Leveraging alignments between core tenants of conceptual change, critical pedagogy, and design, a learning design framework – Design for Critical Conceptual Change (DC3) – helps educators and instructional designers can engage learners in conceptual change processes in order to become agentic empowered learners who are authors of knowledge, self, and their world. This framework uses the design thinking process model, principles of designerly ways of knowing, and principles of constructionist learning to provide structure for operationalization of principles of conceptual change and critical pedagogy.