Education and Justice at SxSW

I am at South by Southwest EDU and am pleased to see core issues regarding equity in education getting even greater attention than years past. In a panel on how the city of Pittsburgh has reinvented its approach to education system innovation in Remake Learning, the audience questions focused on the issue of relevance and justice: how can we innovate education in ways that achieve justice and buy-in from all quarters of society? At precisely the same time period, another panel challenged the assertion of “Code for All,” proposing that we care about an answer first to the question: “Code for What” and that the answer lies in coding for local rights, for local justice. This is education with heart and mission, and I am pleased to see that the mainstream discourse on educational innovation is no longer focused on tech development for tech’s sake, but rather on the very project-centered approaches to education being tilted toward authentic social impact- not years in the future, but here and now. Going micro-local, and hewing toward true issues of justice that pervade all manners of our communities, from urban to suburban to rural, constitutes the only way I see to make education engaging for all, and equitable across the board, if we work at this for enough years without pause.