Design thinking provides students with a motivating and engaging learning experience. Through projects that help students learn by experiencing and facing challenges, design thinking accommodates a variety of students' different interests and abilities so that they can focus on growing their own personal initiative. Learning through design thinking helps students develop their personal interests, skills and learning styles; by responding to a variety of different learning styles, students' own personal styles will emerge.
This campaign introduces these ideas to parents who have the ability to encourage the Vancouver School Board to explore and implement the project. The flyers show a diagram that explains design thinking and its relationship to empathy, and states the name of the project Design Thinking for VSB, and the address for the website. Through the website, more can be learned about design thinking, how it benefits learning, how it fits into the goals of the Vancouver School Board, and examples of successful integration of design thinking into other education systems. Using data from the 2016-17 school year from public elementary schools in Vancouver, the map and table of data compare the number of English Language Learners and Indigenous students to the total number of students in each school. By considering the people around us, empathy can begin.
The Vancouver School Board has already acknowledged the importance of arts in education through their policy manual, which states that the value of "the arts as an area where students develop aesthetic sensitivities, intellectual stimulation and self expression through skill attainment in dance, art, music, and drama." They realize that "the arts provide a unique vehicle for perceiving. An arts education program stimulates ideas, thought, language, perceptions, and understanding which are essential to a student's education."
Introducing design thinking to the current elementary curriculum would fit into VSB's existing values and goals for 2021 which are outlined in their Strategic Plan Overview. At the elementary level, children are learning how to live within a world full of people who are all different from one another. By learning in a way that teaches children compassion, empathy and consideration for people other than themselves, a community may be created that will grow to be more accepting and considerate of others as a whole.
