School Culture and Values in Pandemic Realities

In a three-week HCD Immersive experience, MICA’s MA in Social Design department partnered with City Neighbors Hamilton to explore how we could improve their school culture. A charter school in a neighborhood in Baltimore, CNH already had a thriving and meaningful school culture, which prioritized and supported it’s students first and foremost. However, over the course of the pandemic, some of what had made CNH great was starting to fray. Our class was asked to break into four teams to focus on four constituents to explore how this school culture could be improved. My team was focused on the Board.

︎ City Neighbors Hamilton

︎ Center for Social Design
︎ Design Research, Design Strategy

︎ September - October 2021

What does it mean to “CNH” for the Board?

Research

After being introduced to the project, our teams visited the school. We were allowed to walk the whole property, observe classrooms, and be immersed in the space. We met many smiling faces and people overall encouraged to be talking with us. We loosely followed a schedule of planned interviews and spoke with various teachers, administration, and a teacher liaison for the board. Our group attended a board meeting and scheduled interviews with board members in small groups. At CNH, all board members are also parents of the school.

Credits:
Course Instructors: Annemarie Spitz, Pickett Slater Harrington, Thomas Gardner
Team: Allyson Kim & Elizabeth Emmett

Synthesis

From there, we gathered all of the data from our interviews and observations and began pulling out themes. We recognized several patterns and began writing insights and opportunities for three of them.

Opportunities

︎ How might we better integrate and live out our DEI goals within the CNH culture?

︎ How might we reconnect parents to the heart of CNH culture within the realities of Covid-19?

︎ How might we restructure systems of support and communications to value all staff while remaining student centered?

Ideation

We then went around and brainstormed as teams for each group’s opportunity questions. We worked to develop a diversity of ideas, and then we collated those ideas into groups.

Prototyping & Implementation

We focused on the HMW which felt most relevant and chose three ideas, one for each of our team to develop a low-fidelity prototype. We met with designers from the other teams to discuss them and get feedback.

How might we reconnect parents to the heart of CNH culture within the realities of COVID-19?

We then went back to CNH to discuss our ideas with those in the community. Each of our ideas developed dramatically throughout the day as we spoke to each person. For example, we discussed the prospect of having an outdoor space for parents and board members to meet. While there, a staff member recommended an unused area which could also combine our other idea of a community garden, and a few teachers remarked how the space would fulfill a need for an outdoor eating space for them to eat lunch away from the kids.

We further tested our prototypes in a Zoom meeting with board members and got more insights on how they could be improved. From there, we developed higher-fidelity prototypes. Finally, we presented our findings to the school leadership for them to develop and implement.