Q&A with Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of Design for Change (Part 1)

By Daniel Mucinskas

Design for Change is an international movement dedicated to providing students with the tools and knowledge to shape the world for a better and more sustainable future. Over the past several years, the Good Project and Design for Change have partnered to support one another’s complementary missions and perform assessment of the impact of the Design for Change curriculum. We recently spoke with founder Kiran Bir Sethi about the organization’s 2015 Be the Change conference, aspirations for the future, and the role of teachers in spreading Design for Change’s messages. Part 1 of an edited version of the conversation is below.

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Q: How was this year’s Be the Change conference, which took place from September 25-26, 2015, in Mexico?

A: The conference was a global meeting that brought together all of our partners from many different countries. We developed the groundwork for furthering Design for Change’s global initiatives, and we also viewed exemplary student projects that have had a positive social impact.

Q: What were some of the unique and memorable projects you saw at the conference this year?

A: What was really interesting was where all the projects were coming from. For me, the highlight was that projects were submitted from the remotest parts of different countries. For instance, in Brazil, we received projects from the Amazon. Cases like this are a reaffirmation that Design for Change’s particular framework—Feel, Imagine, Do, Share—is tangible for all children. By using the same four steps, students can create change in their communities.

All kinds of stories were shared at the celebration, ranging from simple dog adoption projects to the construction of a mini-plane that plants seeds across great distances for growing crops or reforesting. There were projects dealing with urban issues like traffic and a couple of stories on bullying and inclusive schools. Overall, a really interesting range of ideas was presented, and because we were in Mexico (for the first time celebrating outside of India), it was very exciting to see so many stories from Mexico as well. The conference cut across demographics, geography, and languages to give these children a platform to demonstrate their “I Can” superpowers to change the world.

Q: Will the conference now be in a new country each year?

A: Yes, that is our intention. We really want the Be the Change conference to capture the full flavor of our global movement. We began in India to get the event rolling, keeping student work as our focal point. We have two countries bidding for next year’s the event. All the partners who attend will get to see a different cultural context and also witness how much Design for Change is growing.

Q: What do you think the role of teachers will be in the expansion of Design for Change?

A: Everything we want to achieve must eventually involve teachers, since children in most countries must attend formal schooling. I’m not sure if or when that will change and a new form of education, but Design for Change is of course still working on partnerships with teachers to demonstrate that empathy, ethics, excellence, and elevation are important subjects to teach in addition to the more typical subjects. We need to get away from “either/or” thinking about character education and more typical subject education. Curricula usually make space for content of character to be taught, and I think Design for Change fits right into that niche.

I’m hopeful that as we make the right noises with the right partners, we get more traction within education and society as a whole. Our responsibility is to continue to create conditions where people start taking these issues seriously.

Q: What are the long-term plans for Design for Change?

A: We will be continuing everything that we have been doing so far, and we will build new partnerships and add new voices. We want to take a global standpoint and show the world that Design for Change resonates with all children. Secondly, beyond breadth and expansion, we want to have a deep impact. Finally, we also leave time and space for more organic interactions: if a need or opportunity arises, we will take advantage of it. Currently our priority is to strengthen our global community and incorporate more voices.

You can find our more about Design for Change at their website by clicking here.

Read Part 2 of our conversation, in which Kiran shares her thoughts about the Design for Change curriculum and the importance of empowering children to make good ethical decisions.

Responding to “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict”

I’ve been very pleased—and, to be frank, happily surprised—by the large number of public and personal responses to my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” Initially, I thought that I would write a single omnibus essay, commenting succinctly on the various points that have been raised. But by virtue of the number and variety of comments, I realized that a single response would either ignore many of the points or dwarf the original essay in length! Instead, I have posted a series of blogs, each directed to a single issue or a closely related set of issues.

Here’s the outline of posts:

Posting #1 What Are Professions, and Where Do They Come From?
Posting #2 What’s Good and What’s Bad about the Professions as Currently Constituted?
Posting #3 What’s Confusing about the Professions?
Posting #4 Disruption #1: Markets
Posting #5 Disruption #2: Digital Technology
Posting #6 Revisiting the Arguments of Richard and Daniel Susskind
Posting #7 Disaggregating the Professions: Comments on the Law
Posting #8 Disaggregating the Professions: General Comments
Posting #9 A Global (as Opposed to American) Perspective
Posting #10 Next Steps, Including Positive Resolutions

Often my postings include direct responses to points made by commentators. In the spirit of a blog (as opposed to a scholarly paper), I do not cite specific comments or references but acknowledge the individuals whose comments were particularly germane to that blog. Apologies if I miss any names.

I welcome additional comments on this series of postings and may address these additional comments in future postings. I hope that, taken together, the original essay, responses, and postings will function as a text on the nature of the professions, their current challenges, and their future course.

What Are Professions, and Where Do They Come From?

