The 2024-25 Student Leadership Design Institute will provide student teams an opportunity to participate in a design challenge that allows them to draw upon their own experiences and observations to create team solutions that address critical issues that impact today’s high school students, their families, or community members.
Each year, the planning team identifies a design challenge with student team leaders. Teens today are very aware of global challenges that play out locally in their own communities, Education, Housing, Criminal Justice, Poverty, Pollution, Sickness & Disease, Gender Inequality, Decent Work Opportunities and Economic Growth. They may have experienced one or more of these challenges in their own lives or know peers, family, or community members who live with these challenges every day. They have developed perspectives and points of view as well as ideas that can inform adults who make decisions about schools and in the community. Student voices offer powerful insights into these challenges.
Teams will explore innovative approaches that can help their schools and communities to become more locally responsive to one or more of the identified challenges. During the Design Institute activities both virtual and onsite in the high schools, student leadership teams determine how they can help create local solutions and take action to address critical challenges. The Institute process engages all participants as bold and imaginative leaders who are committed to improving their schools and their communities through design.
Teams will participate in a design challenge together at their high school and share solutions with students from different high schools. The main purpose of the design challenge is to give students a chance to engage in design process activities that allow them to investigate for themselves solutions to challenges and issues that high school students observe locally in their own communities. Each team will be facilitated by a student leader who has participated in brief training synchronously or asynchronously prior to the conference Institute.
Although faculty advisors will support each team onsite at the high school and at the Institute (as a way of ensuring participation in a supportive environment), design time will be entirely student-driven, giving all students the chance to listen to, learn from, motivate, and inspire each other as they explore the questions and problems that are important to them. Student teams will have ample time to share their experiences and collaborate with other students in coming up with creative, new approaches to issues faced by their communities and pinpoint ways to communicate their solutions to adults who are decision makers.