Design Thinking: Using Persona Profiles to Gain Empathy & Understanding

Persona Profiles are instrumental to gaining empathy & understanding: Luma & Stanford's d-school offer exceptional resources to help teachers begin to use the principles of design thinking in the classroom.

After sharing a few classroom artifacts via Twitter, I was asked to post a few of my lessons in which I used these principles of design thinking in our Cultural Literacy classroom. One of my favorite examples of using design thinking strategies from this first semester of teaching at Holy Family Academy is the 1930s Great Depression Persona Profile project. 

Our Cultural Literacy students studied aspects of American society in the 1930s. This included learning about the "Alphabet Soup of the Works Progress Administration" and reading Clifford Odettes' groundbreaking play, Waiting for Lefty. 

Props to my partner in crime and co-conspirator, Ms. Ro Vigilante for bringing Lefty into our world--tremendously insightful view of life in the 1930s and labor demonstrations integral for ensuring the rights of workers everywhere.

Stakeholder Map - This is the "low-resolution" starting point for our project. We began by thinking of different types of people who would be affected by the economic hardships of The Great Depression. It became evident that the damage inflicted upon American citizens crossed boundaries of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Everyone was caught-up in the wake of this economic crisis that swept the nation and broader global community.

Demo - WPA Employee: Zora Neale Hurston, Federal Writer's Project

(I taught Zora's "How It Feels To Be Colored Me" for six years as an AP Lang & Comp teacher... I just had to honor her spirit! What an inspiration.)

Demo - Average American Woman

Students really needed to consider factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, geography and other social circumstances as they pertained to 1930s American life. Talk about digging into serious social implications of "who we are" and "where we are from".

Student Produced Persona Profiles - The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

Domzy, Mason & Tyrell (The Mayor) created dynamic persona profiles to examine the WPA's affect upon a community in Texas. To achieve their objective, they needed to know information about the mission of the CCC and they had to create a stakeholder map identifying the individuals whom would be affected by this WPA program.

We created an Animoto video as a trailer to inspire other classrooms to try using the principles of human centered design and design thinking in education. Warning: the jazz flute in this video is powerful.

I want to thank #dtk12chat, #BFC530 & #remakelearning for connecting me to a global network of educator-innovators. We are passionate about reforming education: to educate this generation of students for the innovation age. It begins with stoking the fires of learning. 

Our Persona Profiles sparked student curiosity about what it meant to live in the 1930s... How life was radically different for individuals based upon their class, gender, race, ethnicity and other social demographics. It was a tremendous opportunity for growth.

Digital media resources, such as the Depression-Era cartoon "Confidence: Starring FDR & Oswald the Lucky Rabbit", helped my students to connect with a topic as big as the Great Depression. Additionally, this video sparked an intriguing discussion on how cartoons are a perfect medium to convey complex ideas for a wide audience. Children and adults of any age can get something out of the subtle and overt messages within this cartoon from 1933. It is an exemplar text for primary source analysis.

The template for the lesson was designed using Google Apps for Education. This prototype is my first iteration of the project--so, it is nice starting point, but definitely a work in progress. Please pass along your adaptations and ideas for improvement. 

-Enjoy!

-1930s Depression Era Persona Profile Template