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Taylor Your Life: a Life Design + Changemaking curriculum

Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Tulane University was the first school in the country to mandate service-learning for all students.  For more than a decade since the storm, students with an interest in social impact are drawn to the University, eager to make a difference through community engagement and learn how they can align academic interests with their desire to help affect change.

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While students with an interest in social impact are drawn to Tulane, when asked what field they specifically want to enter or how they want to make an impact, most are at a complete loss.

The Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking was founded in 2014 to help students identify their changemaking path. Through human centered design classes and workshops, we teach students, faculty, staff, and community members how to address problems optimistically, creatively, and quickly while turning them into inspiring “challenges”.

 

Enter the “lightbulb moment” when Taylor’s then Program Manager Julia Lang read “Designing Your Life,” and all the puzzle pieces began to come together.  She thought: how might we use a design thinking approach to help students explore and develop a changemaking, professional pathway? 

 

Taylor Your Life

Lang dove headfirst into research and eventually created a five-week program (1.5 hrs/week) that drew on best practices and current trends in innovative career development curriculum, including: Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans, 2016); How to Get Any Job (Asher, 2011); How to Land Your Dream Job Right Out of College by Networking Like A Rockstar (Patel, 2014); Radical Acceptance, a mindfulness text (Brach, 2014); The Power Of Meaning (Esfahani-Smith, 2017); You Are a Badass (Sincero, 2013), Net Impact’s Career Development Program for undergraduate and graduate students; the Echoing Green and Ashoka U award winning Transformative Action Institute, which has been used at over 50 campuses including Harvard, Stanford and UCLA, (Sherman, 2015),  and the Ashoka U award winning Work on Purpose curriculum.

 

Lang advertised the 5-week class, Taylor Your Life (TYL), noting she would run the course if a minimum of eight students signed up. To her surprise, 25 students, ranging from first-year to PhD students, jumped to participate in the free, non-credit program and Lang ran two sections in Fall 2016.

 

In Spring 2017, TYL expanded to an 8-week, 1-credit curricular course. That Spring, the Senior Associate Dean for Career Services, Amjad Ayoubi, got wind of the class and asked Lang to train interested advisors and career educators.

 

In Summer 2017, eleven staff members completed a nine-week experiential training where they experienced the curriculum as students, while also learning how to teach future sections of the course. That summer, Lang fleshed out her curriculum making instructor guides and PowerPoints for the entire course, which instructors would use to teach their own sections.

 

In 2017/2018, 13 sections of TYL were offered (12 students/sections), reaching 156 students. Students kept telling their instructors that 8 weeks was not enough and that the workload requested from students surpassed a one-credit class.

 

In Summer 2018, TYL transitioned from a 1-credit to 2-credit course. Lang developed a full online library with resources, guides, and PowerPoints for each class, Taylor hosted a 3-day training with 25 staff to build a pipeline of TYL teachers, and the TYL teaching team began experimenting with class structures, offering:

·       A summer section that met 3x/week for 1.5 hours for 5 weeks

·       A three-hour class that met 1x/week for 7 weeks

·       A 1.25 hour class that met 1x/week for the full semester

·       Two 20-person classes with two instructors (vs 12 students/class in other sections)

·       A course geared for student athletes, taught by the Senior Academic Counselor for the Basketball and Football team.

As of October, 2021, 868 students have completed the Taylor Your Life class at Tulane

 

Taylor Your Tulane for first-year students

With Taylor Your Life going strong, Lang decided to launch a similar but separate class for first-year students, Taylor Your Tulane, in Fall 2019. Since then, 258 students have taken Taylor Your Tulane courses.

 

As Taylor Your Tulane developed and was adapted specifically for student athletes by life design instructor Cornell Sneed, Athletics made it a required course for all incoming student athletes, believing it greatly helps students acclimate to Tulane, learn about campus resources, and dream about their future outside of being a student athlete.

 

In summer 2021, The Center for Academic Equity also piloted the course with all of the students in their incoming Bridge Program, which invites 30 talented scholars over the summer to participate in courses and programming intended to support academic excellence and retention among this cohort in a small class context. These students often identify as students of color, first-generation students, low-income students, LGBTQ+ identifying students, and College Track scholarship recipients. Throughout the summer, participants become familiar with departments and centers across the institution that support student success.

 

Life Design Materials

Since 2017, our life design teaching materials have been free and available to any educator under a Creative Commons license. As of summer 2020, 74 universities around the world have used our Taylor Your Life materials, reaching over 7,500 students beyond Tulane.

 

Educators say:

 

"For students who are not sure what to study, this helps them to design the purpose of their education. The empowerment of this curriculum to show them that they are in control of their studies and future career is the most impactful." -Carolyn Dembowski, Lansing Community College

 

"I really enjoy the "mad libs" activity for exploring career options. This content also helped me to feel empowered to incorporate more elements of life design into my course curriculum instead of jumping straight to the classic content (resume, interview skills, etc.)." -Brighid Scanlon, Temple University

 

"Highlights of the materials: Detail-oriented guidelines to manage facilitation effectively; Seamless flow of topics to deepen understanding and discover learning; HHH mashups & guided visualization (are not a part of Stanford DYL) were particularly powerful; Materials and content are suitable for audiences of varying intellectual rigor." -Rakesh Lazar, SolBridge International Business School

 

Equity + Inclusion

After the murder of George Floyd, Lang and Kathy Davies from Stanford’s Life Design Lab launched the Equity and Inclusion Life Design Working Group . Since July 2020, the group, which represents 20 universities, has been meeting on a monthly basis, with smaller teams collaborating throughout the month to reexamine readings and redesign activities and homework assignments through an equitable and inclusive lens. The group has provided a powerful opportunity to exchange ideas and engage in conversation with folks invested in this kind of work.

