Description: Medical educators are often tasked with addressing overwhelmingly complex problems: burnout, mistreatment, inequity, mistrust — to name a few. Design justice provides principles and practices for addressing these challenges in ways that center community voices, prioritize impact over intentions, and build sustainable change. Rather than positioning educators as sole experts, design justice recognizes the expertise of learners, patients, and communities who are directly affected by our educational decisions. This session will explore how design justice can transform how we approach problems in medical education, highlighting lessons learned from applying design justice across multiple training programs.
Learning Objectives:
- Define key terms: design, design-based research, and design justice, and the relevance of each term to medical education.
- Formulate critical reflective questions for medical education scholarship prompted by design justice.
Invited Speaker: Hannah Kakara Anderson, MBA
Bio: Hannah Kakara Anderson, PhD, MBA, is an Instructor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads research on educational equity. Her work defines educational equity as not only the restoration of equality for historically marginalized groups but also going beyond equality to proactively build systems that ensure just treatment, access, and opportunities for a diverse society.
Hannah has pioneered the application of justice-oriented assessment (originally developed in K-12 educational research), demonstrating how inequity can be fundamentally woven into the design of assessments in medical education and how inequity can be perpetuated and replicated by seemingly neutral learning environments. To address these inequities, she is leading a multisite design-based research project, Designing for Equity in Medical Education, where she works alongside pediatric residents, patients, faculty, and staff to redesign effective, more equitable assessments at five children’s hospitals across the U.S.
Hannah is the founder of the Learning Design Collective, dedicated to helping clinicians, educators, and scientists apply design thinking to address complex challenges in healthcare.
Scheduling Note: The Center for Faculty Excellence strives to avoid scheduling conflicts, though some overlap may occur. Most virtual programs are recorded, so please register to receive the recording and any follow-up materials if you are unable to attend live. The CFE follows the GW holiday calendar and does not schedule programming on university-recognized holidays and observances.