Food insecurity in Kenya. Clean water access in Thailand. Workforce development in the US. LBTQ+ safety in Ghana. These are some of the problems that students in the Master’s of Development Practice program at Berkeley aim to work on. Realizing that systems thinking methodologies could add some structure to how students were conceptualizing and addressing such complex issues, I worked with Sara Beckman and Nadar Abdelrazik to design an elective course on systems thinking particularly focused on issues of global development. The following semester I worked with the program director, George Scharffenberger, to build the curriculum into the core seminar that all students new to the program have to enroll in. At the same time, we designed a series of systems skills workshops that would be offered to students in subsequent semesters with the goal of having systems modeling becoming a key tool used to guide students’ capstone projects.

Teaching // Systems Thinking // Design Education

Partners: Master’s of Development Practice Program at UC Berkeley