Equity, Independence, and Web 3.0
EquityXdesign is our framework for re-designing systems that foster racism and inequality. Since change is the only constant, as society changes, so must our framework. We must continue to re-design for equity in order to solve problems rooted in systemic oppression, and the reprise of the equityXdesign framework offers tools that can help us accelerate equitable design at this moment in time.
In Part 3 of the equityXdesign revision, we explore how designs for equity must be designed equitably. Inclusive design practices raise the voices of the marginalized, strengthen relationships across racial differences, shift positions, and recharge our democracy. The design journey requires not just equity pauses, observations, and reflections, but the intentional act of challenging the root of oppression—our exclusion and separation.
Below, we will also explore how the Metaverse and Web 3.0 technologies can play an instrumental role in prototyping new relationships that can help us learn more about the requisites needed to scale and design equitable systems.
Part 3: Integrating Process and Product Enables Equity
FORESEE: PROCESS AS PRODUCT. Equity is a verb. It is the process, not an end point. When designing, both the ends and the means matter. We can’t model the future on the past; we need to live the future we want today.
How do I cross edges privately?
How do I cross edges publicly?
How do I find new edges?
In order to design for equity, we must design equitably. The practice of equitable design requires that we are mindful of how we achieve equity. Inclusive design practices raise the voices of the marginalized, strengthen relationships across racial differences, shift positions, and recharge our democracy. Because exclusion feeds inequity, we can no longer argue that there is not enough time to include the community. We must make time for the magic of human connection, especially across racial differences.
The world we face today is frightening and uncertain. For bodies of color, queer bodies, women bodies, and those bodies holding the edges of those intersections, the threat of extinction has reemerged as a ritual in the American experience. But this is the moment to live boldly, fearlessly, and out loud. We have the opportunity to design new systems and spaces that give life in addition to redesigning the one we already have. Especially during this time of crisis, designing for the living requires courageous interrogation and assessment of current toolkits and processes. This work is challenging, to be sure. But to choose not to engage in it is to be an active participant in further entrenching an exclusionary status quo. The privilege of disengagement endorses extinction. These are life matters. Life requires speaking a future and designing a future that hits the taproot of all supremacies—the undergirding and overarching idea that one human or group of humans deserves more trust, wealth, grace, understanding, and virtue than another group of humans. The idea that they are supreme and have the right to author the story for another sovereign, self determined human being threatens the opportunity for interdependence and sickens the Public Body.
Intentionally challenging supremacy in all of its forms, starting with race, requires a design journey that integrates our stories, connects our bodies, and redesigns our relationships. It requires not just equity pauses, observations, and reflections, but the intentional act of challenging the root of oppression—our exclusion and separation. But to see the lines of separation requires being in a relationship across differences to help see the lines. Designing with equityXdesign intentionally produces a new product or experience that changes the lived experience in the present and a new relationship that heals the traumas of the past with an orientation to the future. It enables us to not just look at oppression, but to look past it. It helps us feel our edges, breathe into them, and allow a release, enabling greater flexibility and range of motion. It unleashes and unbounds our imagination.
Admission and acknowledgement of the mechanics of the current design is critical for redesign and new designs. However, the boundaries of our familiar discourses around equity fail to hold the intricacy and dynamism of the natural living world. The relationship between equity and the natural world are often characterized with a directly proportional relationship between both concepts. It sounds like this: "the better we treat each other, the better we treat the earth." And this insight is often discussed by leaders fluent in both equity discourses and ecological discourse, if it is discussed at all.
Speaking a new future, however, requires us to interrogate the inherency of our conceptual relationship. Understanding the intricacies and dynamism of the natural, living, world has always had a role in the justice theater. This relationship is paramount and symbiotic. We belong to the earth. We are made of it. It is us. However, we rarely center this mutuality given the vital life force energy it provides. Its role rarely takes center stage. Because the past is present in people, things, and systems of oppression, the next few paragraphs will remember the integral, mutual role of the natural world, science, and technology in designing equity and healing the Public Body.
When the body and the natural world align to challenge supremacy in all of its permutations, the power and energy of the natural world work in concert with the spiritual world to transform and transcend. Its midwifery bears witness to a new life. We have seen this before. When enslaved Black Americans liberated themselves from southern plantations, it was the science of the skies that created a guidebook to sovereignty. The night sky and organized stars existing beyond the reach of human manipulation enabled some 100,000 enslaved people to make a life move towards more independence, interdependence, and sovereignty. This early cryptography used the harmonies and the healing frequencies of spirituals and field songs to communicate an escape path through the valley of death. The line and boundary between bondage and sovereignty was drawn by man but made visible in the night by the heavens.
