Community-Based System Dynamics & Participatory System Dynamics Modeling: An Overview and Reflections

• In Event: Reflections on Practices in the "Field": Lessons in Creative, Critical, Postcritical, and Community Research

Abstract

Community-Based System Dynamics (CBSD) and Participatory System Dynamics Modeling (PSD) are participatory research methodologies that prioritize capacity building and engagement of community members and key stakeholders towards social action and systems change. Whereas these approaches share similarities with other participatory research methods, including PAR, YPAR, and CBPR, CBSD and PSD are unique in their focus on articulating system structure that drives system behavior and identifying key insights and leverage points for intervention.
CBSD is a participatory approach dedicated to understanding the dynamic interactions among elements of complex systems and their environments, resulting in complex patterns of phenomena over time. CBSD organizes the collective knowledge of stakeholders to conceptualize and understand problems; supports active collaboration and builds trust; and explicates the complex interconnections among system elements that may lead to unexpected effects. A distinguishing feature of CBSD is in engaging marginalized communities with explicit goals to democratize knowledge and decision-making processes, build capacity and resilience within communities, and redistribute power in ways that empower communities and promote social, economic, environmental, and racial equity.
With the founding of the Brown School’s Social System Design Lab in 2009, a strong community-engaged collaboration between Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri and Ritenour School District (RSD) emerged starting with demonstration group model building workshops with high school students to working with parents as part of a school improvement team, and eventually high school students facilitated day-long group model building workshops with administrators, funders, teachers, and community members on how to build and sustain systems thinking in schools building a community of practice in applied systems thinking using CBSD.
It was within this context that RSD leadership suggested focusing on improving middle school algebra proficiency. Specifically, RSD wanted to understand how to improve middle school success in algebra as a predictor of high school graduation and related outcomes. Results included a set of qualitative system maps with prioritized action ideas that formed the basis of a final report with recommendations. Middle school students wanted more time with teachers with the implication of hiring one or more middle school math teachers. Middle school teachers were, however, skeptical that such a recommendation would be supported and approved. However, when presented to the board of education who were deciding on where to invest a budget surplus of ~$1 million that year, decided based on this work to hire more middle school teachers.
A key insight, however, was that it was not the maps or tangible products on their own that led to this change, but a “rewiring” of the network and information flows that informed an education board member to champion the recommendation. That is, the insights and persuasiveness did not come from the analytic insights of a causal map as such, but from a process that could simultaneously engage both middle school and high school students, teachers, and administrators in a new type of conversation to develop a shared view of the system using the conventions of system dynamics.

Authors

• Andrew Foell, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Kirk Foster, University of Texas - Arlington

• Peter S Hovmand, Case Western Reserve University