Building How Stanford Teaches Dialogue, Conflict, and Social Change
To design curriculum, assessment, and facilitator training that prepare learners to think, talk, and act across difference.
Timeline
Jan 2023 - July 2024
Role
Learning Experience Designer
Business Goal
The IBIC (Inclusion, Belonging and Intergroup Communication) Office is Stanford's hub for intergroup dialogue programming, serving hundreds of students annually through courses, certificate programs, residential life training, and community workshops. There was no systematic evaluation infrastructure, no conflict literacy framework, and no scalable design methodology connecting IBIC's various programs. Each offering operated in isolation, with facilitation quality varying by instructor and no shared competency model undergirding the work. IBIC needed someone who could evaluate what existed, design what came next, and build the connective tissue between programs.
Problem Statement
Evaluation of Psych 103 across two quarters (~100 students, 65-69% response rate) revealed that while 67% of students reported high learning gains, the course structure was producing unmanaged harm during identity-based discussions, emotional exhaustion among students and teaching staff, insufficient scaffolding before high-stakes vulnerability, over-reliance on a single pedagogical format (fishbowls), and no mechanism for students to translate dialogue skills beyond the classroom. Adjacent programs, including a PhD certificate program and residential life training, had no design thinking methodology and no shared language for conflict. There was no assessment tool, no facilitation guide, and no way to track whether learners were developing conflict literacy across any of IBIC's offerings.
Solution
Embedded within Stanford’s IBIC Office as a Learning Experience Designer reporting to the Director across an 18-month engagement.
Evaluation and needs analysis. Designed and led a mixed-methods evaluation of the predecessor course using aggregated course evaluations (n=106), mid-quarter TA feedback, summative teaching team reflections, semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and original master's research. Conducted a thematic analysis that surfaced five actionable findings across facilitation quality, learner safety, scaffolding gaps, pedagogical range, and emotional load. These findings became the design requirements for every subsequent deliverable, ensuring each design decision was traceable to evidence.
Curriculum architecture. Co-designed LEAD 152 (Dialogue Lab) from the ground up as a 3-unit, 10-week course with a mandatory half-day retreat. Authored the full UbD foundation: underlying assumptions, enduring understandings, essential questions, weekly learning outcomes, and session-level guiding questions. Designed all three unit assignments (autoethnography, multimedia dialogue project, praxis reflection essay), the scaffolded peer-to-peer conversation structure across three escalating topics, mid-unit reflections, community charter framework, participation rubrics, and the reading and media selections for every week.
Assessment design and competency framework. Built IBIC's first conflict literacy framework with 10 Core Competencies for the office's context. For each competency, I wrote learner-facing descriptions, facilitator application guidance, and curriculum integration mapping. Designed a competency-based assessment tool with four deployment modes: learner self-assessment (pre/post or periodic), facilitator self-evaluation, curriculum audit (checking competency coverage across a lesson plan), and team-level professional development diagnostic. Developed an adapted Learning Zone Model introducing self-regulation, compassionate calling-in, and danger zone constructs, serving as both a learner-facing teaching tool and a facilitator decision-making guide for real-time session management.
Facilitator enablement and workshop design (PhD certificate program). For the CCC&AOP (Certificate in Critical Consciousness & Anti-Oppressive Praxis) a three-session design thinking workshop sequence was designed to teach participants to scope community-based praxis projects. All sessions include complete facilitator guides, worked examples, printable templates, and timing breakdowns designed for facilitators with no prior design thinking experience to pick up and run without additional training.
Learning experience design (cross-program). Designed dozens of original learning activities spanning multiple formats, modalities, and programs (three of which are linked as artifacts on the left). Examples include: a Figma-designed interactive module on cognitive distortions using progressive scenario reveals and illustrated flashcards; an emotional investment lesson plan built around an original dialogue case study with an interactive emotional journey mapping activity; a 90-minute community stroll workshop for rapid prototyping of zero-cost civic micro-interventions; and a speculative futures exercise where learners create newspaper headlines from 2040 to envision the future of student activism. Each activity includes facilitator scripts, timing guides, discussion prompts, and accessibility options.