Visualizing Land Education Possibilities: Visual Participatory Research and Desire-Based Design With Black and Indigenous Youth

• In Event: Reclaiming Relations to Urban Lands and Waters: Participatory Research With Black and Indigenous Youth

Abstract

Objectives
This paper looks at the visual participatory research methods used in Project B, a research project conducted with 8 Indigenous, Black, and Black-Indigenous youth (between the ages of 14-18) during the summer of 2021. The project was concerned with answering the overarching research question: What do urban Indigenous, Black, and Black-Indigenous youth desire from land-education programs? The results from this project helped to inform the development of the Land Education Dreambook, an online open-access resource which supports organizations in the work of designing participatory curricula for Land Education programs for youth.

Theoretical framework
This project took a desire-based (Tuck, 2009) approach to Land Education. Land education is a long-standing practice and area of scholarship, particularly in Indigenous contexts. This project in particular emphasized how land education can be facilitated anywhere, including urban spaces, because land knowledge exists everywhere. Rather than viewing urban landscapes as spaces of damage and disconnection, we focused on the relations to urban lands and waters the youth already had, their desires for the futures of those relations and what kinds of out-of-school land education programs would facilitate deepening those relations.

Methods
This project was grounded in desired-based design (Tuck, 2009), participatory design (Braun, Twito, Kuver, & Tzou, 2018), and design-based research (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004). Participatory visual research methods, such as participatory mapping (Del Vecchio, Toomey & Tuck, 2017) and concept mapping (Kane & Trochim, 2007), were used to generate knowledge about the types of activities young people want to engage in within land-education programs, the places they want to engage in learning with lands and waters, and the types of relationships that they wish to develop within these programs.

Data sources & materials
Data includes visual and written materials created during design activities such as spectrum analysis, satisfied life maps, pedagogy trees and desire-based brainstorming. Data was created using online whiteboards, free-writing, polls, word clouds, and facilitated discussions. Design activities were recorded and visual materials created were used to prompt further discussion on the topics allowing for iterative analysis of emergent findings throughout the program.

Results
Desire-based design enabled young people to attend to all that is possible, not only what is probable or what they have already experienced. Young people expressed feeling like it gave them permission to imagine broader possibilities for land education programs. Activities such as the Satisfied Life Map also allowed young people to ‘time travel’ and consider not only who they were now, but also who they will be in the future and how their relationships with lands and waters will evolve and change.

Scholarly significance
This study shows how participatory visual methods can be used to develop desired-based curricula for out-of-school land education programs. Desire-based design enables us to attend to all possibilities and imagine radically decolonial futures. That futurity becomes more tangible and clear through the use of visual participatory methods. The Land Education Dreambook is an open-access resource that reduces barriers and supports organizations in the work of designing land education programs for youth.

Author

• Jo Billows, University of Toronto