Continued advances in understanding light and the elements accelerated camera technology and motion picture technology emerged as unprecedented documentation tools. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamiliton Houston used still cameras and film cameras to make visible the line that separated lived experiences of Black children and white children in the deep south going to school revealing the fragility of the separate but equal doctrine and ushered in the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of education. Further advances in telephony and data transmission, made visible the inhumanity barbarism of Jim Crow policies and the South visible to every American living household and living room. The television as storyholder and storyteller was in 12 million homes by 1951.
Moore's law, increased computing power, and the arrival of ubiquitous storytelling devices enabled the visibility of the line between the experiences with Black adults and law enforcement, Black children in school, and anti-supremacist protesters and law enforcements. Web 2.0 technologies and the current iteration of the internet ushered in yet another era to see the story as it unfolds, connect and share in the stories of others, and begin to write the story ourselves. At the time of this writing, the lynchings captured on postcards 100 years ago are now animated in the palm of our hands. This visibility is felt in the body. For once we see the line of the bleeding edge, we are compelled to act.
Practicing in Public Speaks and Designs the Future
If we accept the premise that racism and inequity are a part of the design of our American systems and our own stories, then we can also accept our own responsibility to be the champions of that redesign. We are the designers. As the giants of the civil rights movement transition to the ancestral plane, they leave us work to do. Our healing and equity plans have to be more intentional and intelligent than the forces working to separate us. Our plans have to attend to spiritual and emotional intimacy, acknowledge anti-Blackness, and respect the current existence of our separation. Our plans need an intelligence that designs ways for us to come together across lines of difference and learn the competencies of civility that cannot be practiced in private.
Public organizations are inherently political spaces that take on the political will of the dominant culture. That means, that until we collectively reckon and heal, we will continue to bear witness to the blood-letting of supremacy. We have no choice but to redesign and reconstrue both our private and public spaces as racial healing spaces where all bodies can learn to move together, heal together, and learn together. This is not an easy feat for we have inherited the habits of segregation, reinforced by the geographic organization of property, the elevation of property rights over human rights, and its intertwined relationship with wealth accumulation. For too many of us, the incentives to stay proximate to the most marginalized and the suffering at the margins are just not there. However, we do think that we can transcend the barrier of incentive and design new ways to practice being community, progress on the journey, and share and distribute resources. This is where web 3.0 and its technologies can help us live and practice the future we want today.
The rhyme of history reminds us that some of the lessons learned and practiced in the segregated schools of the south can inform our imagination of a new learning ecosystem that seizes collectively its injustice, unapologetically messages that all bodies, especially black bodies and lives matter, by removing experiences of marginalization, and creates ways to learn the cultural codes, of all, instead of teaching the code of one. Getting to this new education ecosystem will require educators, leaders, teachers, and students to emerge as healed designers with the authority to co-design and co-create learning spaces and relationships, prove their commitment to justice, equity, and learning, and practice re-distributing resources to those most affected. It will require actors in the ecosystem to work together and be led by those in marginalized communities and prioritize the learning, skills, and competencies that make our learning spaces as free as possible.
Equity work remains the work of our time and while we have made progress with some policies and procedures to promote inclusion we still have work left to do in and with our bodies, our hearts, and our minds. This movement needs a studio—one that allows spaces to practice new relationships with ourselves and design new relationships with others. In the spirit of equitable design, practicing in public, we offer the following three integrated learning studios that can help us speak the future, design the future, and live the future we want today. This is where we see Web 3.0 technologies being that studio and playing an instrumental role in prototyping the new relationships that can help us learn more about the requisites needed to scale and design equity ourselves and our systems. We still imagine a world where every child in America learns and works in a place that acknowledges their racial identity, prepares them to lead and participate in our economy and democracy, and repairs and restores relationships that keep us divided. We imagine a world where leaders in America co-design and co-create bespoke and equitable learning experiences with their communities. We imagine an ecosystem where networks of leaders support each other in designing innovative and equitable learning cultures and schools that enable every child to develop and share their gifts. We imagine a national ecosystem with certified leaders who are able to lead across lines of difference and school communities that can be galvanized to design equitable policies and practices. We imagine our schools to reemerge as defiant, brave, healing spaces where personhood is protected, fortified, and nurtured.
This world we deserve is obstructed by several dilemmas, three of which will center our work. The first is the need for socially immersive, imaginative, interactive brave space for us to practice healing, building, and designing in community. The need for an Immersive Brave Space becomes more urgent as the distance between threatens the health of the Public Body. We need a persistent space to come together that transcends borders and our conceptions of space and allow us to design the next reality. But we all have to get ready to travel and a map to help us stay the course. The second challenge, Harriet's Dilemma: Finding True North is shorthand for the need for willing and committed people to be able to start, continue, pause, and progress on their journey. As we move on our journey, we will need an ecosystem of safehouses along the way to heal and restore. Furthermore, the learning of the journey—equity literacies—requires the same elevation of other professional learning standards. The persistent marginalization and lack of substantiation of these literacies simply acknowledges our neglect of the common good, our satisfaction with the ill health of the Public Body and its component private bodies. The final dilemma reimagines those on the journey to be able to fund and fuel their journey. We explore the democratization of philanthropy and how educators can reimagine themselves as equity philanthropists funding the necessary innovations that can accelerate our repair, our healing, and our collective restoration.
