Critical Constructionist Design: A Design Framework and Analytic Tool for Speculative Learning Experiences (Poster 3)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

Abstract

While numerous efforts have emerged inviting learners to imagine alternative futures through speculative design practices, a challenge has been empirically documenting the relationship between the design of these speculative educational experiences and learners’ exploration of target topics in dynamic construction environments.

Critical Constructionist Design (CCD) is a framework that invites learners to leverage speculative design to construct future-thinking critical artifacts that center their histories, perspectives, and values (Dando et al., 2019; Holbert et al., 2020). Specifically, the CCD framework supports young people in designing speculative pieces that bring together their past and present to project future possibilities. This framework seems particularly well-suited to make visible the thinking and learning that happens when learners adapt, repurpose, and remix their personal and communal histories in the construction of speculative artifacts (Jennings, 2017). This poster highlights the methodological contribution of the CCD framework by describing its use to design and analyze two speculative learning experiences.

In the first implementation, called Remixing Wakanda, Black, teen girls in New York City worked in a university makerspace to brainstorm, design, and construct artifacts that represented their vision of the future. In Lion Man, the second implementation, middle school art students in Minnesota explored comic book design processes as they constructed speculative characters and stories. Participants in both implementations were invited to look back into family and cultural histories, connect those memories with present-day experiences, and project forward to imagine possible future societies and technologies according to their personal and communal values, aesthetics, and passions. Our poster will show how the CCD framework guided the design of the physical learning environment; available construction tools, technologies, and materials; and the experiences and activities.

The data from these implementations demonstrates how the CCD framework offers an empirical trace of how participants’ experiences emerge from their interactions with the design of the workshop. Using weaving as metaphor, we share an “analysis tapestry” (Figure 1) that illuminates how students’ past history and present experiences are projected into speculative artifacts, and which key features of the design mediate participants’ (re)construction of their various identities.

Figure 1. An Example of the CCD analysis tapestry. Horizontal threads list the design choices to support speculative design practices Vertical threads represent topics that students explore throughout the designed experience, and are organized by how these topics engage past, present, and future speculation.

In illustrating how this framework might be used to highlight important moments of learning, and connecting these moments to educational design, we hope CCD will offer a valuable tool for educators to enact and chronicle speculative and critically-oriented design that will disrupt dominant ideologies of race, gender, and class.

By exploring the methodological aspects of the CCD framework and sharing the resulting analysis tapestries, we hope to discuss with educators and researchers: What important moments of learning can be identified through the visualization? How can the framework and analytical tool support the enactment and chronicle of speculative and critically-oriented design?

Authors

• Nathan Holbert, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Michael B. Dando, St. Cloud State University

• Isabel Correa, Teachers College, Columbia University