Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and Work in Education Research (Poster 5)

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Designerly Thinking and Participatory Design With Students, Teachers, Administrators, and Community Members

Abstract

Objectives. Participatory Design (PD) approaches are becoming more prevalent in education research ranging from scholars interested in learning technologies to community-based efforts where educational environments are co-constructed with partners (DiSalvo et al., 2017; Penuel et al., 2011). In this proposal, I shed light on how theoretical approaches from these interdisciplinary traditions provide opportunities to more deeply explore how to create and understand equitable design partnerships.

Theoretical framework. Two concepts are core to the following analysis. First, infrastructuring describes an attention to creating the underlying resources, social networks, organization, and interpersonal processes required for a complex system to function (Greenberg et al., 2020; Penuel, 2019). An attention to infrastructuring facilitates ways to recognize the everyday design and repair work that marginalized communities undertake to redress historical injustices, or to help to create more equitable designs in future innovations. In addition, tools from human-computer interaction and partnership literatures focus designers to understand the underlying “work” processes that make up education systems. Recognizing the “work” that our partners do in new ways can provide an avenue to these deeper design processes (LeMahieu et al., 2017).

Methods. I utilize conceptual synthesis of the research literature along with qualitative data from two, on-going design partnerships. The first partnership is an RPP with middle school mathematics teachers where we are co-creating data dashboards and instructional routines to assist teachers in improving their pedagogical practices in the classroom. The second project is a participatory design endeavor with approximately 40, low-income, latino/a families to develop informal, STEM learning environments around an urban city. These two contexts provide illustrative cases of how PD, infrastructuring, and the community’s work intertwine to create newly designed solutions.

Data sources. Sources of data include literature reviews of extant scholarship and transcripts of PD sessions across the various design partnerships.

Results and Arguments. In the mathematics design partnership, I present case studies of how we co-designed data dashboards with mathematics educators. The case highlights the evolution of our design process to not only consider the cognitive and individual sensemaking needs for teachers, but the organizational issues such as internal politics, trust, and unique work routines of K-12 schools. In the second case, I present a case study of the unique PD decisions we made in efforts to directly involve low-income, Spanish speaking parents in the construction of their own city. For example, we made explicit decisions to run design sessions in Spanish to foreground the community and engaged in PD strategies to directly translate the “work” of families into the design of the city spaces.

Scholarly Significance. The broader design field is moving away from traditionally privileged practices of design thinking, with more attention to how we might better value partner community’s assets. A key question for the field, however, is to articulate “how” design researchers can theorize and enact ever more equitable design research. The cases of our own design research offer some ways that scholars can shift their attention to building up community infrastructure and honoring the local work of our partners.

Author

• June Ahn, University of California - Irvine