Participatory design research

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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 basic tech 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 has 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.

We have found that the best way to learn about possible communication solutions is to work together with students, parents, and educators to design them -- to determine who needs to share which information with whom and then test ways to facilitate that communication. Our process of participatory design research has been that process of codesigning communication improvements for education. We've been exploring, with other community members, which communications need to be improved and how to improve them. See OneVille's principles.

So, we have designed and tested improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education by joining educators, families, and young people in work designed to improve and innovate in education -- while studying it.

We've put several research methods together in our participatory design research. Ethnography, a method from anthropology and sociology, involves participating in the everyday life of a community and documenting people's everyday actions in detail. Design research has researchers participating in trying to actually solve a problem or improve upon a situation, while studying the effort, its snags, and its redirections (Dede xx and other sources xxxx). Now put ethnography and design research together with participatory action research, which engages members of a community in analyzing and thoughtfully improving community life. Really, there's no other way to improve everyday communications in public schools and communities: the work requires requires forming real relationships with people, experiencing the communications they experience, trying to improve those communications, and documenting and analyzing the work in detail over time in order to keep improving it.

We began our work in Somerville with a year of fieldwork, interviews, and trial and error exploration, to understand current communication issues in Somerville and to test ways of linking people in efforts to support young people. For example, we piloted multilingual coffee hours to get diverse parents talking to one another for the first time across boundaries of program, income, and language about shared issues in their schools. We piloted academic “Reading Night” events to partner families who had never talked before about supporting children who share a K-3 hallway. We participated in the typical data drudgery of schooling by entering missing data on individual children into a school’s common spreadsheet; through this we learned which data on children was easily available for educators or parents to view and which was not. We started an afterschool club and then joined a summer school class, and in both, we worked to test a private social network allowing students to communicate about school outside of class with peers, teachers, and potential "support teams." Deciding to move away from pursuit of one overall media tool (a social network) and instead testing a "toolkit" of smaller tools, we then broke up into our six working groups, each tackling and testing different aspects of communications needed to support young people: the ePortfolio project at Somerville High School; the texting support team at Full Circle/Next Wave, the district's alternative middle and high school; the data dashboard project at the Healey K-8 School; along with the Parent connector project and broader exploration into a schoolwide communication toolkit. We pursued a few efforts in citywide information-sharing and new colleagues shepherded some innovative computer infrastructure efforts with our support. Each working group broadened to include Somerville participants of all ages, language groups, and levels of tech interest, across teachers, families, and young people.

We're exhausted, but truly excited. In this daily collaboration with people in Somerville, we’ve come to see just how crucial it is to improve the communication infrastructure of public education. And we've seen 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 in general.