Every Child Can - A Conversation with Kiran Bir Sethi

With the recent release of her book 'Every Child Can: Riverside School's Design-Led Approach to Empower Children', the wonderful Kiran Bir Sethi is joining us again on the podcast this week.

Kiran Bir Sethi⁠ is a designer who became a teacher, a principal who grew into an education reformer and subsequently morphed into a social entrepreneur. A trained graphic designer from the National Institute of Design, she comfortably uses the language of design – iteration, prototype, design specs – to develop not only curriculum innovation, but also community-based social programmes.

Kiran founded the award winning ⁠Riverside School⁠ in Ahmedabad, India, in 2001. Riverside, is viewed as a laboratory to prototype design processes that uses a systems approach to build a culture of empowerment, graduating young citizen leaders with an ‘I CAN Mindset’ – using their agency for the greater good. Riverside won the T4 Education 'World's Best School Prize' for innovation in 2023: https://t4.education/worlds-best-school-prizes/the-five-prizes/innovation/.

In 2009, Kiran launched ⁠Design for Change⁠ which uses a simple 4 step design framework – FIDS (Feel, Imagine, Do, Share) to cultivate the I CAN mind-set in all children. Today, DFC is the world's largest movement of change - of and by children, and is in 60+ countries—impacting over 2.2 million children and 65,000 Teachers.

Kiran is a judge for the prestigious YIDAN Prize and a Visiting Global Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2019, she was awarded the Earth Prize in Luino, Italy, the Lexus Design Award for 2019, in Pune, India, and DFC has been recognised man times as one of the 100 most innovative educational programmes in the world by HundrED.org.

Social Links

Instagram: @kiranbirsethi - https://www.instagram.com/kiranbirsethi/

Twitter: ⁠@kiranbirsethi⁠ - https://twitter.com/kiranbirsethi

LinkedIn: ⁠@kiranbirsethi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiranbirsethi/