case studies
Baker-Butler Elementary School
National Award for Closing Achievement Gaps
at Baker-Butler Elementary School
_mpathic design’s pedagogy was employed with Baker-Butler administrators and teachers to bring design-thinking principles into elementary classrooms. The result: in early 2020, Baker-Butler was awarded a National Blue-Ribbon School Award by the U.S. Department of Education, one of four schools in Virginia to receive the Blue Ribbon Program’s Exemplary Award for Closing Achievement Gaps.
It is the first time a Virginia school has been awarded this honor for success in closing achievement gaps between a school’s overall student population and English language learners, special education students and students from economically disadvantaged homes.
Seth Kennard, Baker-Butler’s Principal, described it as a project-based learning approach emphasizing not just the answer to a problem, but the process of getting that answer. Kennard credits the approach as a big part of the success that led to the recent award.
Dr. Steve Saunders, former Principal, who led the school during the project, “Our partnership at Baker-Butler was foundational to our staff becoming innovative, flexible and creative problem-solvers.”
Increasing Minority Enrollment and Awareness
at UVA’s School of Architecture
At the University of Virginia School of Architecture, founding partner Elgin Cleckley has served as co-chair of the Inclusion + Equity committee. As UVA Architecture Dean Ila Berman said, due to Professor Cleckley’s leadership, “the committee and School is not simply about including people of varied backgrounds, identities and experiences, but rather of committing itself to the sustained, critical rethinking of our institutional policies, practices, structures, and culture.”
Elgin’s work at the UVA School of Architecture was central to the new Inclusion + Equity Plan, which outlines a series of measurable goals and a broader vision for the School.
Elgin was project director of Project Pipeline, which was a major driver of the plan’s recruitment efforts and helped UVA increase matriculating Black graduate students by over 200% in a few short years. This project was led by colleagues, stakeholders, and the UVA Equity Center.
To do this work, the School built a broad coalition of partners and stakeholders, both inside and outside the university, who are now more invested in and aware of UVA’s student recruitment priorities. This process created a connection between the school’s aspired values and its ability to consistently live up to those values. In this way, design thinking problem solving techniques helped create sustainable, long-term practices to employ across the School.
The Trace, Since Parkland
Mosaic hosted a two-day workshop with all staff to establish reporting priorities and strategies. Stakeholder interviews, mapping exercises, and pattern recognition led to renewed focus on national impact and audience diversification.
As a result, The Trace:
1. Built consensus across all staff on its long-term goals and pathways to impact.
2. Designed a mission-centric workflow for project development.
3. Created norms and processes for honest, ongoing dialogue.
Ultimately, The Trace improved its ability to identify and prioritize projects with the highest potential for impact, leading to Since Parkland, an award-winning national collaborative project.
The project rested on the newsroom’s ability to create a coalition of more than 300 professional and student journalists. Ultimately this piece was featured on the front page of over 30 local newspapers nationwide, reaching ten million readers.
Iblue//black: an exhibition
A seminar of multidisciplinary students from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Carter G. Woodson Institute, and the Buckingham County African American Historical Society created design proposals for the Birth site of Carter G. Woodson in Buckingham County, Virginia. Woodson was an educator, author, and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History). Students primarily dedicated the semester to project research, programming, and schematic development directly with stakeholders.
Through stakeholder interviews, site visits, and design charettes, students conceived of a physical space to honor the personhood and contextual history of an important but poorly understood figure. Design features include a “Woodson’s Wheel,” a teaching circle with a podium, lending library, and a built-in orientation device to help visitors connect Woodson’s accomplishments with the physical surroundings of his birth.