What is Design for Good in the Classroom?

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As artist, visual arts educator and designer Travis Sevilla teaches it, it’s a project-based curriculum that makes a difference.

Travis shows Canyon Crest Academy students, grades nine through twelve, how to start with design thinking.  Projects combine the STEAM disciplines–science, technology, engineering, art and math.  Under Travis’s guidance,  his students use these skills to create a solution to a problem or a needed resource for a community.

Past projects have included the Guanabara Bay Project,  and Everybody’s Mobility.  For the Guanabara Bay Project, groups of students designed “superhero” characters to raise awareness of the problem of water pollution.  Everybody’s Mobility, according to Travis’s teacher website, challenged the students to create branding for a family-owned local company which creates mobility devices for a wide range of clients.

And at California STEAM Symposium 2019, Travis was showing fellow educators how to implement Design for Good in the Classroom in their arts curricula.  His goal, he says, is to help more educators implement the program.

We talked about Travis’s work as both an educator and an artist, his favorite resources and some of the projects he and and his class have created.

On this edition of Over Coffee®, you will hear:

• How Travis first discovered his passion for art;

•  How he first became involved in teaching STEAM concepts in the course of his work as a visual-art teacher;

• Some of the design projects through which he has guided his students;

• One of the biggest challenges he and his class navigated–and one of his favorite triumphs;

• His advice to fellow educators, on implementing a Design for Good in the Classroom curriculum;

• Travis’ recommendations for favorite resources for fellow educators;

• How to support teachers and schools offering Design for Good in the Classroom curricula;

• Where Travis would like to take his program next (and how fellow educators can find out more!);

• A new forthcoming resource for educators (and a program to note, in the future!)

• What Travis has been painting (and the story behind his unique series of paintings!)

• Some of his favorite sources for “recharging” his creativity;

• One of the best lessons Travis himself has learned (and shared with his students), over the past few years;