Origins: The professions as we know them in the contemporary world have existed for more than a century; in the United States, we might say that “progressivism ushered in professionalism.” But the professions were preceded a millennium ago by guilds—collections of tradesmen. As re-invented guilds, professions exhibit some of the positive characteristics of their predecessors (high quality work, solidarity, and an ethical core of service) as well as some more negative traits (secrecy, exclusivity, tribalism, and aversion to competition). Once training for the professions became the province of institutions of higher learning, credentialing became more public; but until the last half century, access to the professions remained largely restricted to certain demographic groups (chiefly white, male, and of Christian and Anglo-Saxon background).

Defining Characteristics: Professions are generally defined in terms of several characteristics. To begin with, provision of standard training leads to certification of competence and, typically, an accepted title (e.g. Doctor, Professor, Esquire). It is assumed that professionals will embody a core set of ethical values (e.g. the Hippocratic Oath) and will transmit these values to younger aspiring professionals. Professionals are expected to deal with complex technical and ethical issues under conditions of uncertainty and to do so in a disinterested way. Their accredited status provides legal recourse to individuals who have been ill-served by a certified professional; it also allows the launching of procedures against individuals who have claimed credentials which they have not actually earned.

It is useful to distinguish these defining characteristics from features identified with the role of the professional: kind personal relations, a wise person (sometimes called a trustee) to whom one can turn, a good member of the community, one who embraces an ideology of service. In my framing essay, I lamented the apparent waning of these desirable attributes.  In the next blog, I critique the professions as they are currently constituted.

Thanks to commentators Pat Barry, Steve Brint, Stephen Gardner, Jason Mitchell, and Dennis Thompson.

This is the first in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

The Varieties of Disinterestedness: Who should judge the judges?

For over a decade, my friend Judge Mark Wolf, of the Federal District Court in Boston, has presided over a dauntingly difficult case. Gary Lee Sampson, a white male with a long history of crime, was accused of murdering three people over the course of a week. Though the death penalty is against Massachusetts law (and indeed is opposed by most citizens of Massachusetts), it is considered to be valid in the Federal Courts. In 2003, Sampson was tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. Appeals of the death penalty take a long time, and even if the sentence is upheld, it typically takes a decade or more until the convicted killer is executed.

The appeal process was unfolding when it emerged, in 2008, that one of the jurors on the original trial panel had lied extensively during the empaneling process. Accordingly, Judge Wolf ordered a new trial.  The trial was scheduled to begin in September 2015. However, before that date, the prosecution filed a motion asking Judge Wolf to recuse himself from the proceedings. The reason for the request: in the summer of 2014, Judge Wolf had moderated a discussion of a documentary that was critical of conditions in American prisons. While moderating a panel about a domestic issue is a valid and indeed often recommended process for a judge, it turned out that one of the panelists might have been subsequently called as a witness for the defense in the trial.

In a 114-page decision, Judge Wolf reviewed the situation and, as befits any thoughtful jurist, discussed many requests for recusal in previous cases. In the end, he elected not to recuse himself from the case. I found his decision convincing.

In reflecting on this unusual case, I realized that it embodied several discrete instances of the notion of ‘disinterestedness’—a key concept in the professions. Despite its odd derivation, disinterestedness does not mean ‘lack of interest’; it denotes the capacity to put aside one’s own interests and inclinations and to make a decision based on the merits of a case.

It can be argued that lawyers in criminal cases—prosecutors and defenders—are mandated to defend the interests of their clients (in this case, the state and the accused, respectively). That is why we need to have juries and judges—individuals who are presumed to be able to put prejudices and pre-judgments aside and think as objectively as possible about the facts as they are discovered and presented in the courtroom. The juror in the original trial had described herself inaccurately, and so it was assumed that she was not disinterested—hence, the retrial of the case.

But I want to delineate here three other connotations of disinterestedness relevant to this situation:

1. The judge. Like all human beings, the judge has his or her own interests and causes, but he or she cannot carry out the role of judge properly if those interests are allowed to color judgments. Judge Wolf argued that his involvement in a panel discussion did not constitute grounds for recusal.

2. The hypothetical ‘reasonable citizen.’ According to statutes, a judge should only recuse himself if a ‘reasonable citizen’ would have cause to conclude that the behavior in question had the appearance of a conflict of interest. Most of Judge Wolf’s reasoning as spelled out in his lengthy decision entailed an attempt to put himself in the shoes of a reasonable citizen.

3. A friend of the judge. As I stated at the opening of this blog, I (and my family) have long been friends of the Judge and his family. And so, in writing a blog like this, it is reasonable to ask whether I can be disinterested, or whether, consciously or not, I will bias my account in favor of the Judge and his decision in the capital case.

Which of us can be truly described as disinterested? And under what circumstances? Who decides? And what happens if the ideal of disinterestedness vanishes?

Postscript: In early January 2016, after this blog was drafted, Judge Wolf decided to step down from the case. He cited competing commitments and the heavy workload of a death penalty trial with its potential appeals.

