Participatory Design for Learning

Perspectives from Practice and Research

Betsy DiSalvo, Jason Yip, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Carl DiSalvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317248217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Participatory Design is a field of research and design that actively engages stakeholders in the processes of design in order to better conceptualize and create tools, environments, and systems that serve those stakeholders. In Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research, contributors from across the fields of the learning sciences and design articulate an inclusive practice and begin the process of shaping guidelines for such collaborative involvement. Drawing from a wide range of examples and perspectives, this book explores how participatory design can contribute to the development, implementation, and sustainability of learning innovations. Written for scholars and students, Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research develops and draws attention to practices that are relevant to the facilitation of effective educational environments and learning technologies.

SECTION III

Case Studies of Participatory Design in Learning Research

8

DESIGNING LEARNING PATHWAYS IN A COMPLEX LEARNING ECOLOGY

A Research-Practice Partnership Focused on Interest Brokering

Marti Louw, Nina Barbuto, and Kevin Crowley

In this chapter we describe an exploratory, design-led research project to align a top-down learning innovation and improvement agenda (to support youth-centered, interest-driven learning pathways) with the needs and interests of a local community-based creative arts and technology organization. To negotiate alignment of stakeholder priorities and values, draw on theoretical learning sciences research to inform practice, and to guide us toward productive innovation, we turned to a participatory, design-centered process to enact theory and creatively synthesize multiple perspectives for action. Our claim is that design-led modes of inquiry are especially needed to respond to ambitious visions of educational transformation and funding directives, which leave much unresolved detail to be determined and realized by local practitioners, leaders, and learners. Our case study provides one example of this kind of design-led learning innovation that builds on and extends our understanding of interest development, and describes its local application in a series of design probes to support forming and deepening interest-driven learning pathways for youth.

A growing body of empirical research takes an ecological perspective to account for the dynamic nature of learning that evolves across the multiple and diverse settings in which youth spend their time (Brofenbrenner 1979; Barron 2006; Banks et al. 2007; Bricker & Bell 2014). A related line of learning research emphasizes the critical enabling roles adult and peer relationships play in supporting youth learning and interest development (Barron et al. 2009; Weiss & Lopez 2015). Interest formation itself is highly contextual and deepens through socially supported “lines of practice” that span contexts and enable identity formation in culturally valued life activities (Hidi & Renninger 2006; Azevedo 2011; Järvelä & Renninger 2014). Rather than examining learning in episodic encounters in a particular learning setting, researchers are now thinking about designing for “connected learning” where learning experiences fit together to form coherent, interest-driven learning pathways that sustain and develop into the future (Ito et al. 2013; Sefton-Green 2016). This broader ecological view has led to calls for a more coordinated and intentional brokering of interest-based learning opportunities for youth across time and place (Rosenberg et al. 2014; Ching et al. 2015; Russell et al. 2017).

An expanded view of youths’ learning lives has inspired the implementation of new intervention approaches such as a set of regional City of Learning¹ initiatives to build and study coordinated ecologies of opportunity through networked infrastructures, programs, and platforms that seek to equitably open learning pathways for youth to pursue and deepen their interests across settings (Barron et al. 2014). In our region, the learning pathways agenda has been shaped in part by a local backbone organization and associated network of organizations (Dolle et al. 2013).² To support this effort, a local foundation funded a university-based research team of “design fellows” to collaborate with a set of local learning providers to interpret and support efforts to create learning pathways of opportunity for youth.

Our case study focuses on one of the design fellows (the first author) who was embedded in a “community arts with technology” organization. The case describes how a participatory design process enabled a professionally diverse team to first reckon with multiple perspectives on what constitutes valued learning, and to collectively define and ground the abstract concept of learning pathways in ways that are locally relevant, valued, and actionable with respect to learning providers, youth and their families

Case Study in Design-Led Learning Innovation Research

How do families, mentors, and caring adults in youths’ lives identify learning opportunities and help youth make choices that cultivate the development of their individual interests? How can we help families interpret complex citywide learning ecosystems in ways that make learning pathways apparent?

To better understand how families navigate Pittsburgh’s informal learning ecosystem (the physical, social, and culturally situated sites of learning locally available) and broker learning opportunities, our research-practice partnership focused on the decision-making criteria that families and adult caregivers use when choosing out-of-school experiences for their children (Figure 8.1). In particular, we explored how parents and mentors find, value, and encourage children’s participation in creative technology and maker-based program offerings. The framing of this study emerged through a participatory process where stakeholders engaged in learning design are positioned as co-creators and included from the inception of the project through data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination activities. The founding director of a local informal learning provider (ASSEMBLE),³ her teaching artist staff, and the volunteer board were included in problem formulation and goal setting for the design of this study, as well as in the data synthesis and presentation of findings at professional and academic conferences.

As with many nonprofit organizations, ASSEMBLE has the perennial goal of increasing the recruitment and participation of youth in its programs, and in particular reaching the underserved community in its immediate neighborhood. The organization uses its website, associated social media channels, tabling events, paper fliers, direct mailings, and word-of-mouth reputation as the primary strategies for raising awareness and interest in programming.

