Our Process
Here’s how we prepared ourselves and engaged in the work of gathering stories that provide compelling evidence of the need for systemic change in STEM and how digital fabrication and making are game-changers in creating equity. In order to go out and do this work, it was important to look within. We essentially asked: how do we as a collaborative and in our respective organizations assure we have equity within our workspaces and ways of operating? Unpacking the answers led to the body of work you see here on this site.
Let’s walk through how we engaged in this work and some of the tools and resources that may be helpful for you to do the same.
AORTA
Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA) conducted workshops to help us further understand the concept of equity especially as it centers around race. This stage of the process helped the members to look at essential questions about equity, themselves, and what we intended to impact in communities and how.
Foregrounding the Black feminist lens of intersectionality, we took a critical look at who we are in relationship to each other, the communities we serve, our goals for the work, and the assumptions and biases we hold that potentially impact how they engage with those in the field including their primary constituents. In other words, we looked at ourselves, the institutions, and how we are complicit or affirm inequities.
Committing to becoming a transforming agent in the STEM field through digital fabrication and making, we were encouraged to do the following:
- Use an equity lens when adopting or reviewing any policy and practice.
- Map our current decision-making process to understand where there were opportunities for openness and transparency
- Establish a Theory of Change that articulates why and how our work will result in systemic change within the digital fabrication and maker ed fields
Post our AORTA work we were seeking additional opportunities for applied learning to address some of the issues uncovered during our workshops. Storytelling and the ability for us to shape, uncover, and tell the stories of the communities we are serving rose to the top.
Storytelling as a Tool for Equity: Our Commitment
Better informed about who we are and our motives and potential blindspots, FBC committed to amplifying individual’s stories to the work that had the potential to change hearts and minds thus policies and practices around the importance of digital fabrication and making to changing STEM education and careers. Because who doesn’t love a good story? Moreover, a good story has the power to shift mindsets.
Stories for millennia have been a way to document experiences and to teach, so equity storytelling was the tool chosen for improving equity in our work. But, how? It seems easy, but there are important considerations in play, so we invested in an Equity as a Tool for Storytelling Workshop series to build the skills and tools needed to conduct our work with fidelity and equity.
Here’s the work we did!
Storytelling as a Tool for Equity Workshops I and II.
Two workshops were held to address the necessary interview skills and questioning technique for equity storytelling–What did we value, want to accomplish, what did they know about their interviewee. Therefore, during the first workshop, participants planned their first assignments–to interview two individuals at your organization. This modeled their belief in applied learning, a value FBC prioritized for its learning.
The workshop included five key features:
- Grounding equity storytelling with our why
- Building a framework for conducting equity interviews
- Planning the interview
- Conducting the interviews
- Post Interview Reflection
You can read about each of these features here.