 

After a year of inquiry and exploration and thanks in large part to work from the E+I Working Group, in Fall 2020, Lang launched a redesigned Taylor Your Life course.

 

You can learn more about the process of developing materials and the content of the redesigned course here: https://taylor.tulane.edu/2021/05/new-life-design-curriculum/

 

We have learned a lot along the way, including:

  •  The need to diversify our readings and teaching materials and honor the different lived experience of all of our students

    • We removed the central textbook, Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans, 2016), to expose students to many voices and perspectives that represent different world views. Click here for a list of all the new readings, podcasts, and videos that are now integrated throughout the Taylor Your Life course.

  • Changemaking Life Design necessitates identity development

    • Identity is core to how we see the world and how we see ourselves in the context of the world as it relates to work. Our intersecting identities are the foundation upon which we build our understanding of the world and come to find “our place.” Recognizing one’s own intersecting identities and how those come into play are also key in tackling social or environmental issues alongside communities with similar or different identities. Learn more about our philosophy and approach here.

  • It takes a lot of time to scale a program and train instructors. We have had to reposition roles to support the growth of the program: As life design grew on campus, Lang was promoted to Assistant Director of Career Education at Taylor and over half of her role involves training and supporting TYL instructors; selecting, hiring, approving, and overseeing HR functions for part-time career educators; refining the curriculum; monitoring the impact of courses and programs; and teaching. 

    • Beginning in Spring 2022, we will be launching a new onboarding model where interested Tulane staff or faculty will "apprentice" with a seasoned instructor for a semester by serving as a co-instructor in one section of a life design course.

      • Co-instructors will be expected to attend all class sessions and meet regularly with the lead instructor, who would determine to what extent the co-instructor would assist with grading, facilitation, and prep. Participants will receive co-instructor pay for their apprenticeship semester ($1,000 for 1 credit TYT class or $2,000 for 2 credit TYL class).

      • After completing their apprentice semester, participants will become eligible to teach any open section in future semesters (the number of sections offered depends on student demand, so it is not guaranteed that participants will be able to teach every semester moving forward but would become part of the pipeline of instructors teaching life design at Tulane).

      • Participants are also able and welcome to incorporate life design content and/or activities into other aspects of their work on campus (programming, advising, mentoring, etc.)

  • Class Times and Structure

    • A three-hour class is too long.

    • Staff can only teach in the evenings, and this material is best taught in the day when students are more awake and alert.

    • 1 hr 45 mins seems to be the sweet spot.

    • Music is crucial to change the energy of the class

    • Flexible classrooms with furniture on wheels is a must.

  • Diluted student population with scale: In the transition to two-credits, some students began enrolling just for the credits and had no interest in changemaking. As such, we have had to refine our approach and our vision of scaling the program. Our goal is NOT to reach every student at Tulane, but rather to reach as many students as possible who are interested or open to a changemaking professional path.  Adding discussion board posts and pre-readings to orient students to the class has helped students have a better understanding of what the class is before they enroll.

  • Participants must have buy in: the material requires one to be open, curious and vulnerable. We were asked to use this material for what we did not know was a mandatory staff training at another university. When students or professionals are open to the material, it can be transformative but when forced to be there, the material can completely flop. 

  • Most students love the class. Some hate it. All are not used to being asked big, hard questions about meaning and purpose as it directly applies to one’s own professional path.

  • Instructors are “designing” their lives too! Training staff to teach the class has had an unforeseen ripple effect to not only have impact on students’ lives, but also the lives of professional staff. In our trainings, staff experience the curriculum first-hand, applying these mindsets to their own lives, while also gaining experience in the classroom working with students. As one staff member wrote after the summer 2018 training: ““My greatest takeaway is that design thinking can be applied to every area of life, at any age in life…I feel more encouraged and have more clarity about living a more meaningful life rather than simply dreaming about it. It allowed me to think about where I am, where I thought I wanted to go and pursue what I really want to become”

 

So, what’s next for TYL?  

We are:

  • Eager to examine our Taylor Your Tulane course through the same lens as Taylor Your Life in order to make the course more equitable and inclusive.

  • In the process of iterating our TYL4Grads program to better meet the needs of graduate students and deciding if that will be in an online, synchronous or asynchronous format.

  • Excited to pilot our new instructor onboarding model beginning in Spring 2022 to increase the pipeline of qualified life design instructors on campus.

  • In the early stages of creating and finding a donor to support a Life Design Fellows fund. Prototyping is a pillar in all of our design thinking and life design courses and programs, yet students often lack funding to engage in substantial life design prototypes, such as attending a conference in an area of interest to build new connections, or being forced to turn down an exciting but unpaid internship with a social impact organization in order to work a minimum wage job that has no connection to their changemaking interests.  This fund would provide equitable access to life design prototypes so any student can build their network, gain experiences in fields of interest, and open doors to organizations and opportunities that could dramatically impact the rest of their life design journey

Questions? Comments? Reactions?

Please reach out to Professor of Practice & Associate Director of Career Education and Life Design, Julia Lang, at jlang@tulane.edu

Click here for Tulane’s follow-up case study “EMBEDDING IDENTITY AWARENESS AND UNDERSTANDING INTO LIFE DESIGN EDUCATION”