Methodological Imagination and Improvisation: The Development of Collaborative Epistemic Relations in Participatory Design Research

• In Event: Processes of Partnering: Local Development of Methods to Democratize Knowledge Production in Research on Learning

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the novel practices developed within a long-term participatory design research project to support 1) the shared construction and analysis of ethnographic data across researchers and educators, and 2) the use of ethnographic and interactional analysis (Erickson, 1986; McDermott & Raley, 2011) to deepen the equitable design of learning within the local setting, and beyond (Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014).

Context
The context of our analysis is an afterschool STEAM program, a partnership between a science museum and afterschool centers serving working-class communities in a large urban area. Participants are children, youth educators, and adult educators and researchers, the majority of whom are from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds. STEAM activities were designed to contextualize science in meaningful activity; emphasize play, iteration, and the arts; and support multiple ways of knowing. This project is a partnership between first author (researcher) and second author (program director and lead educator) focused on studying learning and educational equity.

Theoretical Perspectives
Participatory Design Research (PDR) is a design-based methodology that draws from social design experiments (Colleague & Author, 2010), formative interventions (Engeström, 2011), and community based design research (Bang. et. al., 2016). Key concerns include the power-laden relationships between researchers and “the researched,” the conditions that help transform these relations, the need to study processes of partnering themselves, and related questions of scale and sustainability. PDR also draws from and contributes to cultural-historical theories of learning (Cole, 1996) by analyzing the consequentiality of social and ethical relations to human learning.

Method
To analyze the genesis of new collaborative practices across educators and researchers, as well as the epistemic openings and tensions they created, we consider how our data was constructed and when this construction became meaningfully co-authored. Information sources include: thirty ethnographic field notes (with a focus on those that were co-authored by researchers and educators); thirty audio-recordings of program debriefs (where participants experimented with ideas germinating in the research to analyze and re-mediate pedagogical practice), and 5 video-analysis sessions that included adult and youth educators.

Findings & Significance
Our findings highlight 1) the specific social and ethical relations that created the conditions for improvising with new collaborative practices (such as the co-authoring of fieldnotes); 2) the power of orienting towards moments of tension as potential openings for axiological innovation (Bang, et. al., 2016); and 3) the structural changes that would support more equitable partnerships (such as the need to resource time for educators to meaningfully participate in ethnographic analysis, but also to organize collaborative work in ways that create this time without taking educators away from direct work with youth). In line with the conference theme, we imagine the innovations that might have been possible given distinct structural conditions. This approach reflects our efforts to understand the new ways of seeing and relating and the institutional changes that equity requires (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2017). We end with implications for graduate education, and argue that some of the most generative innovations within the collaboration would not have been possible without a sense of freedom to experiment with method.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Meg Elena Escudé, Exploratorium