Building Participatory Design Research With High School Students on a University-Assisted Community School's Inquiry Practices

• In Event: Advancing Research-Practice Partnerships: Leveraging the Positionality of Graduate Student Researchers

Abstract

Purpose:

This poster will demonstrate how community schooling models that emphasize localized educational inquiry and design for equity (Benson et al., 2009) can support boundary crossing (Penuel et al., 2015) between researchers and partners in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) and advance equity-focused work. The poster will examine how existing norms, routines, and culture built through a community schooling model at an established university-assisted community school allowed one graduate student to initiate a participatory design partnership with students to co-design instructional technology practices. In particular, the poster will highlight the ways in which the school’s local inquiry practices allowed the graduate student, in partnership with school stakeholders, to conceptualize and implement a design partnership that aligned the researcher’s educational equity goals with the school’s equity vision and problems of practice. By doing so, the poster will contribute to the empirical base at the intersection of institutional capacity and the implementation of RPPs (Henrick et al., 2017), and discuss the finding’s implications for equity.

Theoretical Framework:

The study examines how community schools as spaces for local, place-based democratic engagement for equity (Benson et al., 2009) serve as fertile ground for RPPs, understood as joint work that productively negotiate the boundaries between academic research and the work of practitioners (Penuel et al., 2015).

Methods and Data Sources:

This study utilizes ethnographic data from a 4-year participatory design research study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) where researchers, educators, and students collaboratively designed technology-mediated instructional practices at a university-assisted community school. Fieldnotes, audio recordings, design artifacts, and student interviews from the collaboration served as the focal point in this analysis to examine the initial process in which the researcher and stakeholders at the school site built a collaborative design activity aimed at designing local instructional practices with technology.

Findings:

Existing resources and practices for local inquiry and design that the school had built to honor its commitment to community schooling practices, including a local vision for educational equity that was developed through a teacher-led inquiry process, a school-based research committee that vets and monitors research collaborations, and instructional practices to support teacher and student agency, played critical roles in the boundary crossing that occurred in the conceptualization and implementation of the participatory design RPP with students. This joint activity led to outcomes including new instructional practices co-designed and implemented with students, the development of methodological expertise of graduate students (Rivera-Torres et al., forthcoming), and the design capacity development of participating students.

Significance:

The findings suggest that identifying and developing institutional assets to support local agency in inquiry and design at the school level can create conditions that are fertile ground for the development of equity-focused RPPs. Within these institutional contexts, graduate students were afforded opportunities to negotiate their own visions of equity with local stakeholders to refine and advance the broader school community’s equity agenda. The work points to the need for further examination of the reciprocity between institutional practices, RPPs, and equity outcomes.

Author

• Ung-Sang Lee, University of California - San Diego