Co-Design as a Learning Space With Educators to Explore Educational Possibilities for Palestinian Learners

• In Event: Designing for Social Change: Justice-Oriented Interventions in K–12 STEM Settings

Abstract

PURPOSE AND FRAMEWORKS
This work considers co-design as a learning space that can support building research-practice partnerships with educators (e.g., Penuel et al., 2022). I collaborated with an Arab community-based organization for STEM education for Palestinian youth in Israel, and conducted a co-design workshop (~6 hours) with six educators from the organization focused on discussing equity and learning in STEM. I examined the engagement of the group in discussing conceptualizations of equity and their speculative thinking of educational possibilities (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Freire, 1973; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2016) they may envision for learners with whom they work. This proposal focuses on two generated artifacts during the workshop: a discussion of equity and an interrogation of a learner's fictional persona through an educator lens.

METHODS AND DATA SOURCES
This study was framed as a co-design workshop engaging educators from diverse backgrounds in terms of expertise and roles within the organization (e.g., pedagogy, science teaching, robotics, technical support). Discussions and activities focused on three themes: equity in STEM education, interactive pedagogies, and technology affordances. At the final co-design session, we completed three design fiction challenges to engage participants with thinking about educational possibilities of their work.
Selected excerpts of video recordings of discussions during sessions were transcribed and translated by Author. These excerpts focused on participants sharing their conceptualization of equity and sharing their perspectives of learners' personas they discussed during the workshop, guided by the following questions: (1) how did participants conceptualize educational equity and connect it to their work? (2) how can co-design as a learning space allow an interrogation of deficit talk of learners?
Author elicited participants' shared ideas when they defined their meaning of equity and connected it to their practices or everyday life. To address the second question, this proposal drew on an interaction analysis of a dialogue between the facilitator (Author) and an educator as they discussed a learner persona.

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE
Co-design partnerships are complex and their dynamics change overtime. This creates a need for examining its sustainability, how certain learning activities or facilitation expand or constrain participants' engagement, and emerging tensions between research goals and pedagogy enacted during the collaboration process.
Preliminary results suggest using a co-design approach to engage educators in thinking about educational possibilities was beneficial, and allowed them to explore and reflect on their own practices. First, the intentional engagement with defining equity revealed various ways participants conceptualize it (e.g., equity as equality, not differentiating, an affirmative action, treating people equally, being inclusive), yet, connecting their practices to the reality they live in, supported participants in bringing examples of structural and systematic forms of injustice. For example, in his contribution to challenges they face, one participant mentioned a recent report on corruption and violence in the Arab-Palestinian society in Israel, attempting to connect it to a broader macro systematic injustice. Second, despite the constraints of activity-structures, the space allowed for moments where participants could interrogate deficit ideas of learners enacted in the space itself.

Author

• Areej Mawasi, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology