After reviewing your goals and looking through your work, consider the following:

1. What are 2-3 takeaways from your June module that you want to keep thinking about or working on?

   The theme of this reflection (see the frantic T.S. Eliot title) is sorta gonna be the theme here. The idea of summer Design Forward is to have time to reflect on the lessons, which I’ve been trying to do. But “teachers get summers off” is a myth at the best of times, and this is not the best of times, not for higher ed, not for much in America.

   This also doubles as a reflection on Designing for Equity…equity being one of the verbotten ‘DEI’ words. Good work takes time and space, and there are so very many demands on our time and space. As tough as this year has been (to date), it’s also a good reminder that the same is true for our students.

2. What are 2-3 takeaways from Designing for Education that you want to keep thinking about working on?

   How can we do less? As in, what are we doing, what are we forced to do, that is truly BS work? It’s very easy to lose sight of the goals of education (critical thought, an educated citizenry, social mobility, enthusiasm and curiosity and art!) and end up prioritizing the institutional processes that seem most stressful over the human(e) habits that are most important.

   In other words, it’s always ‘TIME’, and I hope to resist by encouraging myself, and my students, and my colleagues, to hurry less.

3. When we gather in August (during U Days week), what would you most like to talk about or work on with others in the cohort?

   We are absolutely at a moment of crisis at PSU, in USNH, across American higher education. How can we protect the time and the space in which to design forward, not backward? How can we use the power we do have institutionally to best protect and uplift and educate those around us?

4. During the fall semester, what kind of follow-up activity would be most meaningful? Workshops on particular topics? Informal meetings? Structured meetings? In-person or online? Presentations by folks about how they’ve designed something for their own classes? Specific speakers or presenters? Something else? Feel free to brainstorm and think outside the box. We can decide as a group what we want to do this year!

   What types of activities would help us to best recharge? We don’t need added deadlines, nor do we need extra opportunities to vent our miseries together (though that is important!). How can we celebrate the victories we’re making through thoughtful design?

5. If you were to continue to engage with the grant, what kind of work would you like to do? More Design Forward modules? A design project focusing on something you’re working on? Supporting others in the grant? Working with the CoLab to refine/expand DF? Something else?

   Support. See #4!

6. What worked best for you this summer? What would you recommend we do differently?

   Despite my low energy at the time, having an all-day event combined with SPIN was the right call. It gave me tons to chew on this summer, and it was an excellent post-semester reminder of what wonderful and supportive colleagues I have at PSU. We’re in this work together!