Framing Agency and Abductive Reasoning: Design Practices for Equitable Change (Poster 4)

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

Abstract

Objectives. Project-based learning (PjBL) settings provide a window into teacher agency, as such settings commonly include teacher-designed curricula. If we view teachers’ work as design, then abductive reasoning—commonly referred to as design thinking (Dorst, 2011)—sheds light on how teachers navigate power dynamics related to structures (e.g., curricular standards, testing, policies) and norms (teacher- and content-centeredness) (Collins & Bilge, 2016) that limit this agency (Giddens, 1984). The purpose of this study is to explore teachers’ design work guided by research questions:

● In what ways do structures and norms shape teachers’ design thinking?
● How do they use their agency to reframe deficit narratives?

Theoretical framework. We introduce the notion of framing agency—defined as the capacity to make decisions consequential to the problem frame—as a key means of overcoming deficit narratives. As designers use their framing agency to shape problems, they tentatively fill in gaps endemic to ill-structured problems; termed abductive reasoning or design thinking, designers draw upon precedent, prior experiences, and beliefs in this process (Dorst, 2011). When considering teachers-as-designers, we recognize their precedent, prior experiences, and beliefs are shaped by substantial engagement with inequitable and traditional forms of instruction. Without deliberate effort, this conspires to sustain forms of instruction that fail to meet aims of justice.

Methods and Data sources. We used participant observation and ethnographic methods, embedded for nine months spanning two years in a project-based, social justice-focused charter school. The high school served minoritized youth who had been poorly served in traditional schooling, with new students enrolling weekly. We documented various school practices, including leadership efforts, teacher professional development and design work, co-teaching of projects, and student participation. For the current study, we selected data from the corpus focused on teacher design work, including in-house professional development, pre-project design sessions, planning/reflecting, and on-the-fly co-teacher discussions during teaching. We analyzed transcripts of audio records using the framing agency coding tool, a discourse analytic approach (Gee, 2014; Konopasky & Sheridan, 2016), paired with values coding focused on uncertainty as a means to identify abduction (Saldaña, 2015); more specifically, we evaluated moments of uncertainty and how teachers filled or resolved these.

Results and Significance. Though the school had permission from the state to experiment with alternate forms of assessment, standardized assessment scores were an ongoing concern. Some teachers initially responded with low-level, skill-building activities, misaligned to their projects, meaning they used abductive reasoning to address uncertainty with traditional norms. Others kept student engagement and experience in mind, using this to override pressures to raise scores, ultimately providing learning designs that were both aligned to their projects and compelling for students. A professional development session critiquing “rigor” and sustained work to align assessment to PjBL supported teachers to deliberately interrupt past precedent and maintain focus on student learning in their designs. As teachers are typically not trained in formal design methods, adapting these methods in ways that address yet background external pressures, and foreground student needs/experiences, holds promise for altering inequitable structures and norms.

Author

• Vanessa Svihla, University of New Mexico