Spotlight on Georgetown University’s Red House
Georgetown University’s Red House, founded in 2013, serves as a curricular and educational R&D unit focused on transformative education. Through its projects, the Red House designs and implements innovative classes, programs, and initiatives that respond to the challenges facing higher education while also aiming to effectively and equitably benefit our students and society.
Our programs are designed to offer students hands-on experience in real-world challenge contexts.
For over 10 years, the Red House has offered a signature course “University as a Design Problem”. Each semester, students take on a problem area in higher education and apply design thinking to create, shape, and inform new models of learning that are implemented by the Red House. In the 2020-2021 academic year, students were asked to imagine what an environmental education should focus on in order to best prepare students to engage with the complex challenges of the climate crisis and associated environmental issues for the Earth Commons, Georgetown’s institute for environment and sustainability. Student work, including course designs, integrative assessments, and frameworks, went on to inform many elements of the newly launched Joint Environment and Sustainability Program at Georgetown.
Other recent Red House projects have focused on scaling transformative experiences and paradigms for higher education to impact more students.
For example, the Red House team helped design the Capitol Applied Learning Labs (CALL), an immersive downtown experiential semester at Georgetown’s Capitol Campus, where students learn, live, and intern in the heart of Washington, DC.
Students participate in the Wellbeing Program.
Additionally, as part of a multiyear collaboration with the Europe-based Wellbeing Project, the Red House has developed a new framework connecting intergenerational trauma, wellbeing, and its impact on social change work as a way to better prepare our students for the future change they will make on the world.
To learn more, visit the Red House LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/red-house-5642b1264/
Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
