenge
Developing an inclusive vision for education that spans the entire University, which includes around 12,000 students and over 1,600 faculty across 10 schools, is ambitious. Additionally, the variety of topics to detail which might constitute a vision for education for an institution of higher education is vast and their relationships are complex. To engage a representative set of individuals and groups across the University in conversations on the future of education that held the possibility of retaining the complexity and richness of the topic under constraints of stakeholder availability would require an innovative approach.
My Role
My Role
As Design Strategist in the TTS Design Practice, my role was focused on the crafting of goals and designing and facilitating the process of engagement. My key contributions included:
Approach to Conversation Focusing: with multiple concepts to introduce for each session, I designed and developed a Google Form for participants to quickly complete at the beginning of each consultation session. The form asked participants to indicate which "Areas of Focus for Differentiation" and "Cross Cutting Priorities" were of most interest to them. The results of the form were displayed and real time, visualizing where interest among the participants was and enabling the group to focus the conversation around those shared areas of interest at the intersection of the ideas.
Retreat Design and Facilitation: with the goal of convening stakeholders across the University to engage with emergent ideas from the consultation sessions, I was a key contributor to crafting the activities and materials for a day-long in person retreat which would introduce participants to the ideas, situate them in the mode of future visioning, and enable them to craft a proposal for a future educational program. Additionally, I supported the session as a table facilitator and played a role in facilitation in plenary.
Approach
Approach
In a series of 15 scheduled 60-minute virtual consultations with groups across the University, members of the TTS Design Practice and the Office of the Vice Provost for Education leveraged presentation materials, a Google Form, virtual white-boarding, and videoconferencing to efficiently and inclusively open the conversation, focus the topic around shared interests, collect a breadth of ideas, explore ideas at depth, and capture the discussion.
Following the consultations, findings were synthesized by the team into a set of ideas (affectionately referred to as, "vision nuggets") that described a distinct possibility for the future of education. To explore these ideas further and in combination, a day-long retreat of over 30 members of the Tufts Community, including deans, leadership, and students was organized. The retreat grouped members from various backgrounds at tables of 6-8 with a facilitator to discuss and build a shared sense of both the role of higher education for society in the future, as well as Tufts' unique role in that future. Following, participants reviewed the "vision nuggets" in a gallery walk, tagging each with a dot vote those which they thought were potentially transformative and in which they were interested for Tufts' future. As a culminating exercise, 3-4 of the "vision nuggets" which received the most interest were assigned to each table to consider in combination as part of the ingredients of a future educational program. The retreat concluded with each group presenting a pitch for their future educational program.
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