FIGURE 8.1 Moving from a Program-Centric to a Family-Centric View of Learning Opportunities

To address ASSEMBLE’s goal of increasing and broadening participation in their programs, we wanted to better understand how families navigate the Pittsburgh learning ecology of out-of-school time (OST) programs—such as summer camps, weekend workshops, after-school activities, and family events—and select these opportunities for, and with, their children. In particular, we sought to understand how adults decide to encourage (or not) children’s participation in creative technology-rich programs (e.g., robotics, digital media production, coding, and maker activities) being offered around the city.

Study Design and Methods

Our research questions and study design sprang from a collective problematizing process where the expanded research-practice team engaged in facilitated discussions over several months in order to surface organizational challenges and opportunities. Moreover, we were able to identify key problems of practice related to the regional charge to develop learning pathways as part of the Pittsburgh 2014 Cities of Learning⁴ initiative. Much conversation centered on the challenge of reaching parents and recruiting underserved youth in ASSEMBLE’s economically distressed home neighborhood. The team decided to focus our design research efforts on better understanding how families choose to participate in informal learning activities.

Parent Way-Finding in a Complex Learning Ecology

To reframe this challenge as a learning research design question, we developed and piloted a parent way-finding study to (1) understand how parents and supporting adults in youth lives become aware of organizationally hosted informal learning opportunities for their children and characterize their information-gathering needs and habits, and (2) identify the decision-making criteria that families use when choosing technology-rich programming with their children. We used a mixed-method approach to examine how supporting adults (i.e., parents, mentors, caregivers) find out about creative technology programs, and surveyed various pragmatic and logistical factors that might influence their decision to support a youth’s participation in a program.

For the study 10 adult caregivers were recruited from two ASSEMBLE programs: “Learn to Scratch” and “Make It,” both aimed at preteen audiences. These adults included parents as well as two mentors, and one parent-child combination also participated. Of the participants, four were male, six female, and four were of African American descent. These caregivers were invited at drop-off and pickup times to engage in a program flyer think-aloud & sort activity (Ericsson & Simon 1998), where they told us what they were thinking as they read through 10 short program descriptions offered by various informal learning providers around town, including museums, community organizations, arts groups, and after-school programs. Adult participants then sorted these programs descriptions into “likely,” “maybe,” and “unlikely” piles and described their reasoning for these selections out loud. In addition, participants responded to a semi-structured interview about their child’s interest areas, how they find and select informal learning programs, and they were asked to describe their family’s approach and philosophy to informal, out-of-school learning time. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. We then analyzed the qualitative data in two rounds, first with researchers and ASSEMBLE staff in a Data Synthesis Workshop using an adapted collective affinity diagramming method (Simonsen & Friberg 2014) described next, and then in a second round where the research team identified and collapsed thematic categories in the dataset (Chi 1997).

Data Synthesis Workshop

As a vital step in the co-design process, the researchers and ASSEMBLE staff worked together to review and make sense of the parent interview data. This workshop activity enabled us to listen closely to parent concerns and priorities, jointly synthesize and identify patterns in the data, and finally to discuss the implications and design opportunities. Five members from ASSEMBLE participated, including teaching artists, the director (second author), and a volunteer board member together with the research team in a three-hour workshop session. For the workshop, each participant was given an envelope containing excerpted comments from the full parent interview transcripts presented as color-coded strips of paper. Initially unknown to participants, the color codes were related to parent gender and ethnicity.

First, the group individually went through each parent interview transcript (edited only for off-topic chat and process comments) and used green dots to mark positive statements and red dots to mark negative ones. Each participant was given a set of silver stars to call out particular quotes of interest they wished to discuss with the group. This seeded the next activity, where we began a visual clustering exercise to group comments into categories, first reading them aloud, then moving them into emergent groupings and labeling them. After formulating high-level categories, we revealed the gender and ethnicity color-codes to check for any visually prevalent clusters of parent talk based on these demographic factors (see Figure 8.2).

FIGURE 8.2 Images from the Design Workshop Activity Showing the Color-Coded Transcriptions, Coding, and Examples of Shared Categories Generated during Our Analysis of Parent Talk

Design Research Findings and Insights

Our parent way-finding study highlighted the important enabling role adults play in supporting youth participation in informal learning opportunities. In particular, we see evidence of the “learning broker” role Barron and her colleagues characterized in their work describing the different roles parents assume when attempting to advance their children’s technological fluency (Barron et al. 2009; Barron et al. 2013). These parental learning support roles include collaborating with them, learning from them, brokering outside learning opportunities for them, providing nontechnical support to them, or hiring them to do technical work. In their parent typology, a learning broker “seeks learning opportunities for children by networking, the Internet, peer networks, and other information sources. This adult signs a child up and provides necessary support for endeavor.” In our interviews we saw this brokering role articulated in four ways: logistical brokering (e.g., transportation to a site, registration), financial brokering (program fees, bus fares, material costs), transactional brokering (tapping personal networks for opportunities, recommendations, reviews, and advice), and sourcing/vetting forms of brokering (searching for safe and appropriate high-quality programs, activities, and events).

In survey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Section I: Introduction
• Section II: Participatory Learning and Design From Diverse Perspectives and Contexts
• Section III: Case Studies Of Participatory Design In Learning Research
• Section IV: Emerging Perspectives On Participatory Design and Learning
• Section V: Concluding Thoughts and Moving Forward
• 16. ‘Learning in PD: Future Aspirations
• 17. Conversation: Tensions and Possibilities between Learning and Participatory Design
• 18. Next Steps
• Contributor Bios
• Index