Designing for Liberation: A Case Study in Antiracism Instructional Design

Abstract

While grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing racialized, anti-Black violence, uprisings around the nation have launched anti-racism into popular consciousness and discourse. In higher education, many statements of solidarity with Black lives have been made with few structural changes offered or enacted. This essay positions instructional design as a material act that extends the organizing logic of education to learners and students (Harney and Moten, 2013) and offers anti-racism as a multimodal framework for instructional design centered upon dismantling the organizing logics of white supremacy and building liberatory possibilities, especially for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). The essay directs these questions and concerns to a case study, the Creative Discovery Fellows program (CDF) at U.C. Berkeley.