Learning Studio 1: Immersive Brave Space—Unbounded, Interactive Learning in the Metaverse
How might we animate the Public Body?
As we all emerge from the pandemic, schools and organizations are engaging in aggressive and informed responses to 21st century economic demands, equity, and cultural needs. The need to innovate is palpable. There is a strong need to move differently.
The ability to create an innovative and equitable culture lives with school leadership. Improvement, design, or innovation efforts at the school level begin and end with leadership. However, the analog technologies of segregation have effectively created lines that have defined our cultural habits and relationships. Uniting our political body requires us to learn how to share space together without fear of othering, violence, or harm. But the resilience of boundaries and lines dividing us make it hard. We miss out on valuable opportunities to learn together. Web 3.0 technologies hold tremendous potential and promise to transcend traditional boundaries that keep us divided and separated.
This need is greater now than ever before. The legislative burden blocking books and anti-racist education is falling on the backs of the systems teaching those most marginalized students. Cultural competence is a job requirement, but leaders and teachers still need ways to learn and practice being equitable centered in a lower risk, lower stakes environment.
They need ways and spaces to talk freely, plan boldly, and organize equitably. Yet still, students need ways to learn the content and skills and that will prepare them to design our multicultural, inclusive democracy. As school district automonies around equity and justice literacies becomes more and more restricted, teachers and leaders on the journey still need ways to be in community, become developed professionals, continue to collaborate and share and create rich learning experiences in ways that leverage economies of grace and scale. With immersive, interactive, and unbounded learning experiences in virtual reality, we can practice living the future we want today.
The metaverse—a collection and connection of virtual worlds that provide experiences that are social, immersive, and interactive— holds unprecedented promise to provide an unbounded and immersive learning experience that could allow children, teachers, and leaders to learn together, irrespective of their geography. Equity literacies can become embedded and integrated into the learning experience. Imagine a learning environment that is immersive and interactive where teachers and students from all over the country and world could upskill in equity literacies, practice in lower risk environments, get feedback, resources, and tools, and most importantly create new relationships virtually online that can be practiced offline in the material world. This is not only probable, it is possible with the Metaverse and Web 3.0 technologies.
Learning Studio 2: Harriet's Dilemma: Finding True North
How might we substantiate our learning, document our journey, and share our growth?
Equity literacies are 21st century competencies—required for all of us to fully participate and design schools, communities, and a democracy where we all are seen, heard, and loved. This learning is at risk of marginalization once again. The need for an articulate equity ecosystem that integrates the brilliant work being led by women and men of color is greater now than ever before. We believe that this learning is the propelling force to a multicultural, multiracial democracy where the most marginalized and excluded experience a life of visibility and dignity.
The 21st century workforce can deconstruct oppressive hierarchies and design for the obsolescence of oppression by prioritizing first the needs of the most historically marginalized. This requires the future of work to take hold of this American promise and reimagine all employees as equity centered designers. It creates intentional space for people in the democracy and economy. But this only happens when supremacy in any and all forms is seen as incompatible with an organization's goals and one’s professional competence. Thus, professionals in all arenas would benefit from consistent, ongoing learning and innovative ways to mark progress on the journey. Urgency and haste without consistency and endurance creates ephemeral understanding. The reimagining of equity literacies as 21st century competencies that begin in adolescence and continue through adulthood for the entire workforce beyond the education sector could have lasting benefit for all.
However, without portable credentials and learner records that have been substantiated with transparent learning targets, objectives, and skills and tasks organizational leaders don’t have evidence that can help them see their colleagues' collective commitment to their own journey. Too often, the ethos of a “racist body is being better than nobody” is employed in hiring practices, and while staffing shortages are a real experience, leaders still need ways to assess competency and commitment to equity literacies. Furthermore, for colleagues early on their journey or just starting, leaders need lower cost, personalized ways to up-skill equity literacies on the job and ways to assess progress and completion.
We are learning more about this problem by launching a digital wallet with immutable credentials that live on the blockchain. These credentials are held in a wallet that can hold not only equity credentials from the 228 Accelerator, but any credential in the equity ecosystem that signals continued professional learning in this learner domain.
