Care.er
Jessica A. Artiles is a design thinking integration strategist that brings her background in traditional design and making to the space of complex systems, like schools, start-up incubators, and banks. She takes a natural inclination to the early phases of the design process and gets most excited with clear examples of how design research pays off.
After obtaining her Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, Jessica continued on at MIT to receive her Dual Masters in Mechanical Engineering and in the Technology and Policy Program. In her graduate thesis, she researched how design thinking can be taught to non-designers in order to innovate in large systems and developed the methodology behind The DesignShops. Now, she's done DesignShops all over world and continues to spread the love for "design with a small d" as a way to impact education and other "wicked" systems. As Curriculum Designer for EXPLOStudio, Jessica was in charge of designing student experiences in the classroom and building capacity in teachers when she got hooked on wondering, more critically, about the role of exploration in our ever-transforming human condition.
All around proud of her Cuban heritage, Jess is a street-made salsa dancer always ready to meet new people, learn from their stories, and think about big ideas.
In her first blog, she'll write about the kinds of things she connects every day. From word play in the perspective of a former ESL student to the engineering principles that guide society's relationships, follow her through her discovery and efforts to make the world a better place.
Teaching & Education Philosophies
I am a product of the Miami-Dade Public School System. In high school, I went to school board meetings and presented on the effects of extending to an 8-period schedule.
My mother is a school teacher that's suffered under the injustices of a system not designed for its users. During dinner conversations, the nightly topic featured my mother's limitations and frustrations, and the occasional praise of the one thing that was working.
In Spring 2014 I completed the MIT Teaching and Learning Lab's Teacher Certification Program. For this program, I wrote my first ever Teaching Philosophy Statement. I look forward to editing this with time, as my experience within the field harpens. An excerpt of that statement, below:
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
—Sir Isaac Newton
When philosophy meets practice
I believe that as a teacher, one should spend time constructing and innovating new types of learning experiences. I believe as developing teachers we have a responsibility to our students to surround ourselves with the best possible mentors, and inherit their lessons. The most extraordinary teacher in my 17 years of schooling came my very last year, as a senior, in the senior capstone design class of the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT. His name is Professor Wallace— David, to be exact— and when I later found out of his many awards in teaching innovation, I could understand why. One year later I commenced my graduate studies and was lucky to have him as an advisor. And so my learning from him began, and my mental note-taking of every tidbit of philosophy I could gather whenever we conversed. My teaching philosophy for in and out of the classroom learning greatly builds on the philosophies I’ve learned from his mentorship, having experienced them as a student, and having implemented them myself in classrooms in Colombia, India, and the U.S. Below I extract a few of these lessons and their implications for my teaching recipes.
