Participatory Design for Remix and Emergence in Professional Learning

• In Event: From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching: Toward a New Vision of Digital Literacy Teacher Education

Abstract

We will share the social composing practices (Stornaiuolo, 2013) of educators engaged in an openly networked learning collaboration built on notions of production-centered participatory networks (Jenkins, 2006). The collaboration was designed to allow for teachers’ interest-driven pathways to emerge as teachers engaged in co-producing a “living curriculum” (Roth, 2013)—as opposed to the replication of existing forms as is common in professional development.

While many learning organizations have designed curricular happenings with end-users in mind, few have engaged in processes of participatory design that engage a critical number of those users in the negotiation of the curricular happening itself. This contemporary understanding of participatory design recognizes the human and non-human actors (bodies, technologies, objects, etc.) under an “infrastructuring strategy” (Bjögvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012) that is intentionally fragmentary, incomplete, and unspecified, allowing for the possibility of new configurations of the learning environment to emerge. Thus, the infrastructuring strategy was a professional learning “event-in-the-making” (Roth, 2013).

To better understand how this unfolded, data were collected during two intensive month-long summer cycles across multiple online platforms. To date, it is estimated that 2950 educators have opted in as participants, composing and distributing compositions using Twitter (n=27743 tweets ), a Google+ Community (n=2521 members), a Facebook Group (n=239 members), and personal websites (n=156 submitted to feed). Drawing from visual rhetorical circulation methods (Farman, 2012) by way of an digital collaborative, interactive visual mapping tool, we analyzed the relationships between participants’ makes and posts through a transliteracies framework (Author, 2017); i.e. looking for emergence across varied scales of activity, resonance among artifacts and ideas, and participants’ uptake of each other’s work and ideas.

By attending to participants’ transliteracies across the openly networked, production-centered community, we were able to parse out distinct mobilities that characterized remix in their learning processes (Authors, 2016). These mobilities revealed remix as an iterative, collaborative, critical practice that reshaped not just individual artifacts, but the processes and power hierarchies of the professional learning itself. By encouraging remix as an iterative, collaborative practice, and displacing modes of content delivery typical of professional learning, we glimpse transformative possibilities for openly networked web-mediated professional learning.

Following Grabil (2001) and Spinuzzi (2005), we discuss how organizers of an open, networked learning collaboration used participatory design as method to: 1) surface and interrogate tacit and explicit knowledges about learning through play; 2) promote ongoing iteration through making and remix practices that operate across socio-material domains; and 3) enable reflexive collaboration to blur boundaries between participants and designers, affording the co-construction of a shared space. Moving learning into online spaces is an opportunity to expand communities of learners; however, we cannot simply move work online without considering the implications of replicating offline inequities (Watkins & Shor, 2013). What we have found is that when we bring connected learning principles in designing educators’ professional learning--learning as interest and production driven, peer-supported and academically-oriented--we begin to see how such inequities might be shifted by allowing for co-construction of the open spaces themselves (Seely-Brown, Shah, & Schmidt, 2013).

Authors

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University

• Stephanie West-Puckett, East Carolina University

• Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project