Blockchain technology can help us create meaningful documentation of our equity work that enables ideas to move from performance to practice, and help us support all learners on their journey to become more equitable, more competent professionals. We can no longer acquiesce to the demands and influence of literate racists or oppressors—the people who demonstrated mastery in the calcified world of the past, seek to reproduce it in the present, because they are fearful of learning new skills and competencies needed for the future. Moreover, with an organized education ecosystem reoriented to healing the Public body, we can tactically see redundancy and strengths in the current ecosystem, spaces and bridges for innovation, and relics of the legacy system. Learning is the antidote to ignorance. Redundancy in relics reinforce oppression. Repetition and practice in new skills at the edges of our identity enable greater flexibility. We were born to move. And we were born to move together.
This is personal and private work and since we are in a relationship with each other, we need ways to share our private journey publicly. And in sharing the public journey, our collective practice becomes transparent. It matters not that mastery is achieved in the first attempt. We have generations of accumulated traumas, unbeneficial ways of relating to ourselves, and others stored in bodies, our conscious minds, and our unconscious minds. The belief in process as a product suggests that consistent, well instructed routine practice over time creates the transformation needed for a more equitable world. Assessing the commitment to the process keeps the door open for everyone to practice being better together. Personally managed, immutable micro-credentials give all professional learners the ability to tell their own transformational story of the journey with evidence, challenging stable hegemonic discourses of performance.
Learning Studio 3: Learn to Repair, Learn to Redistribute, and Learn to Heal
Easing the Healing. How might we decolonize wealth, learn to repair, learn to redistribute, and learn to heal?
Equity work and justice work in a culture supremacist in its origin can feel Sysphian at times. Progress feels ephemeral. Exhaustion feels eternal. While there is joy in resistance, staying engaged when it's hard requires more than pats on the back. Especially, in a political climate where threats to the body are the weapons of choice.
This creates a culture of fear that may not only just silence our most innovative and equitable teachers and leaders, it could be their exit ticket out of the profession. As equity learning and training becomes increasingly criminalized and the funding pipelines to incentivize this learning are constricted, we will need new ways to incentivize this incredibly important work, ease financial hardship that might come for courageous and persistent leaders, and invest in new innovations inspired by educators for educators to accelerate and scale equity.
Money creates space to think, keep educators in the classroom and engage in the resistance. But how do we move and redistribute financial healing without reinforcing existing power dynamics that are typically associated with centralized philanthropy? How might we streamline diligence processes knowing that the commitment to designing for equity, evidence of past commitment, and the promise of a new innovation mitigates risk? Educators and leaders' commitment to work of equityXdesign justifies the bet, the risk, and sound investment in the equitable future. As Eduardo Villaneva minds us, when money is not hoarded, and we employ ancient and indeginous wisdom to guide our design and creation processes, it emerges as a healing agent. What can be when the people doing the work become the philanthropists that fund and fuel the work?
Decentralized Autonomous organizations (DAOs) provide visibility into how an automated, autonomous, educator led fund could accelerate and sustain equity work in classrooms, community centers, and any other physical space reimagined as a healing space. Membership and enfranchisement is meted by only one's will to learn and practice. Digital badges and earned microcredentials proxy this desire and will. The architecture that would enable educators to fund, fuel, and fan educator design. It should be noted again that the educator’s authority to distribute healing funds is arbitrated by the educator's commitment to their own healing, creating symmetry in process and product and in both the material and immaterial. The redesigned relationship between the funder and the funded is created in process flow shown below:
As mentioned before, the work of healing the Public Body requires regular, consistent, thoughtful therapies, not rushed, urgent, and spasmodic reactions. This new innovative organization led by equity centered designers and equity centered educators creates the structure to incentivize the creation of more tools, learning experiences, and resources. We can create products together that scale equity. The reinvestment of earned revenue into the Public Body provides the much needed nourishment for our collective innovative thinking, dreaming, and designing. We can put ourselves back together again.
Why this? Why now?
The work to an equitable future is through the messiness. The messiness is in each of us and healing requires integrating multiple ways of knowing including those traditionally evidenced but and those embodied and experienced. This new future requires new spaces to practice new relationships. This new future requires fuel and nourishment to maintain its health and wholeness.
Getting there is both a private journey and a Public journey. It requires us to interrogate the stories we were told about who we are, and when they challenge who we aspire to be, have the courage to abandon them and write new stories. It will require us to challenge the lines that have created our comfortable senses of belonging that we have called custom and tradition. At the private level, it means that we practice mercy, compassion, and forgiveness with ourselves. At the relational level, it means we practice mercy, compassion, and forgiveness with others. It means we heal to design. Moving our national ideals to reality we require beautiful and healing contributions from the healers, thinkers, teachers, and leaders and all of us to create and design the tools and experience that will accelerate our progress towards a more equitable, interdependent and whole society.
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