Codesigning Opportunity: Researching and Creating Youth Pathways in a Regional Learning Network

• In Event: Pathways, Trajectories, Ecologies, Oh My! Bridging Theories and Methods for Studying Youth Learning Lives

Abstract

In this paper, we describe how a “design-research partnership” (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013) with a regional learning network led to insights into how youth are pursuing interest-driven informal learning opportunities within an urban geography. We share further how these contextualized findings have driven the design of supports that can better connect the constellation of afterschool opportunities made available to youth in this network. Our research site is the Hive NYC Learning Network, a city-wide community of after school institutions including museums, libraries, colleges and community-based organizations that collaborate on creating innovative learning experiences for youth. The Hive NYC network was conceived in part as an interconnected learning ecology that could support youth as they explored and developed personal interests and identities over time and aims to embody principles of Connected Learning (Ito, et al., 2013) in its work with young people, focusing on production-centered pedagogies, fueled by youth interests, and powered through peer learning and collaboration.

A core goal of Hive Research Lab is to help the network understand, and help it create, opportunities for youth to follow their interests along trajectories of mastery. In order to do so, we conduct basic research on Hive NYC youth participation patterns via surveys and youth case studies. We bring this data, along with lessons from the literature on interest-driven learning (Edelson, & Joseph, 2004; Hidi & Renninger, 2006), motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000), learning ecologies (Barron, 2004, 2006; Bronfenbrenner, 2009) and youth identities (Holland, 2001; Moje & Luke, 2009) among others, to the table as we engage in a co-design process to support youth pathways within the network. In thinking about facilitating such a process, we looked to emerging trends within the design-based research (DBR; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003) community, specifically design-based implementation research (DBIR; Penuel et al., 2011), and research-practice partnerships (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). DBIR has developed methods that are particularly suited to addressing theoretical issues related to implementation of interventions at large scale within educational networks and communities, a category that the Hive NYC network falls into. And the nature of the network as somewhat decentralized meant that models such as research-practice partnerships that focus on collaborative co-design on the levels of districts and networks were ideal approaches.

Here, we present the results of one “design cycle” that Hive Research Lab engaged in with network stakeholders. We describe the process we underwent to (1) jointly define “persistent problems of practice” (Penuel et al., 2011, p. 332) within the network concerning the development of youth trajectories and pathways within the Hive NYC network (Santo & Ching, 2012), (2) lead network members in a collaborative design process that led to the creation of program- and network-level interventions to help young people find personally meaningful pathways and trajectories towards greater mastery and technical fluency, and (3) examine how implementation of such interventions reveals theoretically interesting findings relevant to the learning sciences, youth development, institutional change and organizational learning. We will also discuss the opportunities and challenges of conducting network-level design experiments.

Authors

• Dixie Ching, New York University

• Rafi Santo, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Christopher Hoadley, New York University

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington