Redesigning School Site Governance Through Participatory Design Research: Lessons From Salt Lake City

• In Event: Beyond the Engagement Paradigm: Family and Community Leadership in Co-Designing Educational Justice

Abstract

Family engagement is widely recognized as a vital piece of addressing educational inequity in our schools (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Henderson & Mapp, 2002). Nondominant families have a wealth of knowledge, skills, and assets to bring to the work of improving schools, which is unleashed when parents are able to access power and collaborate equitably with educators (Warren, Mapp, & the Community Organizing & School Reform Project, 2011). However, in low-wealth communities and communities of color, such efforts face a range of barriers including marginalization, devaluing of cultural knowledge, cultural differences, biases, broken trust, and a lack of opportunities to build the capacity to collaborate effectively (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2003; Mapp & Author, 2013). In contrast to this are efforts to engage parents as leaders and decision makers in our schools (Luppescu et. al., 2011; Warren, Mapp, & Author, 2015). The Salt Lake City Design Research Team works to collaboratively design spaces where families have real, collective impact on school-site decision making and can engage in true collaboration with educators.

Our focus is on School Community Councils (SCCs), state legislated decision-making bodies that include parents and educators in designing the school’s improvement plan and deciding how to spend money from a state land trust. Our project seeks to to redesign SCCs around principles of equity, partnership, and welcoming. This paper looks at key lessons learned from three years of participatory design research (PDR) with educators and parents in Salt Lake City, UT around SCCs. Participatory Design Research brings a critical lens to this work, rooting the design process in questions of equity, power, and structural critique (Author & Author, 2016).

The SLC project was built around a series of “design circles” in which families and educators came together to co-design theories about, and solutions to, the challenges facing SCCs (Author & Author, 2016). These sessions spawned additional collaborative spaces including a team of parents who designed a comic book for recruiting SCC participants, and a learning community in the district. The circles served at once as a form of community engagement, data collection, and collaborative analysis. Design circles lasted from 2.5-3 hours, and were recorded and transcribed for participatory qualitative analysis by the core design research team.

In this paper, we document our process, the products the group co-designed, and our initial findings. These results help to elucidate:
1) Systemic barriers to collaboration (e.g., overburdened decision making bodies, culturally-specific visions of “appropriate” participation, and formalized systems that provoke alienation and fear).
2) Capacities educators and families need in order to share decision making authority (e.g., conflict management, cultural humility, critical consciousness, relationship building)
3) How participatory design processes can provide space for families and educators to interrupt deficit discourses and break down barriers.

The results help to advance both the theory and practice of fostering family leadership in school spaces, and expand our understanding of how design research can be used to advance equity and justice in education.

Authors

• Gerardo R. López, Michigan State University

• Paul Kuttner, University of Utah

• Almaida Yanagui, University of Utah