Teaching UX/UI to Women and Refugees at ReDI School

2022-present
Mentoring, teaching, curriculum development

ReDI School of Digital Integration is a non-profit tech school providing migrants and marginalized locals free and equitable access to digital education. I have taught 8 cohorts of the UX UI Intermediate course in Berlin.

ReDI School is aimed at mainly refugees and people with forced migration background, and the students are largely women. Many are attending the course in their second or third language, and come from various professional backgrounds.

My contributions

The most visible work is showing up to each lesson: leading, explaining without jargon, keeping the students engaged whether in person or on Zoom. Over 8 cohorts, I have also played a key role in developing the curriculum. Each semester, the teaching team identifies gaps and I have taken lead on filling several. These are based on student feedback, questions, and our own professional opinion on what is the most relevant development in the field right now. Here are the ones I have gotten most positive feedback on.

Student need:
“As a student and aspiring product designer, I don’t only want to learn the perfect double diamond process - I want to understand what designers do day-to-day at their jobs.”

Hypothesis:
”If we, as teachers, show some examples of what we did that week at work and give the students an opportunity to ask questions, they will have a more realistic understanding of what the work looks like. Not the best and most interesting work, but also the basic, day-to-day work.”

Student need:
“As a student and aspiring product designer, I need to understand how to use AI in design processes, while still learning the craft.”

Hypothesis:
”If we introduce AI-powered prototyping to the curriculum, we will give students better tools in the current job market, but we also need to stay critical of letting AI do the design work and get in the way of learning.”

IMPACT

These 2 curriculum developments: teacher’s corner (my name for the new section where teachers share their work) and AI prototyping have both been very positively received. With both of these new sections in lessons, we often run into the positive problem of “too many questions”. The topics spark lots of curiosity in students, as it opens up new topics that are not covered by the classic double diamond process that is normally taught.

Teacher’s corner is a students favorite - one of the feedbacks I have received several time is “can we have this every week?”. The students were often before asking us “how does this work in a real company?”, when we taught new concepts. Now we actually have a space to show those examples with screens shots, to exemplify how we use the processes we teach, and most importantly, why and where we don’t use the whole process. The discussion is a lot more realistic when we share the constraints we work with, the decisions made and the real artefacts.

AI prototyping is a fairly recent addition and evolves with the tools. By my initiative, this section has been permanently added to the lesson where we teach prototyping. The lesson now encompasses both the more traditional way of creating connections between screens on Figma, and using Figma make to create an AI-powered prototype. The lesson also includes discussion about how and why we teach both. It is important for us to bring the discussion back to AI being a tool, and having it replace design process, craft and judgement fully.

Going forward

Teaching and mentoring is something I enjoy and it keeps me engaged in the field and brings me constant new inspiration, which keeps me returning to each semester. Our students come from very diverse backgrounds, and their project ideas are something I look forward to seeing and feedbacking on - I learn so much from them too. Being a part of the ReDI School teaching team genuinely makes an impact in the world, and showing up to teach on Saturdays in my free time is a great joy.