Paper 6: What does it mean to design for people and communities, rather than disciplines?

• In Event: Reimagining Researcher-Participant Relations in Engineering and Computing Education

Abstract

Objectives
We seek to reimagine design perspectives for culturally sustaining learning spaces that support youth of color to explore their relationships to STEM. Inspired by culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014) pedagogies that transform educational spaces, we share enactments of hip hop STEM-rich learning ecologies, designed in different community spaces. Co-design has become popular among STEM education researchers, as a means for describing educational innovations developed collectively among researchers, participants, and communities. The term is used fluidly, with multiple meanings in disciplinary education research (Penuel et al., 2020). The histories of community spaces are specific and unique, and our objective is to explore co-design perspectives focused on research with existing community spaces. We describe enactments of hip hop learning programs situated in different community sites to explore the question, what does it mean to design for people and communities, rather than disciplines?

Theoretical Frames
Community-situated design research (Bang et al., 2016; Fishman et al., 2013) aims to collaboratively identify goals, questions, and futures with participants. Yet, the history and nature of relations among researchers and communities varies. Some researchers are members of partner communities, others help to found new communities, and so forth. We argue this complexity raises questions about designing for people and communities, over disciplines and outcomes. Blending CSP with community-situated design perspectives motivates our exploration of differently powered and structured relationships that researchers have with community organizations, spaces, and histories.

Data and Methods
The poster presents 4 design enactments of a hip hop STEM-rich program for young people, intended to study youth engagement in STEM and computing. Enactments drew from a set of shared design principles, to construct specific designs for each of the four sites. The researchers’ histories with these sites are unique and central to how co-design unfolded. The poster explores perspectives on the core question of “designing for and with communities, not disciplines.” We draw from design discussions, researcher-participant conversations, and narratives from participants to present case studies of each enactment that elucidate perspectives on designing with communities.

Results
We share specific information about community spaces, with their consent, to ground the findings in authentic community histories. We present four perspectives: designing within, with, together, and to build community relations and futures, elaborated in Table 1. The poster will explore the different structures of relations across the four sites, and the implications they pose for how we imagine designing community-situated research that sustains and builds towards meaningful STEM learning.

Significance
We contribute to community-situated design perspectives by offering dimensions for exploring the complex dynamics of “co-design” across different community relations. Each researcher-community partnership is a unique story, and that story and history deserve careful consideration when imagining the design possibilities. The enactments shared stimulate new questions: what design constraints emerge within the structures of relations among designers and participants? How are relationships sustained in and through design research? And finally, how is “co-design” a space for building, sustaining, and reimagining researcher-participant futures?

Authors

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University

• Dionne N. Champion, University of Florida

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, Boston University

• Amon D. Millner, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

• Christopher G. Wright, Drexel University

• Ayana Allen-Handy, Drexel University

• L. Clara Mabour, Tufts University