Over the past year, Bodenhamer fellow Hannah Gray, a fifth-year architecture major in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, served on an executive committee for a student outreach organization called Freedom by Design, which has developed Design Toward Justice, a coloring and activity book for middle school students. Through multiple activities, the book introduces important vocabulary, notable designers and works of architecture that aim to educate young students about social and racial inequity, as well as ways to advocate for and work toward justice.
1. When it comes to creating a book like this, what is the process? There are five executive members on the Freedom by Design committee: Kayla Ho, Stone Taylor, Lauren Miller, Ryan Harris, Ben Ebbesmeyer and me. We each took a leadership role and led a group of students. First, we thought about what a coloring book might be and who it might serve. I think our first goal was narrowing down who was going to use it.
Based on some input from John Folan [head of Department of Architecture], who came from Carnegie Mellon and was one of the founders of Freedom by Design, as well as some of our community members, we decided on the 10- to 12-year-old range because students that age can comprehend and start thinking about these ideas and read about them— we didn’t want it to just be visually-based. Once we’d decided on a target age range, we divided the groups into five different types of activities— a buildable activity group, a “copy an image” activity group, a coloring activity group, a puzzles group and a comic strip group.
Over the summer of 2020, we’d meet about once a week if we were able to and everyone would bring their ideas. As designers, we all have a particular skill set. We’d use Illustrator and Photoshop and other similar programs to complete work in our own time and then bring it together to discuss. It was a very awesome collaborative process. Everyone was very open to criticism, maybe even more so than we are with our work in school, but eventually we needed to start getting feedback from outside our group because none of us are educators. We really had no experience with kids, and we didn’t how this would be received by kids.
John helped us reach out to the Thaden School in Bentonville. We were able to meet with teachers there who gave us a lot of really great feedback, and we started meeting with others in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, including Charlene Johnson, Lewatis McNeal, and Freddie Bowles. [Respectively, associate professor of curriculum and instruction, assistant dean for administration and diversity, and BAT program liaison and program director for Master of Arts in Teaching.]
2. How did students respond to the book? We haven’t been with the students to see their response, but the teachers did integrate our activities in their curriculum. It was really funny to read the students’ feedback— the teachers wrote it down word for word, and it ranged from things like, “you should change this word,” or “you should change this picture,” to very complimentary feedback, like when they enjoyed a particular activity more than others or wished there were more of a particular activity
3. What issues in particular does the book touch on, and how did you decide? The goal of this project, from the perspective of the designers, was to focus on issues of racial injustice through the lens of design and the design field in particular, which is very limited in its diversity, especially in the state of Arkansas. I think our goal was to empower younger students to know that they can become designers. We wanted to help them understand what the design field really is and to know the power that design has to affect daily life. It’s a power that’s often overlooked, even by practicing architects, but we recognize it’s our responsibility to educate younger students who are still exploring what they want to do in their lives.
We looked at a wide range of minority designers doing great work, not limited to architects, but artists as well. We also looked at differently built projects that aim to empower or touch upon the history of a lot of different communities.
4. Did you get any input from designers or artists of color, or groups that work for social justice? Yes. Within the architecture school, we have a very active organization called NOMA, the National Organization of Minority Architects. We heard their perspectives and tried to get as much feedback from them as possible.
5. What is your ultimate goal for this project? Are you looking to publish? To sell? Our goal with this isn’t monetary. The only thing that we’ve discussed is if we’re going to print it ourselves— that would obviously cost money, and we’ve looked into getting donors. As of right now, we’ve been sending it out as a PDF to teachers and administrators, who can print it themselves and get the supplies for things like the buildable activities.
The end goal— we’ve talked about getting it embedded within the Arkansas School District curriculum. It’s an initiative that I really think is important for all students in all areas because we do recognize that the diversity in Northwest Arkansas is limited and the ideal audience we want this to empower could be elsewhere. We tried really hard not to limit it to the Northwest Arkansas region— this could be sent to and used anywhere, and it would be awesome to reach school districts in other states too.
I think John is committed to continuing this project, and he’s been really great about putting it out to other communities within the architecture field. There’s a lot of excitement starting to generate, which is exciting.