Dr. KIJIMA Rie leads discussions about challenges in
educational equity and inclusion in her undergraduate
course, Education in a Global Context, at theUniversity of Toronto. VIVIAN XIN SHUUSING DESIGN THINKING TO CULTIVATEGLOBAL STEAMLEADERSin a notable change in the participant’s perceptions
towards STEM, a higher level of creative confidence,heightened prosocial tendencies, and an increase in
future aspirations and career options.
Dr. KIJIMA Rie, the co-founder of SKY Laboand assistant professor and Director of Initiative for
Education Policy and Innovation at the Munk Schoolof Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University ofToronto in Canada, mentions that the uniqueness ofSKY Labo activities lies in the utilization of design
thinking to promote STEAM learning. “We wantyouths to think out of the box, explore different
ideas, and work collaboratively in a more humancentered way. That is what we want the youths to takeaway at the end of the workshop,” she says.
Kijima’s focus on education has roots in her own
career: after earning an M.A. at Stanford University,
she worked for the World Bank and was involved
in improving access to education and the learning
outcomes of children and youths living in developing
countries. There, she helped devise monitoring
strategies to ensure that progress can be measured
for various education projects. Upon returning to
Stanford for her Ph.D., she gained more research skills

Dr. KIJIMA Rie and SKY Labo have developed experiential workshops using design thinking
as a pedagogical tool, with the intention of cultivating women STEAM leaders for the global
stage. Girls have a new toolset for changing the world.
Many adolescent girls think of science andtechnology as fields that are far removed from theirown experiences and interests. However, the girls
who participated in a three-day workshop for juniorand senior high school students—conducted by aneducation non-profit organization, SKY Labo—cameaway with stronger interests in the STEAM fields.
This year, SKY Labo collaborated with Kyotango
City, in the northern part of Kyoto Prefecture,
the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Graduate University (OIST), and PwC Japan, aglobal consulting firm, to implement the workshop.
The workshop’s theme this year was sustainability.
Youths were placed in a team of four people and one
design coach (a college or graduate student), theninterviewed “users” (business leaders or university
faculty members) to understand their needs. Eachgroup brainstormed a solution to solve these user’s
needs and created a prototype to visualize theirsolution. They presented the prototype to the users
for feedback, which led to further improvements.
Participants gained first-hand experience of SKY
Labo’s “design-thinking” process that emphasizes
the importance of thinking out of the box, failingforward, and bias towards action.
Today, there is a great need to create more
opportunities for youths to pursue STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in orderto tackle the complex, global challenges our world
faces. SKY Labo aims to cultivate the next generationof women STEAM thinkers by emphasizing theimportance of human inquiry, or the Liberal Arts,
and combining it with STEM. Through rigorous
evidence-based research, they show that this results

Top: Design coaches guide the youths at the workshop. At OIST, a doctoral
student engages and collaborates with them using the human-centeredapproach.
Bottom: Kyotango City in Kyoto Prefecture is a center of the machine-metalindustry in Japan. The students learned about how community leaders in
Kyotango tackled the issue of sustainability in their region and designed
prototypes that meet their needs.

Kijima received a Ph.D. in international
comparative education at Stanford
University. What drives Kijima is the desire
to help girls acquire creative confidence andbreak down the social barriers to studying
the STEAM fields.

and learned about different
theoretical frameworks thathelp us understand issuesof diversity, equity, andinclusion in education.
Driven by a strong desire
to create a bridge connecting
research, practice, and policy
and to address the large gender gap in Japan, Kijima
co-founded SKY Labo in 2016. To date, more than
300 youths have participated in their workshops. At
the OIST workshop mentioned above, for example,
one of the groups tackled the issue of sustainability
and conceptualized the idea of cultivating young
children’s love of nature by building a school under
the sea, surrounded by translucent walls.
“In Japan, there is a narrow and leaky pipeline
into the STEM fields for young girls and women.
Research also shows that young girls in Japan have alower sense of self-efficacy and self-concept, and areless motivated in science and mathematics comparedto their peers in other OECD countries,” Kijima
reflects. “There are various social forces that influence
girls to think that they should not pursue the STEM
fields.” Kijima thinks that we need to create a system
where we empower youths so that they can break
down the barriers to pursuing STEM. This desire,more than anything else, is what motivates Kijima inher efforts.
“Girls who were initially hesitant about voicing
their opinions begin to feel more comfortable
sharing their ideas as they make more progress during
the workshop. Our job is to provide them with
an opportunity to fail forward and to create a safe
learning space for them to imagine what it is like topursue their interests in STEAM,” she says.
Kijima’s message seems to be reaching them. As one
workshop member noted, “The world is so much bigger
than I had ever thought. My greatest takeaway is that
now I think that maybe, I can change the world.”