Participatory design research

Our process of participatory design research has been our method of learning, with community members, which communications need to be improved and how to do it. See OneVille's principles.

Researchers and companies typically design tech tools for education and then head to schools to try them. Many avoid the bottlenecks of public schools altogether. Policymakers typically just tell youth and educators regulations constraining such tools’ use in public schools. Put together, this leaves young people, families, and educators in “traditional” public schools with little power to direct the use of technology in 21st century public education. So, how might diverse youth, educators, families, and researchers instead come together to co-design uses of social and digital media that effectively support young people’s learning in diverse, mixed-income, and traditional public schools? How might such efforts transform public schools from the inside out?

What's been particularly exciting to us about working in Somerville is that we've had the chance to engage young people, families and teachers in design efforts to bring tech into the everyday core of life and communication in “regular” public schools.

The OneVille Project has been a fully cooperative exploration of how commonplace technology might help diverse people work together toward youths’ success by helping them share information, efforts, and resources. The best way to learn about possible communication solutions, we have argued, is to work together with students, parents, and educators to design them -- to determine who needed to share which information with whom and then test ways to facilitate that communication. We have designed and tested improvements to the communication infrastructure by joining educators, families, and young people in work designed to improve and innovate in education, while studying it. This is participatory design research -- for many of us, a new application of ethnographic methods.

Ethnography is about XXX. The method assumes that some phenomena that are crucially important to young people, to educators, to families, cannot be understood unless you are there, and participating and observing everyday life and asking questions of people in person. Understanding some phenomena, like everyday communication needs and experiences in public schools, requires forming real relationships with people, experiencing the communications they experience, and analyzing those communications over time.

Participatory design research, which Dede (xx) calls a form of ethnography (CITE), IS about YYYY. [CITES HERE to design research and community-based/action research]

In Somerville, we began with xxx, and ended up doing ZZZ.

In this daily collaboration with people in Somerville, we’ve realized the need to improve the entire communication infrastructure of public schools and also grasped the potential of technology for doing so. Had we been too afraid to leap over the cliff methodologically or to join people in an attempt to improve something, we would have learned nothing new at all. So, we’re coming to see that joining educators, youth, and families in efforts to improve schools, while rigorously studying those efforts in detail, may be one of the most important ways available to us of actually improving education.