University of Virginia Darden Business School Nancy Gonsalez

of  1 2 Design Thinking for Innovation

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Jose Luis Llamas

November 22, 2020

Storytelling Applied as Design Thinking Tool to Solve a Challenge:

Monocultural v Bicultural Education

Challenge.

A school always is a place for debates and difficult, challenging decisions.

Imagine a school where, there is many stakeholders all with different goals:  the  teachers, the upper administration, the parents, the regulations that must be complied  with and the main stakeholder, the student whose opinion is, in general, the least  considered.  Now, let’s add an additional issue:  In schools with a high population of  English Language Learners, like Bandung Institute of Technology in Texas, a Dual Language Enrichment  (DLE) model is offered.  Unfortunately this program can be declined by the parents, now  that they are in the U.S.  This model is only offered up to 5th grade.  Although the  bicultural benefits have been extensively demonstrated, still some parents insist in their  children attending “English only schooling”.  The challenge is to demonstrate the  parents how the DLE model, a bicultural education approach can benefit their  student(s).

Scholars

Teachers

School Administration

District Leadership

Parents State and national

regulations and laws

University of Virginia Darden Business School Nancy Gonsalez

of  2 2 Design Thinking for Innovation

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Jose Luis Llamas

November 22, 2020

Selected Tool:  Storytelling.

We believe storytelling is the perfect tool to overcome this challenge.  Storytelling

results will  establish a trusted relationship which gives access to the listener of a  message paying more attention to the emitter of that message, given some conditions.

Application.

Commonalities like their language -most parents speak only Spanish-, the place

they were born, their experience as migrants, etc.  Storytelling in this case has involved  sharing my experience as a bicultural immigrant student myself, if I know the location  they are from or if I have been there, the kind of food we like and eat, how I became an  immigrant, how knowing two languages helped me gain a better job in the U.S., etc.   This empathic approach has been very successful in the parents being not only more  understanding of the situation but also a better student-teacher relationship which  facilitates the learning process.  This approach went beyond its initial goals of showing  the parents that a bicultural education could be the best choice for their child and having  an impactful effect the whole school year.

Insight gain.

Storytelling is a powerful tool, however, this fact is not as evident as when the

tool is applied and the behaviors and performance of the scholars  both all along and at  the end of the school year come back and are analyzed.  At least for me, who have an  engineering background, the first approach is number oriented not people focused.

Approach.

The more you do Storytelling, the better results you obtain, with decreasing

benefits the more time it is done.  Unfortunately, teachers have limited time and  sometimes around 100 students divided in four sections.  “Problem pupils” can take up  much more time than the average student.  So I would not change the tool, instead I  would further refine the current tool to the particular configuration of the unique set of  variables a given school year deals us.

