The Need to Identify Insidious Forms of Inequity in Design Contexts (Poster 10)

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Designerly Thinking and Participatory Design With Students, Teachers, Administrators, and Community Members

Abstract

Teaching design thinking to children is difficult because it requires learners to think about abstract concepts and skills not supported in school (Noel & Liub, 2017). To take on these challenges and opportunities, we design curricular activities with equity issues in mind and adopt an embedded design instructional model (Anon et al., 2020). Facilitators bring design challenges into the learning environment and use the club to model design practices, where facilitators are designers of the club and learners are “users” of the club. In this paper we discuss how equity and inclusion is considered in curriculum and instruction and highlight critical issues yet to be addressed.

This study is a five-year long design-based research project conducted at an afterschool club in eastern US, for 3rd to 6th graders to promote design thinking. Data included video recordings and artifacts. Data analysis followed Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

In the afterschool club, facilitators present different design challenges to situate the learning of abstract design concepts within an authentic context for children. These challenges incorporate equity and inclusion by bringing diverse clients for the children to design for as part of design teams. As teams develop design prototypes, they engage in solving multifaceted problems requiring socioeconomic, socioemotional, and sociotechnical considerations. In one of the design challenges where children were designing a garden for a client with partial visual impairment, they discussed universal design concepts to build a sensory garden with auditory cues for navigation. Using the embedded design instructional approach, these challenges support learners towards being active agents as they learn about design concepts, propose solutions, and make collective decisions about club activities and expectations.

The embedded design approach can successfully guide active engagement of learners and their development of sophisticated sociometacognitive skills. However, our findings also highlight subtle socioemotional problems that lead to insidious forms of inequity. These problems are exhibited in uncivil forms of interaction that reach a level of micro-bullying, which can be hard to detect by facilitators. Micro-bullying plays out as a form of dominance by some members over decision making processes, use of tools and technologies that results in psychologically threatening situations and exclusion of targeted group members, sustained over long periods of time. Children who are micro-bullied eventually act out. This is problematic because the subtle nature of micro-bullying means facilitators are unaware of its existence and only aware of the problematic behavior of those victimized by it. As such there is a potential for inequity within the environment unbeknownst to facilitators.

Our findings show that even with the well-intended design and facilitation, researchers and practitioners need to pay attention to how inequity occurs in moment-to-moment interaction (Shah & Lewis, 2019). It indicates that the design of an equitable and inclusive learning environment is an interactive and iterative process that requires a micro-ecological approach to understand the interplay between different elements of the learning environment (Borge & Mercier, 2019) to make sure our expectations of learners are met in achieving an equitable and inclusive community.

Authors

• Dhvani Ashok Toprani, Pennsylvania State University

• Mona AlQahtani, Pennsylvania State University

• Yu Xia, Emporia State University

• Shulong Yan, University of California, Davis

• Borge Marcela, Portland State University