Additional reading:

–“In Defense of Disinterestedness in the Digital Era,” The Professional Ethicist blog, The Good Project

–“Reclaiming Disinterestedness in the Digital Era,” in From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age (2015: University of Chicago Press), eds. Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

Too Much Talk about Skills and Very Little Talk About Virtues

By Tatiana Rodriguez Leal

I recently realized how uncommon it is to talk about virtues in education and work settings. Skills, not virtues, seem to be quite the protagonist. In my own life, skills are what I have in mind when I am designing the learning objectives of the courses that I teach, and virtues rarely make it into the syllabus. Skills, not virtues, are what I am expected to discuss when writing my self-evaluation as a doctoral student. Skill-development, not virtue, is why my employers have ever paid me. I wonder what the world would look like if, at school and at the workplace, we spoke more, or at least the same amount, about virtues as we do about skills.

Let me tell you how I came to think about virtues and contrast them to skills. I am currently researching how senior managers deal with misalignment of values as their work changes. In my conversations with participants in the study, I noticed that they talked much about skills. Creating better alignment among workers within new work requirements seemed to demand better influencing, commercial, and leadership skills. It’s natural, I thought, that if managers need to adapt to new and changing demands in their work, they have to work on their skills. But I then came across the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. His discussion of virtues made me question the pervasiveness of a skilled-focus narrative among the participants in the study as well as in my roles as a student, a teacher, and an employee.

The abundance of explicit skill-talk and the absence of explicit virtue-talk is not just something that my interviewees and I happen to share. In education, skills are more than a buzz word. At a policy level, it is commonly argued that the right skill-set in a country translates into a stronger economy. Reputable educational initiatives such as the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, OECD’s PISA, and ministries of education across the globe explicitly mention skills time and again. The hype around skills also continues at the workplace. The last time I checked, Harvard Business Review had already published eight digital articles with the word ‘skill’ in the title during 2015, and not one with the word virtue since 2013. Managers strategize how to improve the skills of their staff and evaluate their own skills in their annual development plan. Updating and renewing one’s skills has become a life-long necessity, and employers invest millions trying to improve the skill set of their workforces.

But what is the relationship between skills and virtues? A genuine virtue, according to MacIntyre’s definition, should meet three conditions: 1) it allows us to achieve excellence in the practices in which we engage; 2) it contributes to our quest for a life worth living; and 3) it contributes to the quest for the best in society. These conditions mirror the three Es of Good Work: excellence, engagement, and ethics. The problem with a focus only on skills is that emphasis is placed on excellence alone, and engagement and ethics are often overlooked. A skilled pianist, a skilled chess player, and a skilled software developer can all achieve excellence in their practices. Yet being an excellent pianist, a chess champion, or creating an innovative app does not necessarily mean that these people will find their work to be meaningful or that they are ethical in their practice of that work. So there is only so far a skill can take you.

It’s not that virtuous behaviors receive no attention. Leadership and management articles are saturated with arguments as to why it is no longer enough that doctors are good in the operating room, civil engineers know how to design structures, or managers are able to improve efficiency. These professionals also need to be good with people. The same publications also offer advice and strategies on empathizing with colleagues, being more open-minded, or becoming a better communicator. But instead of speaking of ethics or virtues, these abilities are referred to as “people skills” or “soft skills” that make for more cozy working environments, better negotiators and sales-people, and bigger bottom lines. When virtues gain relevance only for their instrumentality towards a limited definition of excellence, and when one is otherwise selfish and uninterested in the common good, they are not virtues any longer. These quasi-virtues become nothing more than tools to close deals, enhance productivity, and bring about higher performance reviews. It suffices to walk down the business aisle of a bookstore to find that title after title of the books on the shelves offer advice on how to influence, negotiate, network, and manage through soft skills. Some of these flashy and well-designed book jackets may even teach the art of manipulation under the banner of “people skills” and sugar coat it with promises of performance, happiness, fulfillment, and success. With these ideas to guide us, the successful student remains the one who just gets good grades and a successful professional the one with good performance reviews.

The focus on skills has distracted us from talking about the higher notion of virtue. When they are remembered at all, virtues are referred to as old-fashioned, and those who engage with the topic of virtues feel compelled to make a case as to why they continue to swim against the stream (see Howard Gardner’s Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed). While skills remain crucial to achieving excellence, only virtues can lead to socially responsible and meaningful acts. By not recognising virtues as central to education and human development, the possibility of doing Good Work suffers. Neil Postman questions what the end of education is, and David Perkins invites us to reflect on what is worth learning. The end of education should be to develop virtuous citizens, and the practice of virtues is something worth learning.

Let’s stop shying away from the virtue-talk and make it the center of our educational curricula and workplaces. Virtues, like skills, allow us to achieve excellence in the practices in which we engage. But unlike most undirected skills, virtues contribute to the life worth living and the quest for the best for society.

References:

Framework for 21st Century Learning – P21. (n.d.). [Web page]. Retrieved from www.p21.org: http://www.p21.org/about-us/p21-framework. Accessed 09/03/2015.
MacIntyre, A. (2013). After virtue: A study in moral theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Perkins, D. (2014). Future wise : Educating our children for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Postman, N. (1996). The end of education : Redefining the value of school. New York: Vintage. Retrieved from Amazon.